Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

1.5 Million Missing Black Men

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 375 posts

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#171

Post by Retric »

mc32 wrote: post #156
michaelchisari wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in places with a lot more men than women both men and women converge on wanting a long term relationship, but in places with a lot more women than men There's also the narrative that places where men outnumber women, men become increasingly competitive and violent towards women and each other. An example is any blue collar "boom" town like North Dakota's fracking industry.

In china where men outnumber women due to family preference for a male heir, it has resulted in straight men having to compete with each other on an economic status basis to attract women, what happens in north Dakota is not a universal phenomenon.

This is vastly overstated. Historically there are 1.05 male births per 1 female birth without any technical sex selection going on. Which for a population the size of China works out to an extra ~33 million men. Interestingly in the US and globally men of every age but ~10 years old die more frequently than men so older woman significantly out number older men. It's a fairly significant gap which is one of the reasons this chart looks so shocking. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88_fig4.png

Roughly stated the younger the population the more men you end up with. Generally this is balanced by woman having shorter 'breaks' between relationships until old age when women significantly out number men. See: 1950: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/Fi...

vs: 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/Fi...

It's hard to read, but the gap actually looks smaller for 15 year olds now vs 1950.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#172

Post by Alex3917 »

hn_ wrote: post #142
Alex3917 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Everyone always blames this on conservative policies like the war on drugs, but in reality liberal policies like school integration have also contributed to the issue, e.g. by creating gangs and balkanizing communities.

Did I read that right? School integration creates gangs? http://www.nber.org/digest/may11/w16664.html >Rucker estimates that each additional year of exposure to desegregated schools increased black men’s annual earnings by roughly 5 percent, increased their wages by 2.9 percent, and led to an annual work effort that was 39 hours higher. At the same time, for these black male adults the probability of poverty decrease…

> School integration creates gangs?

C.f. http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/0674...

> Rucker estimates that each additional year of exposure to desegregated schools increased black men’s annual earnings by roughly 5 percent, increased their wages by 2.9 percent, and led to an annual work effort that was 39 hours higher.

Also, what exactly does that mean? E.g. a person going from an all black school to a school that's 90% white is going to have almost nothing in common with someone going from an all black school to a school that's still 90% black. I skimmed over the study, but I'm having trouble understanding how they are controlling for demographics and what they call the 'black-white exposure index'.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#173

Post by hackuser »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #28
guelo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That middle eastern hypothesis is wrong, offensive and off topic.

I think it's an interesting point. Even more interesting is your attempt to shut down the conversation because it offends you.

> Even more interesting is your attempt to shut down the conversation because it offends you.

That brings up an interesting issue for me. It's a somewhat popular trope, that there is an equivalence between Amy offending people and Bob asking her to stop. It's really a rhetorical tactic -- an attempt to disrupt Bob by forcing him to philsophically justify what is obviously and intuitively true to everyone.

There may be a question of whether something is offensive or otherwise does harm to others, of course. But absolutely if someone finds something offensive, they should stand up and say so -- and not be shut down by the new political correctness (i.e., the frequent knee-jerk reaction to people who point out issues of race, gender, etc.).

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#174

Post by gaius »

Mizza wrote: post #47
dmix wrote: post #13

> The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.” Interesting, I never thought about this side-effect of mass incarceration. Another aggravating factor in…

> women are arguably less war-prone than men I don't think are actually any studies that support this, unfortunately. War simply isn't a consequence of gender, it is a consequence of ideology and fear.

If you are English you grew up with the stories of Boudicca who battled the Romans, the notion of the warrior woman is pretty deeply embedded in our national psyche.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#175

Post by daveloyall »

javert wrote: post #108
kaa2102 wrote: post #20

I'm a Black Man. Growing up there was a realization that being alive and out of trouble over the age of 21 was an accomplishment. This would extend to middle class. Due to a history of American apartheid, there were often just a few degrees of separation between middle class and working/poor class kin.

