A boarding school for blacks exemplifies one general concept that has been growing in the minds of liberal activists about what to do with ghetto black students (witness the demands for mandatory preschool, longer school days, shorter summer vacations, and universal post-high school education). Since we all know that blacks are equal in intelligence by nature, therefore their unfortunate performance on average means that they must be victimized by their nurture. So, the solution is to take them away from their families to the maximum extent possible and have them raised by salaried professionals. The problem is that we simply haven't spent enough money on black students. It's our fault.
In other words, the trend is to re-enact the Australian Stolen Generation scheme. As you'll recall, in the 1930s, half-blood children of alcoholic Aboriginal mothers were sent to boarding schools to learn how to function in white society by well-intentioned whites. This was condemned in the movie Rabbit Proof Fence, but, amusingly, the director, Philip Noyce, wound up, much like the white bad guy in his film, sending his adolescent half-blood female star to boarding school to get her away from her alcoholic family.
SEED costs $35,000 per year for five days per week of school and boarding, but most of the article concerns whether or not having the kids go home on the weekends (which keeps the cost from being a lot higher than $35,000) just ruins whatever good is done by locking them up away from their friends and relatives on weeknights.
While SEED enrolls plenty of at-risk students, critics argue that SEED and other charter schools skim the cream of inner-city youth, attracting the families who are motivated to fill out the paperwork to apply to the school. Meanwhile, some of the most high-risk kids, whose parents are barely functional and place more value on their child’s being home every day to baby-sit or do housework than they do on education, are left behind.
But SEED’s statistics have impressed fans of the school, including President Barack Obama, who called the school “a true success story”: at least 97 percent of SEED graduates are accepted to colleges, including Princeton, Alabama A&M and Connecticut College. And 90 percent of SEED graduates immediately enroll in college, compared with 56 percent of African-American high-school graduates nationally. (About 70 percent of SEED graduates are currently in or graduated from college, although the program is new enough that the sample size is small.) Though SEED also outpaces D.C. public schools in reading and math, reading is still a weakness for many SEED students and, not coincidentally, the school’s SAT scores have been unimpressive. ...
Some kids don’t last beyond the first year or two at SEED. Until recently, the school lost about 20 percent of the student body each year — mostly in middle school and mostly boys. The incoming class of 70 students slowly dissipated each year so that by senior year, the remaining students barely filled a gym bleacher. The high attrition made the school’s much-lauded college acceptance rate less impressive: If a class of 70 seventh graders fell to 20 students by the time of graduation, those remaining 20 students were arguably among the best — at least in terms of self-discipline and a willingness to stick it out — of the original class. Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses. During this past school year, the attrition rate dropped by more than 50 percent.
Recently, the Prime Minister of Australia issued a lachrymose apology for the Stolen Generation. (Of course, the levels of alcoholism and sexual abuse of children in Aborigine towns only got worse under the administration of culturally sensitive anti-racist post-1960s people, but who's counting?) It would not at all be surprising if about 2080, the President of the United States issues a similar apology for the Stolen Generation of blacks in the 2010-2040 era.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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65 comments:
Just to be review/be clear: what are we supposed to do? Not just abandon them, right? Is there some IQ-realistic version of SEED that could be invented?
I think Murray put in about one sentence in Real Education to the idea that "of course, some schools really are bad and should totally be improved" and then it was back to the IQ thing.
What ARE we supposed to do with them?
When I lived in Aus I happily gave Aussies the benefit of my advice on every political issue, bar the Aboriginal Question. I could see that generations of Aussies had tried a huge list of tactics, each "progressive" or "PC" in its time, and all without much success. The least unsuccessful were those that were deemed deeply racist by the 80s and 90s when I was there.
Mind you, I don't see how any method for dealing with a troubled race can avoid being "racist" in some sensible meaning of that word.
"what are we supposed to do? Not just abandon them, right?"
Vocational education. And stop bringing hordes of unskilled Third Worlders to fill all of the manual labor jobs.
