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In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

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Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#141

Post by Veelox »

wsxcde wrote: post #127
leepowers wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .... inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy. We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised. Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Value…

"I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised." There is no need to detect a dogwhistle. We have an explicit statement from Wax ( http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultur... ) where she says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that…

An aside, I grew up in a small Midwest town. There was one black family in town. One of the sons was in the grade above me in school and people would joke that he wasn't really "black". This was because he had been raise in a small Midwest town and had small-town values and habits. He and his family were an accepted part of the community because they had the same values.

If a member of the Bloods had moved in town, they would very much have been rejected because they would have been acting with very different values. Further more, they probably would have starting acting in ways that were contrary to cultural norms.

Is it racist to say that I think small-town Midwest values are superior to inner-city black values?

Is it racist to say that I think that the lives of inner-city blacks would be improved if they adopted small-town Midwest values?

What if I switch the statement and say that I think small-town Midwest values could improve the lives of all poor people in the inner city. Is that "dog whistling"?

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#142

Post by johnminter »

jancsika wrote: post #70

> All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. So for which statement is the author providing evidence? The first or the second? They are two completely different statements.

Decisions and choices have consequences. These are not made in a philosophical vacuum, they are made according to the values the individual holds - which are largely influenced by the culture from which the individual comes. Indeed the term "culture" arises from the Latin "cultus" which is a religion or value structure.

A culture that passes on default values of industriousness and a high regard for education will generate individuals that are more motivated and perhaps more resilient than one who does not. A culture that values consistent parenting of children will likely pass on more deliberate traits than a culture that does not value active parenting.

One should not be surprised to see different distributions of outcomes from different groups who hold different values. One of the advantages of living in a multicultural society where people live together peacefully and actually listen to one another is that we can learn which choices lead to the best outcomes and encourage our children to emulate those and to avoid choices that lead to dependency and addiction.

The Brookings Institute can hardly be considered a right wing think tank and yet they published a well reasoned piece on the behavioral aspects of poverty [1].

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-behavioral-aspects-of...

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#143

Post by weberc2 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #128
weberc2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery) Without defending slavery, the obvious problem with your line of reasoning is that most people (implicitly most people alive today) are influenced by C(now). Even if you identify a group of values that are relatively constant across cultures (including bygone cultures), the best you can do is say "culture X better conforms to the majority values than culture Y". It'…

True, but that doesn't help. Whether or not due to influence by C(now), there are very few people currently alive who would not say that C(now) > C(slavery). Those people cannot (validly) also argue that all cultures are equal. Worse, I'd guess that there is a liberal/conservative element here. Liberals are more likely to believe that C(now) > C(slavery); they are also more likely to believe that all cultures are equ…

I think my post agrees with your first paragraph, but your post reads like a rebuke.

I disagree that conservatives are more likely to believe that C(slavery) was better than C(now), but I agree that conservatives are more likely to process an absolute morality position (with liberals it seems more complicated--most would say they support moral relativism, but they seem to view other moral systems as fundamentally racist and thus evil, which can't be far from moral absolutism). This is more an elaboration on your point than a correction, I think.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#144

Post by Veelox »

antisthenes wrote: post #139
Veelox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op and not exactly what you ask for. Welfare is structured so that single moms get more money if they stay single. It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it. Source: Wife worked in a homeless shelter.

Appreciated all the same. Poor policies that leave people in poverty traps (e.g. having a single mom find a job that pays barely above her welfare benefits shouldn't be stripping her of benefits, but a much more gradual sliding scale instead) should constantly be brought to light and fixed. > It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it. Absolutely, but to fix that we a…

I think we agree, poverty traps need to be fixed.

I think there are a lot of reasons fathers aren't sticking around. I think a lot of those can be helped if there was less drug use and gang violence and more enfranchise on education, family planning, and marriage.

I think there are both structural (welfare, education, ect) and cultural changes that need to be made before all of those areas can be improved.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#145

Post by coldtea »

gertef wrote: post #95
coldtea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hypocrisy. All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts. Not to mention that when someone is wrong about facts you correct them, you don't fire them or ask for their condemnation. Professors are not supposed to be correct, just to probe for what's correct. In fact they should be encouraged to be boldly inquisitive and incorrect in that pursuit, and use dialog t…

Professors are expected to have some self-awareness and avoid stating their opinions as facts.

Professors are supposed to present the conclusions they've come to from their studies and work with no "self-awareness" filtering to avoid hurting anybody's feelings. Doubly so in an article, which is not a scholarly paper, and is meant to represent a broader picture with broader strokes.

And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.

Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#146

Post by antisthenes »

bcoates wrote: post #134
antisthenes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take huge issue with this statement because it tries to sneak certain statements past the reader without evidence. How do you mean marriage is increasingly unattainable ? A marriage license costs $55. Are you alluding to something else here? Single mothers are one of the last bastions of subsidies and welfare, especially considering how everything else has been scaled down in the recent years. > our society takes e…

A little googling: TANF (the last vestige of single-mother welfare) is ~$30bn/yr for the whole US, state & federal contribution. SSDI (a mix of people with severe medical problems and the work-shy) is $150bn/yr. OASI (I'm old - gimmie money) is $813bn/yr Medicare (I'm old - gimmie healthcare) is $709bn/yr Single mother welfare is a rounding error in the budget compared to other subsidies and welfare, which is mostly…

I appreciate the elaboration of your position, we seem to have more in common than originally thought.

> But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.

Part of the plight of single mothers is rising inequality and inability of the fathers to find decent jobs. Whenever arguments about children are made, I strongly believe at looking at a broader picture - how can we make sure the child grows up in a nuclear family for at least 16-18 years? I think that has to be looked at in the context of both sexes.

Thanks for the numbers as well, although I believe medical care is also subsidized for single mothers (at their median income level). It's hard to argue against expanding TANF (One of my college Economics courses examined effectiveness of welfare programs, and found that TANF was the most beneficial as far as how far each dollar goes).

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#147

Post by Blackthorn »

Danihan wrote: post #135
Blackthorn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black culture exists, at least in the United States, since the USA systematically destroyed any other form of heritage from black people.

This seems like an extremely ignorant comment to me. There is a ton of black culture in the South that is uniquely American.

Yes, which is black culture, which I literally just said existed in the USA. So what exactly are you disagreeing with?

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#148

Post by WillPostForFood »

wsxcde wrote: post #127
leepowers wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .... inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy. We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised. Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Value…

"I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised." There is no need to detect a dogwhistle. We have an explicit statement from Wax ( http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultur... ) where she says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that…

The article you link to undermines you core claim that she implicitly claims "inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy." She explicitly states the opposite:

“Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she said. “The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#150

Post by kelnos »

weberc2 wrote: post #63
taylodl wrote: post #7

If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture. So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current…

> I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery) Without defending slavery, the obvious problem with your line of reasoning is that most people (implicitly most people alive today) are influenced by C(now). Even if you identify a group of values that are relatively constant across cultures (including bygone cultures), the best you can do is say "culture X better conforms to the majority values than culture Y". It'…

That might be technically correct (as we know, the best kind of correct), but it's not a useful argument to make, outside of pedantry.

You may not be defending slavery, but you are suggesting that we cannot make a definitive statement about whether slavery is good or bad. If we can't do that, then what's the point of practical discussion about the direction of our civilization?

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