The New York Times editorial board (photos; note that all are white except for a token Asian woman, a token black guy, and a token Indian) has written “Forcing Black Men Out of Society” in which they complain that low-skill low-income black men have been excluded from work and traditional family life. There is no reflection, however, on the fact that the policies for which the New York Times has tirelessly advocated are to some extent responsible.
First, it isn’t clear that skin color has much to do with this. A white man with poor skills, little education, and a criminal record is not first on anyone’s list to be hired or as a mate. Let’s chalk the emphasis on race to the fact that white people at the New York Times enjoy writing about skin color. There aren’t too many unemployed black doctors or lawyers and most of them presumably are sought after as mates and/or as child support payors. So really this is an article about the low-income portion of the distribution of American workers.
What policies has the Times advocated for?
- high minimum wages
- regulations on employers that push up the cost of labor
- comfortable welfare benefits
- profitable child support
As Milton Friedman noted 42 years ago,
A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills. Playboy: Isn’t it, rather, a law that requires employers to pay a fair and livable wage? Friedman: How is a person better off unemployed at a dollar sixty an hour than employed at a dollar fifty? … the effect of a minimum-wage law is to produce unemployment among people with low skills. And who are the people with low skills? In the main, they tend to be teenagers and blacks, and women who have no special skills or have been out of the labor force and are coming back. This is why there are abnormally high unemployment rates among these groups. … Blacks get less schooling and are less skilled than whites. Therefore, the minimum-wage rate hits them particularly hard. I’ve often said the minimum-wage rate is the most anti-Negro law on the books. Playboy: Couldn’t those who are hurt by minimum-wage legislation be trained for more skilled jobs at better wages? Friedman: The minimum wage destroys the best kind of training programs we’ve ever had: on-the-job training. …
The Times has advocated for regulations that require employers to provide various benefits, that allow employees to sue for various kinds of discrimination, etc., all of which drive up an employer’s costs to the point that isn’t worth having a low-skill worker around (see “unemployed = 21st century draft horse?”). A lot of people do seem to like the idea of a world in which everyone who has a job is paid well and consequently not everyone can have a job. But if that is what you want, why then express surprise at the fact that a subsection of people are not in the work force?
What about in the domestic sphere? If a woman can have a child out of wedlock and use the child (poor single mother status!) to get a house, food stamps, TANF cash, Medicaid, cell phone, heating oil assistance, etc., what use would she have for a low-income man in the house, especially if she can tap into what income he may have through the child support system. And if having three children with three different men yields twice the revenue of having three children with one man, what would be the rational economic basis of a low-income woman for settling down with one man?
Why do blacks come in for special criticism? In interviewing attorneys for Real World Divorce most of the people they told us about who were behaving contrary to conventional 1950s morality were white. White people were eager to tap into the income of two partners instead of one. White people were eager to profit from children, whether conceived via a one-night encounter or a short-term marriage. White people were eager to collect court-ordered financial transfers (e.g., alimony, child support, property division of premarital assets (traditional gold-digging), etc.) rather than work (see the Massachusetts chapter for a University of Pennsylvania graduate’s 3.2X earnings from a 4-year marriage and a 2-year-old child compared to the average working Penn grad’s income). White people were presumably more likely to tap into a private defendant than the government, but this is an example of differential opportunity not morality. (When the (white) Times reporter Liza Ghorbani was seeking $3 million in tax-free child support revenue she targeted a white married (to someone else) guy; their respective behaviors were not portrayed as behavior defects for white people overall.)
The subtext of this editorial is perhaps “Yes we created all of these incentives for low-income Americans to behave in certain ways but we are certain that they can’t be intelligent enough to follow the incentives. Thus we are going to attribute their following of the incentives to prejudice by white people other than ourselves.”
If the Times is so sure that low-income criminally convicted black men are not getting a fair deal from prejudiced white employers, why doesn’t this multi-billion dollar profit-seeking corporation hire them and thereby boost profits? And if settling down behind a white (black?) picket fence with a low-income black guy is something black women should be enthusiastic about doing, why are Times reporters instead choosing to have profit-yielding out-of-wedlock children with high-income white guys?
What policies has the Times advocated for?
high minimum wages
regulations on employers that push up the cost of labor
comfortable welfare benefits
profitable child support
You forgot the most significant driver of unemployment among low-skilled workers, and throughout the economy, — immigration!
Charles Murray’s book, “Coming Apart” shows that the problems of blacks have almost nothing to do with race and everything to do with their culture. The book compares whites in two communities, Belmont MA IIRC and a neighborhood of Philadelphia. Murray deliberately chose two white communities to side step all the racial baggage that the Times and their editors harp on. He showed the Mass. whites had almost all the civic virtues, more religious, stable families, devoted parents, children raised to value education, etc. The Phila. whites had the same problems associated with blacks, children born to unmarried mothers, fathers skip out on their children, massive unemployment … The Times by absolving the blacks of their responsibility for their problems is perpetuating them.