About 20 years ago, a woman (who happened to be white) came up with an idea: Offer crack addicted inner city women a couple thousand dollars, in exchange for their volunteering to have their tubes tied (the surgery provided free of charge). Her reasoning: Crack moms make lousy parents, especially for the 'special needs' children they invariably give birth to.
Well, it turns out most female addicts in her area were black. The usual activists, organizers and advocates did the math: One + one = this is racist!
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something bold, like take children away from their families, go to the usual activists, organizers and advocates first and pay them off. Then make sure that there are enough things wrong with your program that it will fail. That way it can grow.
P.S.:
The US tried something like this with its aboriginal population. Around the turn of the last century tens of thousands of Indian kids were taken from their families, and placed in boarding schools far from home. The kids could only speak English, were dressed like whites, etc. Somehow, 100 years later, Indian reservations are worse cesspools of alcoholism, unemployment, general dysfunction than ever.
If you want to see what "inner city" America will look like around 2080, take a trip to Pine Ridge, SD -- the epitome of a century-plus of social engineering/ do-gooder fuck-up.
Garland - as long as they live with us its going to be our fault. The policy implications of that, well...
Steve,
Off-topic, but if there were ever an MSM blog post that needed an injection of Human Biodiversity, I think it would be this one by James Fallows of The Atlantic: More on obesity geography and class.
"What ARE we supposed to do with them?"
For starters, we can go back to tracking and make sure that those who lack the ability or the discipline to absorb "book learning" as my Granny used to call it learn a trade** or at least are taught to do some kind of useful work. Murray touched on this in "Real Education". The tracks shouldn't be set in stone and a student should be able to move up or down, but only by demonstrating ability.
Stop dumbing down the curriculum for all students just because some can't keep up. You aren't helping those who can't or won't learn and you are greatly handicapping those who could if they were actually being taught.
Follow this up with a halt to importing cheap foreign labor to drive down unskilled wages and things will improve. The Hyatt Regency in Boston just replaced its largely minority cleaning crew with H-2B cleaners from some outfit called Hospitality Staffing Solutions. HSS is apparently a woman-owned minority business. Thanks, ladies. Your turn, Testing99.
** The only two sets of my friends who own second houses are (1) a couple of anesthesiologists, who own a "farmette" that you couldn't give me if I had to live there and (2) my plumber, who owns a nice house at the local lake.
Garland, in the film "Caddyshack", a working-class caddy named Danny Noonan seeks to obtain a scholarship sponsored by the country club. In order to receive the scholarship, he must ingratiate himself to the club president, a crotchety man named Judge Elihu Smails.
In one memorable sequence Danny Noonan says to the Judge, "I planned to go to law school after I graduated, but it looks like my folks won't have enough money to put me through college. Judge Smails replies, "Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too."
I think Sailer believes that not all people need or deserve a college education, or even a excellent high school education. Some people are smarter than others and the smart ones should proceed to college while the less intelligent should learn a trade or at least pick up a broom and shovel.
Sailer also points out frequently that America's manual laborers are being squeezed economically by our lax border enforcement. Hence, ditch digging jobs in America are likely to be filled by Mexicans because they are willing to work for a cheaper wage than American born manual laborers.
Even if you accept the 83-87 IQ average the HBD people are claiming for black Americans, it still means there are a number of smart black kids who are getting lousy educations because of their surroundings. Aren't these academies a decent way to identify and develop the talents of the talented tenth from the ghettos?
Just to be review/be clear: what are we supposed to do?
Here's a thought: nothing.
"What ARE we supposed to do with them?
I haven't read Murray's book, but I've heard that he advocates vocational training for the left side of the bell curve. I would agree. First, the kids' IQs should be tested. Based on the results, they should be put in different tracks. Education for the lower-scoring kids should stress discipline, middle class values (I agree with he blogger Half Sigma on this) and training for concrete blue collar jobs. Education for such kids would end earlier than it does now, transitioning into on-the-job apprenticeship by the age of, say, 14 or 15.
