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

The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#41

Post by jhedwards »

eric_b wrote: post #27
ajamesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are those potential underlying causes and possible solutions, if the elephants in the room are IQ and culture? clicks post history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12159996 "What has been emerging especially now that genetic sequencing is becoming rapidly cheaper and more advanced at picking human genomes out of the genetic diaspora found in old fossils, is a much more complicated picture. The Chinese obv…

I'm not sure if you realize it - but your comment is the problem, not the original poster. Sometimes facts don't fit a political narrative. Comments like yours are what have polarized the nation. Your knee-jerk reaction to anything that disagrees with your position is to name-call and shame. Not very good form.

I kind of disagree in this case. As a general rule I think ideas should be debated objectively and with facts, but when someone so clearly promotes the idea that there are human races that are genetically distinct and map onto traits like intelligence and success I just think of the legacy that this line of thinking has given us: death, torture, and poverty throughout human history on a scale that's impossible to comprehend. Slavery and the holocaust were both predicated on the simple idea that one kind of human was superior so I don't feel comfortable sitting around sipping tea and debating that.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#42

Post by kmicklas »

ajamesm wrote: post #33
eric_b wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you realize it - but your comment is the problem, not the original poster. Sometimes facts don't fit a political narrative. Comments like yours are what have polarized the nation. Your knee-jerk reaction to anything that disagrees with your position is to name-call and shame. Not very good form.

The problem is so-called "race realists" boiling complex sociological issues down by way of lazy and fallacious thinking, and then not-so-subtly implying that there is a racial basis for intelligence and human worth. The snarky "checkmated by FACTS, you emotional liberal!" narrative doesn't work when STUDY after STUDY fails to find any meaningful correlation.

Sadly these Nazis are the majority of readers here.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#43

Post by gragas »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #14
themgt wrote: post #9

This is such incredibly poor agenda-driven "journalism", with cherry-picked data used to (poorly) attack a sort of straw man argument: Asian Americans seem to offer proof that minorities can prosper — and even leapfrog whites — if they work hard and jump through the right hoops. For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanic…

There is also this, by the same author: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/19/the-r... Basically, when you control for education level, Asians come out just behind whites while black and Hispanic minorities still get shafted. And that this didn't used to be the case, that Asians used to have a similar gap, which indicates that Americans have simply gotten less racist towards them. Presumably on such…

>And that this didn't used to be the case, that Asians used to have a similar gap, which indicates that Americans have simply gotten less racist towards them.

Source? You have no proof that any of these differences are due to racism rather than the underlying culture of each group.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#44

Post by wutbrodo »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #10
_m8fo wrote: post #5

This article sure is strange: >>The contrast between whites and Asians is particularly stark. Nearly 1 in 5 white Americans reside in rural counties, where a dollar goes a lot further. But 97 percent of Asian Americans live in or near a major city, where the cost of living is higher. By definition of living in a lower income area and subsequently making less money, you are unable to live in a nicer, high cost of livi…

What he's trying to imply is that the place people live is affected by more than simple economics. There are differing historical and cultural reasons why blacks and Asians might live in different cities, regardless of their economic power. So controlling for their environment, Asians stand out less than they do just by looking at raw numbers. Compared to where they live, they stop outperforming whites, they just ten…

> So controlling for their environment, Asians stand out less than they do just by looking at raw numbers. Compared to where they live, they stop outperforming whites, they just tend not to live in poor areas where whites also populate.

That's begging the question of why they tend to live where they do: whether someone lives in a high-income/high-cost/economically-productive area is in large part driven by whether they can git into that economy.

By your logic, I could take Americans in high-income areas and those in low-income areas and prove that the former don't stand out in terms of income (which is obviously silly).

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#45

Post by ajamesm »

JPKab wrote: post #29
themgt wrote: post #9

This is such incredibly poor agenda-driven "journalism", with cherry-picked data used to (poorly) attack a sort of straw man argument: Asian Americans seem to offer proof that minorities can prosper — and even leapfrog whites — if they work hard and jump through the right hoops. For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanic…

You're on the money. Sadly, the only way to even discuss culture's role without being labelled a bigot is to discuss the cultural differences within white Americans. When you're talking about how cultural traits prevalent in Appalachian communities like the one I grew up in exacerbate inequality, suddenly you have an audience. See the author J.D. Vance who wrote 'Hillbilly Elegy', and has subsequently become a darlin…

Why do you blame culture, but ignore historical practices like redlining, or the obvious correlation with poverty, or the fact that American black people have had scarcely 50 years of equality under the law? That drugs in black communities are treated as crime, but drugs in white communities are seen as a public health crisis?

