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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

economist.com

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Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#461

Post by nl »

imgabe wrote: post #434
michaelt wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in STEM departments, no. Why would you run a pro-male affirmative action programme in a department where men were already over-represented? But there's affirmative action for men in nursing, teaching, social studies, and similar female-dominated departments. There are active campaigns to recruit more male nurses - and male teachers are more likely to be promoted. I also know first-hand that vocational ballet scho…

Isn't the goal of a nursing school to provide the best possible nurses to the healthcare industry? If we assume that: Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why…

> If we assume that:

> Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance

This seems a questionable assumption.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#462

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sublinear wrote: post #309
okwubodu wrote: post #261

The second order effects of affirmative action's repeal are going to be very entertaining. You can get a sneak peek by taking a look at the student body at a school like UT Austin where, by law, 75% of students must be in-state and automatically admitted according to class rank (GPA). https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/freshman-profile You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and…

I think there's a bit more to this. A lot of men simply don't need a degree when they take up the family business, go to trade school, or start a military career and that's fairly common in the south. I wouldn't call most of those guys disadvantaged. Drop out rates for the disadvantaged can be high as well regardless of affirmative action getting them in. The difficulties are cultural and I agree that making this sit…

This sounds like the argument that women don’t need degrees because they are just housewives or secretaries

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#463

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Georgelemental wrote: post #286
okwubodu wrote: post #261

The second order effects of affirmative action's repeal are going to be very entertaining. You can get a sneak peek by taking a look at the student body at a school like UT Austin where, by law, 75% of students must be in-state and automatically admitted according to class rank (GPA). https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/freshman-profile You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and…

Women outperform men on GPA, SAT reading, and ACT humanities sections. Men do better on SAT math and ACT STEM sections

The difference is pretty small though. Like 30 points on the SAT

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#464

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

abeppu wrote: post #417
briHass wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.

But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile…

These studies of intergenerational class mobility can be highly problematic, because they often just look at income, very much less access to opportunity. The reason being patterns like the following are not uncommon:

1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year.

2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low.

3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job.

Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity.

There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#465

Post by kamaal »

etempleton wrote: post #110

Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both. To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is rece…

>>Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both.

Race is an unchangeable, decided at-birth deal. Class on the other hand changes based on how you succeed to that end. People do feel class as something that is not fixed, and can be changed.

In some way getting rid of Racism means changing other people, and changing class requires one to change one's own ways.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#466

Post by kilolima »

Is this The Economist discovering Marxism?

AA (and also Critical Race Theory) argue that race/racism are the defining structural concept that order economic and social relationships. Marxism argues that it is by wealth or class.

For a fun conspiracy theory, could neoliberalism be pushing this CRT view because it divides and conquers the lower classes by race?

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#468

Post by thejman5200 »

blinkingled wrote: post #387
civilized wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unironically, I've been looking for a few thousand pages of biography worth reading.

Lol few years ago I got LBJ's from local library and made sincere effort to read through - it was humongous. I could not carry on after a week.

I dont really care if George RR Martin ever finishes Winds of Winter. But I will be immensely disappointed if Robert Caro dies before finishing the last LBJ book. He already somehow wrote 3,000+ pages in 40 years and hasn't even reached LBJ's passage of Medicare, Civil Rights, and Vietnam. He's 87 but still working on it apparently.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#469

Post by crhulls »

seadan83 wrote: post #360
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And this is why the term "white privilege" sells so poorly to whites. It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege. >And why CRT is attacked so vigorously. Have you read any CRT "scholars?" I have, and they are sickening.

This would imply that "driving while black" is not a thing if you have an expensive car. Counter-example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-woma... Another example indicating the dependent variable is not always wealth: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/michael-bennett-las-vega... While that is anecdotal, the overall statistics of police stops based on race are damning. This is just in the rea…

I don’t necessarily think the research agrees the stats are damning. For example, here is Roland Fryer’s study which concluded blacks are more likely to be pulled over than whites but are actually less likely to be shot.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...

Roland is a black economist from Harvard.

It seems many people from both sides just decide the data that refutes their opinion is misinformation. The topic of police discrimination is far more nuanced than either the left or right makes it appear.

And it is easy to find anecdotes that support any narrative you want so your links do little to sway me in the same way if I were to share a link of a white person being harassed it would likely do little to sway you.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#470

Post by gautamdivgi »

scarby2 wrote: post #428
coyotespike wrote: post #187

Here in Texas, any student from the top 10% of their high school is guaranteed a place at the flagship University of Texas at Austin. This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action. Naturally, high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools. We ignore that difference as a policy matter. Top 10% is…

can you game this system by moving to a worse area? If you're rich and give your child all the support they need they're almost bound to be in the top 10%.

I’ve known of folks who moved out of frisco and Plano suburbs to prospect when it was up and coming to spare their kids of the “Asian competition onslaught” in frisco and Plano schools. Not sure whether true or how it worked out. But yes, people do try to game it somewhat. I’m unsure how successful they are in the long run.

Edit - these were Asian parents

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