The education of the higher-scoring kids would continue beyond that point. It wouldn't include as much preaching about morals and values because a lot of the people on the right-hand side of the curve grasp that stuff instinctively anyway and are simply bored by such preaching. The classes would be more demanding (AP on steroids) because teachers would be able to teach to a higher lowest common denominator than now.
Fewer kids would go to college and more young people would start working early. Autodidacts would be able to enter professions by passing rigorous tests, without attending college. The time and money spent on teaching things other than the hard sciences, math and technology at universities should be drastically reduced.
@Garland - eugenics. Pay dumb people to get sterilized and smart people for every child they have. You don't even have to target races.
"of course, some schools really are bad and should totally be improved"
My hunch is, for those schools that really ARE bad, it still goes back to IQ-denial. This time for teachers. My hunch is, the really, really, really bad schools are staffed overwhelmingly by the lowest-IQ teachers.
What do you think, Steve?
The problem with blacks is genetic and cannot be fixed. My only suggestion to Garland is to try to make them carpenters or something like that. Try teaching them a trade.
Free mandatory vasectomies!
Governments, and everyone else, would be well advised to steer clear of running boarding schools of any kind, especially one targeted to a particular ethnic group. In 20 or 30 years or more there will be cries of "cultural genocide" because you ripped these kids out of their natural ghetto culture and tried to force white, European values down their throat.
Starting in about the 1920s Canada began a opening Indian Residential Schools. Most of the schools were run by churches (Catholic, Anglican and United (sort of like Presbyterian)) and were funded by the government.
My guess is that most of the people who wanted to start these schools and teach in them were "do-gooder" types. They were probably sort of left-leaning and compassionate, and wanted to rescue the Indian children from the terrible poverty, alcoholism and abuse that they observed on the Indian Reserve. They wanted these children to have clean cloths, good food and an education. No doubt a lot of good people donated a lot of money to these missionary causes.
The schools operated for much of the 20th century.
Today the people who started those schools, and the schools themselves, are vilified at every turn. Governments and churches are falling all over themselves to apologize for the schools. Vast sums of money have been paid in compensation to the students (now grown) who attended those schools. The schools are blamed for every ill that now besets Canadian Aboriginals, especially for alcoholism. Ironically, it was likely extreme alcoholism on the Reserves that motivated the do-gooders to start the schools in the first place.
A "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" travels around the country, and natives who attended the schools come and tell about their terrible experiences in the schools.
The government pays out millions in various settlements.
http://www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/English.html
Today the only socially acceptable belief to have in Canada is that these schools were run by monsters bent on cultural genocide. And of COURSE a lot of the First Nations people are alcoholics today. What could we expect when they, or at least their parents or grandparents, were torn away from their families and forced into those horrible schools? That sort of trauma, along with ongoing racism, leads to addiction and all the other social ills that beset these poor suffering people.
If anyone suggest that possibly the alcoholism is genetic, you are immediatly written off as a Nazi and shunned from polite discourse.
Just don't get involved in any sort of boarding school for ghetto kids! Stay away! Stay far far away!
It would not at all be surprising if about 2080, the President of the United States issues a similar apology for the Stolen Generation of blacks in the 2010-2040 era.
LOL. So how long will we be apologizing for black failure?
There are very few Aborigines, and as long as you don't expect them to build shopping malls or something they functioned perfectly before the Europeans got to Australia. Its a viable policy just to leave them alone. They don't bother anyone.
African Americans were originally imported here, are a tenth of the population, and live in our cities so leaving them alone isn't an available policy option.
Change publice policy--once and for all change the federal and state welfare idiocy. Make it almost impossible to live off the system.
If you stop rewarding girls/women who get pregnant, their low-life boyfriends stop living off them since there's nothing to live off. Everyone is better off.
For those who still get pregnant and can't afford the kid? Well, there are abortions, much as I don't particularly like that, and there are extended families full of grandmothers, great-grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and there are churches....
What the hell did people do in the 30s, 40s, 50s when an unmarried woman with no means of support got pregnant? (See above).
And yes, go back to tracking. There is no shame in working with one's hands, in learning a trade. As any woman married to a guy with a 130+ IQ knows, it would be nice to have a man around who knows something about cars and carpentry and electrical repair work! And--a guy in a tool belt is damn hot.