See also: “free trade” as advocated in economic textbooks written by certain NYTimes authors/academics. Opening our markets to commodity goods from poor countries has made us poorer ($10T cumulative trade deficits), not richer as promised by academic economists. Ross Perot was right after all.
Bob: I haven’t read Coming Apart but are you sure that the two white communities had comparable incomes? If not, the difference in behavior could be explained more simply by a difference in potential income from wages. Compared to a high earner, a person with a lower earning potential would be more interested in welfare, collecting child support, or other ways of getting cash without working. As Milton Friedman noted, black Americans are more likely to have less education and/or lower work-related skills. A white person in the same position might make the same choices regardless of “culture”.
E: You’re right on immigration. I think the best economics research has found that it helps higher-income people but harms those with low income, including, of course, the low-income blacks about whom the Times editorial board purports to be concerned.
No, of course not. “Fishtown” was Murray’s example of a lower class (white) community that had many of the features of the black underclass (including lower income, education and intelligence). By focusing on a white community he removed the racial baggage that makes any calm discussion impossible in our society.
Bob – I don’t think that Coming Apart shows that the problems are merely cultural. Murray showed that the people of Belmont and Fishtown are increasingly genetically isolated from each other. Belmontians meet other Belmontians when they are at Belmontian colleges and workplaces, etc. and interact with Fishtowners only when they come to paint their house or something. Belmontians differ in IQ from Fishtowners from earliest childhood. In the past, a Belmontian doctor might have married his Fishtownian nurse or a Belmontian lawyer might marry his Fishtownian secretary, but such cross-cultural marriages are rare nowadays, maybe even more rare than Belmontians of different races marrying each other.
Of course the dysfunctional culture that is found in Fishtown (drug addiction, single parent households, etc.) is maybe half the problem, but the other half (and here Fishtowners are stand-ins for blacks, but without the racial baggage) has genetic roots which we would like to wish away, but you can’t – these kind of genetic intelligence differences are real and measurable and not cannot be erased in school. You can’t start pre-school soon enough to erase these differences. Rich people tend to be smart, which is how they got rich in the first place, and they tend to have smart kids who grow up to be rich kids.
You see this most clearly when Belmont families adopt children from Fishtown. Being adopted into Belmont even from birth does not make you into a Belmontian. Maybe some of these kids have fetal alcohol syndrome or something, but mostly they just have intelligence that resembles that of their birth parents and not their adoptive parents. My wife works with a lot of these kids – their Belmontian parents have unrealistically high expectations and expect these adopted kids to be professionals such as they are and it rarely turns out that way – they just don’t have it in them genetically, despite having been raised in Belmont among parents who talk a lot to them, etc. from day 1.
@Izzie L: Very good comments.
…cross-cultural marriages are rare nowadays…
Steve Sailer calls this “assortive mating.”
Have any of you actually read Coming Apart? My impression was that Murray chose two white communities to avoid racial controversy as well as to avoid genetic IQ issues. I saw an interview on the PBS NewsHour where, as I recall, he suggested that upper class people like him should somehow teach poor people better habits. He didn’t mention anything about how genetics might the benefits such education would have.
Vince, yes I did read the book. He chose white communities to avoid racial controversy but NOT to avoid genetic IQ issues. One of the main points of the book is that Belmont and Fishtown are in effect becoming separate breeding pools that differ in IQ. Did YOU read the book?
For example, here is a table copied from a section of the book entitled “Transmission of Cognitive Ability to the Next Generation”
“Suppose we have four white couples with the same level of education, plugging in the average IQs for those levels of education as given in table 2.1 (splitting the difference between the NLSY-79 and NLSY-97 figures when necessary). I add a fifth couple who both have degrees from elite colleges, with a midpoint IQ of 135.36 Here is what we can expect as mean IQs of the children of these couples:
Parents’ Educations Expected IQ of the Child
Two high school dropouts 94
Two high school diplomas 101
Two college degrees (and no more) 109
Two graduate degrees 116
Two degrees from an elite college 121”
@Izzie L: He chose white communities to avoid racial controversy but NOT to avoid genetic IQ issues. One of the main points of the book is that Belmont and Fishtown are in effect becoming separate breeding pools that differ in IQ.
Once again, Izzie gets it right.
No, I didn’t read the book. My question was a sincere question. I read a review of the book and saw an interview with on TV. I don’t recall IQ test results being mentioned. It’s a bit surprising that he wanted to discuss IQ again.
When I see so much attention paid to IQ, it raises a bunch of other questions that don’t get much attention when IQ is discussed. What do IQ tests actually measure? What do IQ tests consist of? Who is in charge of creating the tests? Are there separate verbal and math scores like on the SAT?