There are hundreds of issues of infinitely more substance than whether black children are conceived in wedlock.

What makes you a bigot isn't that you see that as something worth addressing. You're a bigot because, of all the problems facing black communities, you choose that one to judge them by.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#46

Post by home_boi »

pessimizer wrote: post #28
RoboticFoot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really the data shows that discrimination is more anti-black than it is pro-white Or it shows that there is something about the statistically average black person that makes them less successful than the statistically average asian person. I don't claim to know what the difference is, but this is a fairly obvious inference to make. I'd actually say this is, a priori, a lot more likely than "everyone coincidentally…

> I'd actually say this is, a priori, a lot more likely than "everyone coincidentally discriminates against these particular racial groups but not any of these other ones". How would you change that prior if you were informed one of those groups had been enslaved on the basis of race for a couple of centuries, ruthlessly oppressed for another century, then blamed for most of the problems in the country for the lion's…

It doesn't seem like that study normalizes for quality of college degree. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the average "ranking" (used as a proxy for quality) of the alma matter of black people is worse than that of other races.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#47

Post by nommm-nommm »

themgt wrote: post #9

This is such incredibly poor agenda-driven "journalism", with cherry-picked data used to (poorly) attack a sort of straw man argument: Asian Americans seem to offer proof that minorities can prosper — and even leapfrog whites — if they work hard and jump through the right hoops. For that reason, Asian Americans have often been invoked as a way to excuse the income gaps between whites and blacks or whites and Hispanic…

I suspect you'll get a series of high fives and fist bumps just for criticising "mainstream liberalism," no matter how valid the criticism, because that's in vogue right now.

You're living under a rock if you believe nobody is studying or confronting IQ and culture and how it relates to race. It's just it's not really intellectually profound to repeat and rehash the same old "scientific racism" that's been going on for the last century and a half, that's why you hear less of it.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#48

Post by mattnewton »

Spooky23 wrote: post #16
tristanj wrote: post #7

This article has a glaring logic flaw. After COLA, Asians and Whites show roughly the same median household income. But among minorities, Asians still have higher median household incomes than their Black and Hispanic counterparts. The author barely makes an attempt explain why this is the case. Doesn't the data just reinforce the perception that Asians are the model minority? So what the article should have said, is…

The problem is that those racial categories aren't very well aligned with anything. In 1816, this article would talk about how the Irish were a bunch of turds. If you look at "asians" you're looking at mostly confuscian based cultures and various Indian ethnicities, mostly admitted for residency for work purposes. "Hispanic" in particular is any of a dozen different distinct cultures. Statistically, hispanics are an…

This, exactly this. "Asian american" immigrant family's disproportionately come here on work visas. This is a socioeconomic effect and afaik has very little to do with race.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#49

Post by eric_b »

ajamesm wrote: post #45
JPKab wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're on the money. Sadly, the only way to even discuss culture's role without being labelled a bigot is to discuss the cultural differences within white Americans. When you're talking about how cultural traits prevalent in Appalachian communities like the one I grew up in exacerbate inequality, suddenly you have an audience. See the author J.D. Vance who wrote 'Hillbilly Elegy', and has subsequently become a darlin…

Why do you blame culture, but ignore historical practices like redlining, or the obvious correlation with poverty, or the fact that American black people have had scarcely 50 years of equality under the law? That drugs in black communities are treated as crime, but drugs in white communities are seen as a public health crisis? There are hundreds of issues of infinitely more substance than whether black children are c…

I mean... jeez, again with the name-calling. Have you looked up the definition of "bigot"? It's defined as a person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions.

In the comments I've seen you post so far, the intolerant one is... you.

Re: The Asian American ‘advantage’ that is actually an illusion

#50

Post by lern_too_spel »

teen wrote: post #17

Why would you factor out local cost of living when comparing incomes? For the wealthy, a high cost of living is a choice to live where they want.

Because then you can show that controlling for location, Asians don't make more than whites. Asians who live in high cost of living places or low cost of living places make the same as whites living in the same locations despite having more education. This analysis is a rebuttal to the argument that Asian median income as a whole being higher than white median income implies that America is a post-racial society where working hard will result in equal reward regardless of race.
Post reply on HN