"My hunch is, the really, really, really bad schools are staffed overwhelmingly by the lowest-IQ teachers."
Journal of Labor Economics recently published a paper by Kirabo Jackson showing that better teachers of all races would leave teaching blacks for positions teaching whites.
From the press release:
Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students—and it’s directly related to their race.
“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said.
The full text PDF available at author's page:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showStoryContent?doi=10.1086%2F%2Fpr.2009.05.19.2254
http://works.bepress.com/c_kirabo_jackson/11/
Malthus:
"African Americans were originally imported here, are a tenth of the population, and live in our cities so leaving them alone isn't an available policy option."
I think benign neglect would probably be a better approach than most of what you've tried.
I am not one to blame others for someone else's failure, but the marketing to blacks is disgusting. The rap culture music and ads need to be censored for decency. When kids see members of their own culture depicted is such base behavior, they see it as normal even expected. They need a steady diet of Cosby Shows etc. It won't fix everything, of course, but the current glorification of criminal culture can't be conducive to success or happiness.
vocational education
Who are you kidding? Yourself unfortunately
(1) Vocational education: machine shop, auto mechanics, plumbing, etc. nowadays requires modestly high intellectual ability, or even rather high. Try it sometimes. Much of the work is SW based for goodness sake! The rest requires discipline and attention to detail, yikes.
(2) Vocational education (falsely) implies that industrial or at least construction jobs will be there for the grads. An unemployed tool and die maker is still unemployed.
Start by ending “free trade” continue to close the “open borders”, and our society would be relatively well off in a few years. Nannies and gardeners would be less cheap. Oh the horror, oh the humanity.
A quicker strategy: bomb dammed Wall Street back to the Stone Age or at least the gold standard and give it back to the Manhattans, if they will have it.
There are a lot of silly comments on this thread. People writing here seem to be very pessimistic. Being pessimistic about racial issues implies that you accept the nurture explanation.
If you believe that environmental differences account for the racial differences in IQ and crime, then you should be pessimistic. The US and Europe have spent well over a trillion dollars in trying to eliminate those environmental differences in the last half century and virtually all those programs have utterly failed.
In 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was being debated Hubert Humphrey assured that there would never be racial preferences. He wasn't lying. He expected that the behavioral differences would just melt away and blacks would not need preferences. Enacting Affirmative Action (preferences for blacks) is evidence of the failure of the equality theory. Making the environment equal did not solve the problem of black under performance.
But as Hannity says, "Let not your heart be troubled". There is every reason to believe that the IQ gap between the races can be and will be solved.
The reason for hope and optimism is that IQ is largely genetic. We have failed to bridge the gap using environmental measures but we have barely begun to address genetic issues.
The genome is discrete or digital. It is not analog. This code can be deciphered. When I first read about IQ no one knew of any gene that had an effect on human smarts. Today there are at least a dozen genes known to have an influence on intelligence.
There have long been known to be vitamins and minerals that if abscent from your diet would make you dull. Soon we will be able to identify genetic deficiencies that keep your test scores low.
Someday not far off, the OBGYN will tell the black parents, "Like most black babies your child lacks appropriate levels of XYZ. We will just supplement those levels with a little routine genetic insertion. There is nothing to worry about".
There will of course be some political posturing but most black parents will welcome the chance to have a smart baby.
Vocational training plus. What's the plus? End no fault divorce, shame women who live on child support, glorify fatherhood and the intact family. Vocational training all by itself isn't enough. The boys need to be motivated and the girls need to motivate them.
LOL. So how long will we be apologizing for black failure?
We will have to apologize for black failure for as long as blacks are a failure.
In short, forever.
We'll you could no doubt increase the graduation rate from 20 out of 70 by chucking the lottery and picking top down by test scores and grades. You could put in an income cap and require parents to show 1040s.
"Even if you accept the 83-87 IQ average the HBD people are claiming for black Americans, it still means there are a number of smart black kids who are getting lousy educations because of their surroundings. Aren't these academies a decent way to identify and develop the talents of the talented tenth from the ghettos?"