Many Americans read statistics about how some groups have higher IQs than other groups and have little curiosity about what it all means.
Vince: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_general_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html is a good summary of conventional thinking regarding the correlation between IQ and earning potential. If you think the conventional wisdom is wrong you can make infinite money by hiring a workforce of Americans with an average IQ of 85. Due to a lack of competition from other employers, hobbled by their conventional minds, you likely won’t have to pay above minimum wage. Your service business will therefore have a much lower cost of labor than the competition and consequently high profit margins.
Vince, you’re being pretty lazy here. A few minutes spent with Wikipedia and Google will answer all of your questions. Charles Spearman in the early years of the 20th century observed that children’s performance ratings across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated, and reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general mental ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tasks. Spearman suggested that all mental performance could be conceptualized in terms of a single general ability factor, which he labeled g. IQ tests attempt to measure “g” (which cannot be measured directly – yet) thru a battery of different questions and tasks.
I think Americans have plenty of curiosity about IQ but after the experience of folks like James Watson, Jason Richwine, Larry Summers, etc. they are afraid to speak publicly. If you are a climate change denier you are a crank, but being an IQ denier or asserting that IQ is 100% malleable thru education at increasingly early ages (which is even more scientifically disreputable) puts you on the side of the angels.
“The minimum wage destroys the best kind of training programs we’ve ever had: on-the-job training …” While this is entirely true, there is another, hidden, side to that story: introducing a floor in wages has had other interesting effects (or will have them in the future, although an opportunity often is one that is not missed …): when in Europe there was a large influx of rather unskilled and sometimes illiterate workers from e.g. Turkey and Morocco, to a lesser extent from rural areas in Italy, Spain and Greece, into the then smaller European Union (only Italy then being a member), an amazing thing happened: people, largely men considered “unskilled” before or simple journeymen in some trades who would not have been charged with overseeing “reports” became … foremen (or, esp. in cleaning, forewomen). So the influx of large portions of unskilled or simply: LESS qualified, migrant workers made life better, not worse, at the time, for those previously on the lowest rungs of the social ladder! So everyone profited. And surely the now better paid foremen/women would eventually buy or build houses, buy (bigger) cars etc. etc. This minimum wage thing has backfired badly in another area too: since anyone kicked out of or kept out of work by it will (esp. in Europe) be on social welfare, contributions tend to go up for those that still are working, making them relatively more expensive until they lose their jobs too!
Maureen – bringing in unskilled workers from abroad made sense in a time of a growing economy and labor shortage. Millions of men (and women) of working age had been killed in WWII, there was a market for European exports such as VW Beetles, industrial robots did not yet exist, there was no competition from low labor cost countries such as China, so it made sense (at least in the short run) to bring in men from Turkey to work on German assembly lines.
America today is a different time and place. Bringing in more unskilled workers from abroad (or raising the minimum wage even higher) when we already have a large pool of unemployed youth wandering the streets of Baltimore makes zero sense.
I’m not exactly an IQ denier, but the analogy isn’t far off. We all have inclinations. Some people don’t want to accept that global warming is happening. I saw some polling results which said that a lot climate deniers hold that view because they don’t want to have to make the adjustments necessary to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.
My attitude regarding IQ is not exactly the same. If we consider the assertion that we can measure the intelligence of individuals in the same way that we can measure their height or weight, the first step would have to be to define what intelligence is. For example, whose achievements represent greater intelligence – those of Isaac Newton or those of William Shakespeare? It’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? If they were still alive, it wouldn’t be a matter of opinion to determine who weighs more.
Also, that Slate article doesn’t mention anything about genetics. I happened to hear a radio interview a couple of years ago with a professor who identified something called the Flynn Effect, which is the increase in scores on IQ tests over time. Some of the possible explanations for this phenomena are:
Schooling and test familiarity
Generally more stimulating environment
Nutrition
Infectious diseases
Heterosis – hybrid vigor associated with historical reductions of the levels of inbreeding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Izzie, it has been a while since I read the book but I do not recall any emphasis on IQ. I do recall his showing that we are becoming separate monocultures with little mixing–the main point of his book. Contrary to your emphasis on IQ, his solutions to the problem were cultural. One was having the Belmont culture, which has a lot of influence in our society, exercise moral judgements and condemning the behavior of the Fishtowners. The other is to hope for a religious revival as has happened many times in U.S. history.
I am not saying that IQ is irrelevant–just that it was not emphasized in the book. My own view is that it is certainly relevant but that an individual with ability, IQ if you will, and drive can overcome the culture and the environment such as terrible schools, crime, etc. of Fishtown to become successful and join the Belmont culture. And the Belmonters will welcome him, I think.
I think we can also hope for a religious revival. Even trivial things like the tremendous success of movies with moral characters such as Forrest Gump shows that there is a hunger for that in America.