In the US we had segregation, not apartheid. There is a difference. As a white man living in the South, we still have segregation in practice. I rarely had interaction with blacks because they did different things and took different classes at school. We all went to the same schools---just didn't have the same classes or have the same social circles. Not much shared in the way of culture. I have had some black friend…

I grew up white in the south, too.

I took me years to really grok how I was part of the problem. Eventually, I figured out that I needed to do this:

    s/white people/people/g;
    s/black people/people/g
Even today, I almost always have to spend a little cognitive load to patch my own though process at runtime.

When I fail to overcome my upbringing, I fail to make new friends. I fail to be funny with strangers. I don't get smiles because, without thinking about it, I wasn't giving 'em.

This is subtle. It's not just hard to talk about, it's hard to think about.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#176

Post by teen »

dmix wrote: post #13

> The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.” Interesting, I never thought about this side-effect of mass incarceration. Another aggravating factor in…

> I remember reading a hypothesis of why many middle eastern countries generate so many young angry jihadists is that most of the young men had never had a stable interactions with women in their youth. Most grew up in socially conservative environments and missed out on the stabilizing effect of having relationships with women, not having a sexual output, not having reasons to stay alive for a girl at home, or even missing out on having a female perspective on things (women are arguably less war-prone than men).

This has been my experience in San Francisco, thanks to gender imbalances

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#177

Post by danielweber »

dmix wrote: post #13

> The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.” Interesting, I never thought about this side-effect of mass incarceration. Another aggravating factor in…

Monogamy was an amazing invention, as it did something with all the surplus males with nothing to lose.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#178

Post by maceo »

SovietDissident wrote: post #68

Moynihan in 1965, writing at the Labor Dept.: "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_... The welfare state and the drug war have had devastating effects on the U.S. black population. To take just one statistic, when Moynihan…

Moynihan was snubbed for writing the report and liberals and conservatives alike have since been very afraid to comment on the state of black families in the US.

The black family unit in the US has been under attack for over 500 years. During slavery, blacks were prohibited from marrying and relationships between father, mother, and children were torn apart at the slaveowners whim. Slavery was still in existence 150 years ago, and it existed on US soil for 350 years prior. Reconstruction offered brief solace, but then came Jim Crow, white terrorist organizations like the KKK, a so-called social welfare system that overzealously institutionalized and split apart poor families, the war on drugs/crime, Clinton era cuts to welfare that disproportionally affected working single mothers and poor children of color, etc.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#179

Post by Alex3917 »

signet wrote: post #151
Alex3917 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Everyone always blames this on conservative policies like the war on drugs, but in reality liberal policies like school integration have also contributed to the issue, e.g. by creating gangs and balkanizing communities.

I don't follow at all. You're blaming balkanization on integration? Sure, white flight was an unintended consequence but that surely wasn't the goal and no fault of the policy itself. And how is this connected to gangs? Gangs can't exist in segregated schools how?

> Sure, white flight was an unintended consequence but that surely wasn't the goal and no fault of the policy itself.

It's not entirely accurate to say it was an unintended consequence. The Coleman Report predicted these sorts of issues if desegregation was implemented in the way that it was.

> And how is this connected to gangs?

C.f. the book I linked to.

Re: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men

#180

Post by belorn »

joshuapants wrote: post #73
michaelchisari wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scandinavians have a very low rate of marriage and a high divorce rate, and yet are as stable and wholesome as you can imagine.

I don't know that people necessarily have to be married and stay married to make the nuclear family work, even if that is the typical manifestation. If two unmarried people have children and contribute to a stable life, then they still are a strong nuclear family even if not bound by marriage. Similarly, if a divorcee pairs up with someone else and doesn't get married, the children can get a de-facto stepparent. I'm…

With few laws that differential between marriage and people living together, marriage mostly becomes a symbolic ritual. It would be interesting to see how legal systems for alimony or custody of children effects marriage statistics.
Post reply on HN