The smart ones took advantage of government help and settled into cushy affirmative action jobs two generations ago.
What's the IQ of ghetto blacks?
Getting back to the article, I can't believe they are spending $35,000 per student. If they are going to spend that amount, why not just pay for these kids to attend private or catholic schools?
I am sure those schools are run better than the government school and tuition would be less. They would have to abandon the lottery system because private schools would not want to take the chance on accepting trouble makers.
I think they could select a 'talented tenth' and rescue those kids from the horrible D.C. schools. It would give the few kids with the intellectual tools a chance to get out of the disruptive schools and interact with kids from more stable backgrounds.
Steve, do you have any information on sex differences within races? European and Asian culture have traditionally kept the wife subordinate to the husband. Men have a will to dominate, and this is useful for monogamous marriages. Women, if not controlled, veer to abusive alphas, and men, if not controlling, are frustrated and lawless. I know that Lynn found that, by adulthood, men have IQs five points higher than women do, so it generally makes sense to have men rule the women.
In Africa, as you recently noted, there are tribes where women have more political power, so the men have to be effective fighters, entertainers and lovers to keep a woman's interest, because women there don't need bread-winners, with bountiful amounts of vegetation throughout the year. I've already read, by Thomas Sowell, that black women have higher IQs than black men.
There are a lot of correlates with race, such as blacks being more muscular and extraverted than Asians across, both among men and women. But within one race, are men and women different in a number of ways than they would be if they were another race?
Several people have suggested stopping importing cheap labor as a solution ...
They clearly do not realize that those people are not primarily imported for their cheap labor, but because they are consumers ...
There are powerful interest groups who want that to continue.
The genetic basis of IQ is unknown, and human genetic engineering of any trait remains a fantasy, much less done in a cost effective, safe and humane manner on something as broad as IQ. Therefore 'fixing' racial inequalities in IQ by engineering black people is not likely to be a short or medium term solution. Long term, it may be used to create a cognitive elite, but they will probably be east asian, not black, and might not even be sane.
"Start by ending “free trade” continue to close the “open borders”, and our society would be relatively well off in a few years. Nannies and gardeners would be less cheap. Oh the horror, oh the humanity."
Agreed. No use training a generation of factory workers and technicians when the powers that be have decided that manufacturing is too dirty and best left to the swarthy furriners.
-Vanilla Thunder
"Steve, do you have any information on sex differences within races? "
Thomas Sowell claims the avg IQ of black females is higher than that of black males.
at least 97 percent of SEED graduates are accepted to colleges, including Princeton, Alabama A&M and Connecticut College. And 90 percent of SEED graduates immediately enroll in college, compared with 56 percent of African-American high-school graduates nationally.
These numbers struck me, but maybe I'm misreading something. Assuming 20 of the 70 students initially chosen by lottery go on to graduate, and then 90% of those (18) attend college, this would mean 26% (18/70) of those originally chosen end up attending college. After taking into account the 80% black HS graduation rate, those who started the program were 10% less likely to attend college than those who were never part of the program!
Furthermore, 56% of black high school graduates attend college? Is this true? What is the rate for whites?
Boarding schools suck. My wife went to one her whole youth, and lost the culture. You're beaten if you speak your language. HOWEVER, until recently, boarding school grads were the successes and leaders for most tribes.
Since blacks don't really have a culture to lose, and everything to gain, it may now may be a good idea. Vocational educational is more crucial than anything else (regardless of skin color), I believe. Those few here who've disparaged it don't realize that those who don't find a job as a tool and die maker, for example, start their own shop. Sometimes skills are more important than measured intellect for societal well-being.
Neshobanakni
The 35k figure is high; but the proper comparison is to other boarding schools, not the average private day school.
I have no experience with boarding schools, so I would have to do a bit of digging to get an idea of what what typical fees would be, but it's obvious they would be more than the fees for a day school.
