No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#821

Post by rayiner » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

ksplicer wrote: post #819

rayiner wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also a couple of billion people in Asia who think the exact same way as the author about families and culture. I’ve never read Laffer or Kudlow. I’m interpreting society through the values of my Bangladeshi parents. And they lead me to the same conclusion. And given the remarkably higher income mobility of Asian kids raised in the bottom income compared to white kids, I think social liberals are sticking thei…

Be careful when trying to draw conclusions about cultural values of different ethnicities within western countries with high percentages of recent immigrants. Immigrants in general outperform natives in income mobility, and this tapers off in later generations. Additionally it's difficult to ignore the massive selective bias within immigrant populations. Immigrating is very difficult and that's positively reflected i…

In America immigration isn’t difficult at all—we don’t have skill based immigration. The Asian kids being raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are mostly here based on chain migration.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#822

Post by fwip » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #706

fwip wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes: > Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die. Without seeming to make any s…

Poverty isn’t the cause of crime. People were objectively poorer in the 1950s, even in the lower classes, and people in developing countries are much poorer than even poor Americans.

Absolute income (whether measured in dollars or purchasing power) means very little when compared across time periods or countries. Poverty has never been about your absolute buying power. It is relative to the society you exist in. You will find, by any objective measure, that the wealth disparity in the US is nearly as high as it has ever been (only exceeded by the Great Depression). These same objective measures will consistently score the US as worse than many developing countries.

You will find across many eras and cultures in the last two millennia that the poorest members of the society are the most vulnerable members of society and the most likely to be punished for committing crimes. If you still don't believe me, read this paper for an in-depth analysis that controls for many factors: https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/IN...

Laws are made by those with power. In today's society, power comes in large part from wealth - that's the foundation of capitalism. The objective of capitalism is to accrue capital, and our laws and police system are set up to protect the wealthy and their wealth.

That's why graffiti is punishable by ten years in prison. Stealing a week's worth of groceries can mean years in prison. In contrast, the penalty for illegally evicting a renter, rendering them homeless, is about two or three months rent, and no prison time.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#823

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #257

jelly wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are certainly causal explanations for the data, but once those phenomena are here they impact people's expectations. Change in expectations is clearly what the author is focusing on. For example, the emergence of the rust belt leaves a lot of unemployed men - the impacted parts of society won't continue to expect the same work ethic and commitment from their men 40-50 years later.

As in, "In the past young men could look to the example of their fathers, who had well-paid automotive manufacturing / steel mill / electronics assembly jobs that allowed them to care for their families and even put a downpayment on a small home, but now they have no such examples and no such expectations of moving into that kind of position at adulthood." Okay, that's an expectation issue. Why is the author ignoring…

> "Why is the author ignoring the change in conditions that led to that change in expectations?"

Because recreating the economic conditions of the '50s-'90s would require repeating the global devastation of industry and commerce of World War 2 but with the US (again) untouched along with reduction of emerging economies back to the backward state they were in then. Anytime one sees people asking why America can't just bring back to that golden (for the US) era, this should be pointed out in no uncertain terms. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#824

Post by rayiner » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:18 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #793

rayiner wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does adjusting for “cultural biases” mean?

Cultural factors that can influence the measures and outcomes.

But the argument is that Bangladeshi villages are more peaceful than American inner cities, despite being vastly poorer, because of cultural reasons. It’s almost as if America has a more traditional culture in the past—when it was poorer than today—and then there were massive cultural changes around the same time crime started skyrocketing.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#825

Post by AvocadoPanic » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #567

AvocadoPanic wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or 'migrants' exhibiting the typical behavior of their homeland. See Vienna 1683.

The Lipka Tatars would like a word.

They assimilated, and fought against the Turks at the battle of Vienna.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#826

Post by josephg » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #497

josephg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you're saying, but words matter. I can never support a slogan I explicitly disagree with. There's plenty of better slogans out there. I'd support "end police violence" or "stop killer cops" or something. Thats certainly much more catchy than the full slogan right now, which seems to be "Defund the police, but we don't really want to do that, even though some people in our movement actually do want that, b…

This sounds very much like the critiques I heard of “black lives matter”. Wait, are you saying white lives don’t matter? Where do these slogans come from? Are they designed by conservatives to make liberals look bad?

“Black lives matter” is a much more defensible slogan, because if you believe all human life matters, you should also support the idea that black lives matter.

“Defund the police” is much worse because it’s explicitly naming and promoting a policy idea which activists promise they don’t actually want.

Why lie about what you want?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#827

Post by rayiner » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #803

jacobolus wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...). E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans bui…

I think we agree that many pro-social structures exist in poor and socially rigid societies. However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.

I agree there is a trade off, but let’s explore this a bit further. Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates? Decisions about these trade offs tend to be imposed from the top, by the elites. 2/3s of Americans still disagree with the Supreme Court ruling banning school prayer.

When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#828

Post by metadat » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #724

philosopher1234 wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could share this evidence instead of sharing an anonymous assertion

i can certainly think of cases where the children and one parent are really much better off without the second

Yes it happens, but isn't the rule. On average, it's ideal to have two happy, loving parents. But only on average!

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#829

Post by dang » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #697

dang wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. " ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) You may not owe luxury columnists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

What the heck? He did reply to the argument. He didn't call anyone in the community names, and the beliefs and position held by the author absolutely DO matter in this context. Dang you need to really revaluate your decisions on when to post or call people out for "rule violations".

I don't see any reference to beliefs or positions in the GP comment, nor replies to arguments. "Luxury columnist" is obviously being used as a dismissive label in this thread. If you toss in "Yale" as more or less a bad word, then the entire comment reduces to name-calling. This was not a borderline moderation call.

(Btw the guideline against calling names isn't limited to people in the community.)

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#830

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #814

zmgsabst wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person Can you cite this — or is it a made up fact to support your pre-existing beliefs?

It’s a guesstimate. As stated. The normalisation of domestic violence 30-50 years ago is going to be hard to find statistically, as things like that are not going to be in crime statistics, obviously. Everything I said was anecdotal, from the midlands in England- but it matches other experiences from southern Scotland and East Coast US. I guesstimate 20% because it “felt” like 1 in 5 families had someone abusive in t…

[deleted]