"The genetic basis of IQ is unknown, and human genetic engineering of any trait remains a fantasy, much less done in a cost effective, safe and humane manner on something as broad as IQ. Therefore 'fixing' racial inequalities in IQ by engineering black people is not likely to be a short or medium term solution. Long term, it may be used to create a cognitive elite, but they will probably be east asian, not black, and might not even be sane."
Genetic engineering isn't even required to improve the situation. Simply stop the perverse incentives of welfare.
If low-IQ teen girls were paid NOT to get pregnant, the total fertility rate of that population would decrease. (And long run, we taxpayers would save money not having to provide for the spawn when children and imprisoning them when adults.)
Test IQ on teen girls. If sub-100, she could come to a clinic, get a preg test. If neg, she gets a check. Return in 3 months. If neg, get a check. Continue until age 22, or even make it a sliding scale -- the lower the IQ the longer into adulthood the no-preg checks continue. We could, also, if we wish, provide free birth control.
Seems to me such a program could be politically viable if marketed as intended to "prevent teen pregnancy" and "prevent girls from dropping out of school" and leave the eugenics aspect unmentioned. If the IQ testing would create too much hullaballoo, direct the program to teen girls whose mothers were ever on welfare --call it "ending multigenerational welfare dependency." (Since low IQ is grossly overrepresented among welfare mothers, it would largely accomplish our purposes.)
What liberal could object? Even BO wants (dull) girls to stay in school.
I think the best first approach is not to try to do anything to poor blacks to fix them, because we (the US government, the opinion leaders of US society, academics in the social sciences and education, voters) are neither smart nor wise enough to do that sort of thing. We'll be lucky if the outcome is only as disastrous as subsidizing unwed motherhood or sticking Indian kids in prison-like boarding schools.
What we need to do is stop trying to use poor people, particularly poor minorities, as props in our inter-elite morality plays.
After that, we do what we know how to do. We run decent public schools--which can be done, because it has been done. We maintain public order--again, it's been done, so we know it can be done. If we're really ambitious, we find some way to fix our godawful welfare/child support system, which creates awful incentives for unwed parenthood and off-the-books employment.
Does anyone here advocating ending free trade have any training or reading modern economic theory or economic history?
Seriously, protectionism is universally regarded as counter productive by economists and most educated people, with very good reason.
Actually, the limited success of the SEED program only confirms what Sailer has been saying all along. And, SEED is unwittingly premised on NATURE as much as on NURTURE. After all, it implicits works on the notion that blacks CANNOT naturally govern themselves and must be guided by and brought up along the habits and manners of mostly non-blacks. In other words, since the NATURAL BLACK environment is hostile to progress and advancement, black kids must be ARTIFICIALLY brought up under a white-ish environment under firm discipline. After all, the problem isn't just the criminality and alcoholism among black parents. Even many decent black parents generally don't raise kids of high intellectual caliber.
So, even though NURTURE can make a difference, it's only because it must contend with NATURE that is undeniable. Sailer once said blacks are naturally more unruly in general and therefore need to be raised under stricter guidance and discipline. Indeed, one of the reason why blacks have done better in the military than in other organizations is not because the military has been particularly enlightened but because blacks who enter must say "YES SIR" and follow orders in order to rise up the hierarchy. Blacks who 'act up' get kicked out of the military. So, the limited success of SEED confirms what Sailer has said all along. For blacks to succeed more than they are doing now, there needs to be stronger artificial or NURTURE factors to counter the more problematic NATURE of blacks. Question is, can we do this for ALL black kids? No. And once blacks are out of the strict NURTURE environment, there is a chance that the call of nature will make them revert to their original nature.
The 35k figure is high; but the proper comparison is to other boarding schools, not the average private day school.
That's about what you'd pay at the top New England boarding schools. Boarding Students pay $36,500 at Phillips Exeter.
"Several people have suggested stopping importing cheap labor as a solution ...
They clearly do not realize that those people are not primarily imported for their cheap labor, but because they are consumers ..."
Nonsense. They are imported primarily for their cheap labor, for jobs that can't be outsourced. You don't need to import consumers; you can export to them.
"Seriously, protectionism is universally regarded as counter productive by economists and most educated people, with very good reason."
The "good reason" is that economists tend to be tenured professors whose jobs aren't vulnerable to outsourcing or to the importation of cheap labor. Seriously though, this isn't a black-or-white issue. Protectionism of sorts has been crucial to the development of some economies -- it depends on the context and the country's stage of development. Protectionism certainly played a role in the growth of Japan's post-WWII economy.
More broadly though, current policies of unlimited outsourcing combined with unlimited, unskilled immigration are an 'epic fail', as the kids say. Most mainstream economists and pundits haven't proposed policies that would be effective in addressing the challenges of globalization. Protectionism may not be the best answer either, but economists can't expect regular folks to reject it out of hand when the economists haven't proposed any viable solutions of their own.
One thing that seems clear to me, looking from AUS although a fairly long time traveller in the US, is that African-Americans seem to thrive best in an environment of institutional authority. That is, organizations where old-time, strict patriarchal values are strongly held and enforced. Such as the Armed Forces, Churches and traditional sports teams.
The best African-American role models seem to be drawn from such traditional conservative environments, such as General Powell and Rev Martin Luther King. God-fearing, law-abiding, family-valuing folk.
But of course post-modern liberals, in their infinite stupidity, have done their level best to discredit such institutions. So African-American youth can now model themselves on freedom-loving Puff Daddy, Don King and other such charmers.
I despise the mutant brand of liberalism that we now have to put up with.
"Does anyone here advocating ending free trade have any training or reading modern economic theory or economic history?"
Economics is not a science any more than psychology and astrology are. It's a bunch of political opinions dishonestly disguised with math-like nonsense. 90% of the male population have some political opinions. If you think that yours and mine are less valid than Krugman's just because Krugman is an authority on the soft pseudo-science of economics, then you're wrong. We should save that kind of respect for people who are involved in the hard sciences.
You mentioned history. My reading of history suggests that protectionism is good.
Summer vacation to be abolished; and school days lengthened
Maybe this would be good for BLACK students, but for ALL students?
Given how schools are run and what is (isn't) taught, the best people should be homeschooled or not be in school at all.
Several times, I've posted the story from Obama's book about the older black residents of a Chicago housing project who get sentimantal whem remembering their life in the Jim Crow South. Southern paternalism was real and, though it will never be admitted by anyone publcally, more humane than the combination of the welfare state and big city machine politics that blacks faced in the north. But any noble obligesse that existed 40 years ago among southern whites is gone now. Every time our "first black president" supports policies that harm the middle class, whites are further estranged from the black population, who almost unanimously voted for Obama. In fact, why shouldn't whites support policies that deliberating harm blacks? It's a war of all against all.
"Seriously, protectionism is universally regarded as counter productive by economists and most educated people, with very good reason"
Um hmm.
And economists and most educated people believed that spiralling home prices were GOOD for the economy.
If anything, becoming educated makes people susceptible to "groupthink" due to their desire for status.
The only people who make any money in the stock market are contrarians, more commonly known as "nutcases" and "crackpots."
Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds."
Paul Craig Roberts has got it right. "Free trade" with overpopulated countries full of desperate people who are willing (or have no choice) to work for slave wages 16 hours a day in dangerous, dirty conditions gives the slave-labor countries NOT "comparative advantage" but ABSOLUTE advantage.
Free trade can only equalize the world down to the lowest possible living standards. I'll pass on the cheap toasters and do my own gardening, instead, thanks.
"Anonymous said...
Seriously, protectionism is universally regarded as counter productive by economists and most educated people, with very good reason."
Seriously, economists are regarded as counter productive by most thinking people, with very good reason.
"Anonymous said...
Seriously, protectionism is universally regarded as counter productive by economists and most educated people, with very good reason."
Seriously, economists are regarded as counter productive by most thinking people, and with very good reason.
The answer is selective apartheid. Homelands would be created that are physically separated from the rest of society – a little like the Gaza strip but hopefully with a little more real estate between it and good society. Entry would be by either criminal activity or failure in school – and would be permanent. Children born there would have the right to request transfer to good society for trial runs but only after passing certain minimum IQ tests. Any do-gooders would have the right to enter to help whoever they wish although no back-up would come if they got into trouble.
The habitants of these homelands would be provided with food (airdrops) and water. The rest is up to them. They would have the right to ask help from do-gooder groups to for example set up a primitive hospital but we all know how long that would last.
The homelands would provide society with a one way filter system to weed out the bad seed. Race would play no part in the criteria for selection although a cynic would guess that certain races would tend to predominate over time.
What to do with them? Criminalize every method they have of earning a living, raise the minimum wage, educate them as mental invalids, sensationalize their exceptional aptitudes and loudly bewail their generalized failure as the responsibility of some other group.
Like Homer tells Bart, "if at first you don't succeed, then just stop trying."
Homer is a Democrat/Progressive/Statist. He should be an Obama Czar.
Do you ever worry about repeating yourself Steve? We get it. Black people are dumber and you're the only one who knows it. That's about all you say. No matter how true it is, it gets old.
"African-Americans seem to thrive best in an environment of institutional authority. That is, organizations where old-time, strict patriarchal values are strongly held and enforced. Such as the Armed Forces, Churches and traditional sports teams."
Amen, so do most children.
leaving the Australian policies aside, I really wonder about the validity of what people are saying here about Native Americans from boarding schools. On the face of it, this sounds (or maybe "sounded") like a great idea that would have allowed them to integrate into the (back then) functional, productive and affluent white society. Now, here is a subversive thought - could it be that a lot of the boarding school grads actually did very well and assimilated, while leaving a loser remnant to get drunk on reservations and bitch about cultural genocide? I fully appreciate that this is a question that demands and affords a straightforward statistical answer. Well, it would be interesting to know one way or the other.
No matter how well the kids turn out, you cannot defend the $35,000 price tag. Spending that kind of money on smart kids would be questionable since you could probably get similar results for a mere fraction of that, but spending it on the marginally educable is egregious.
Anon:
I think the good argument here (not the ones discarding all of economics as nonsense) involves the distributive effects of free trade (and even more of immigration). Specifically, the argument is that free trade with China and Mexico shrinks the demand for low-IQ labor--the new jobs created by the greater wealth produced by free trade mostly either aren't things the low-IQ folks can do, or they're worse jobs (less well-paid, harder, etc.)
The same basic thing seems likely for immigration. The country as a whole gets richer, but the people at the bottom are priced out of the market for unskilled labor.
Do you ever worry about repeating yourself Steve? We get it. Black people are dumber and you're the only one who knows it. That's about all you say. No matter how true it is, it gets old.
Not nearly as repetitive as "white racism" and as the catch-all excuse.
"Do you ever worry about repeating yourself Steve? We get it. Black people are dumber and you're the only one who knows it. That's about all you say. No matter how true it is, it gets old."
No doubt you chide the liberals for repeatedly claiming that innate intelligence is evenly distributed among all racial and ethnic groups.
In 2002 I was on a BART platform in Berkeley listening to a young guy with that typical Jewish-liberal look (kind of like Elaine's marxist boyfriend in "Seinfeld") talking on a pay phone. He was apopletic, ranting about "little monsters." When he got off I chatted him up, and it turned out he was substitute teaching in a public middle school full of black kids. He described the daily scene as insane, lacking any semblance of order.
I assume that one reason the same people who support SEED chide the Australians for doing the same thing is that they'll make sure that SEED is administered by a carefully racially selected group, with a high number of black liberals. That way they can say it's not whites raising black kids to be white.
I think it's the "and you're the only one who knows it" part, that she finds particularly disagreeable.
Achievement gaps narrowing in US schools since No Child Left Behind
"...Also, Ms. Kober points out, different methodology can change the results. The study focuses on the percentage of students who have reached the 'proficient' level, since that's the level that the No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes. But when the researchers looked at the gaps between average test scores for all groups, the results were 'still positive, but a little less rosy,' she says...."
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