From the Washington Post:
Many in U.S. slip from middle class, study finds
By Michael A. Fletcher,
Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.
... The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.
People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. ...
Overall, African American men have a particularly hard time clinging to middle-class status. Thirty-eight percent of black men who grew up middle-class are downwardly mobile, nearly double the rate of white men, the report says. Hispanic men are slightly more likely than white males to fall down the economic ladder, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Among African Americans and Hispanics, men are more likely to slip than women, although the reverse is true among whites.
The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults. That report underscored the feeble grip many African Americans had on middle-class life, prompting researchers to probe deeper, said Erin Currier, project manager of Pew’s Economic Mobility Project.
The new report called the performance of blacks on a key standardized test a factor that accounts for virtually the entire mobility gap separating the races. Black males scored much lower than white males on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures reading comprehension, vocabulary and math ability.
“Taking into account differences in AFQT scores between middle-class white and black men reduces the gap until it is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the report said.
The findings in the report are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979.
Hmmhmmhhhh ... AFQT scores ... the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ... Where have I heard all this before?
The Atlantic Magazine article, "Can We Save the Middle Class," which may have drawn from the same study, found that high school graduates and high school dropouts are most likely to drop out of the middle class. These are the groups that most immigrants compete against for jobs.
ReplyDeleteHow can a reporter of reasonable intelligence report this and not reference The Bell Curve? Amazing!
ReplyDeleteFrom the linked article:
ReplyDelete"The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults. That report underscored the feeble grip many African Americans had on middle-class life, prompting researchers to probe deeper, said Erin Currier, project manager of Pew’s Economic Mobility Project."
Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard...
"That RACIST!"
ReplyDeleteNot "That is racist"
..who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs.
ReplyDeleteOr who got lousy grades in law school.
“Taking into account differences in AFQT scores between middle-class white and black men reduces the gap until it is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the report said.
ReplyDeleteThe very fact that this sentence appeared in a Pew report, and then was repeated in a Washington Post piece, is utterly astonishing.
What it shows is that, among other things, EVERYONE [who is anyone] knows EXACTLY what we are dealing with here.
And the fact that the sentence [and the idea behind the sentence] made its way through both the Pew censorship and the Washington Post censorship shows that even the most staunchly libtarded of nihilists can't keep up the charade any longer.
EVERYONE can see the writing on the wall now - EVERYONE [both human AND libtard] knows that we have an absolutely catastrophic mess on our hands as regards this burgeoning demographic fiasco of ours.
And now the wall of silence has finally been breached...
The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults.
ReplyDeleteRegression to the African mean as blacks no longer feel pressured to conform to European standards.
Jonas Salk said the following:
ReplyDelete"When you're arguing for an unpopular idea, there are three stages of truth. First, your opponents say it can't be true. Next they say if it's true, it can't be very important. Finally they say well, we've known it all along."
It's nice to see Charles Murray making their much-deserved ascent into the third stage.
His name will still be a swear word for another twenty years, though. That's just the way these things work. There's no crime the establishment punishes more mercilessly than contradiction.
Kylie, please explain.
ReplyDeleteThanks
"People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents."
ReplyDeleteSo two of the three metrics here are how people performed relative to other people. The obvious corollary, then, is that for everyone who falls in relative standing someone else has to rise. (More or less. If there are family size differences, this could mean it's not exact.) More downward mobility, relatively defined, means more upward mobility. How does upward mobility vary by racial/ethnic group? What characteristics are associated with upward mobility? It's incomplete to talk about one half of this without mentioning the other.
Using hard drugs and having a broken home . . .
ReplyDeleteAlmost enough to make you find religion. Hedonism is an expensive lifestyle.
It'd be interesting to see what the differences are for drug use/broken homes based on race. My gut tells me that whites are somewhat more insulated from their poor choices than blacks, for whatever unfair reason.
One can be below middle class and still lead a good decent safe life... if a community is crime free.
ReplyDeleteI don't mind the poor class, and I've known plenty of poor people--generally white, hispanic, and aisan/muslim immigrants--who were nice people.
So falling from middle class per se isn't as disastrous. The problem is getting stuck in areas that are crime-oriented and CRAZY and they happen to be black.
Also, middle class or not, what passes for 'poor' in america isn't really poor. A lot of Polish immigrnats tell me Poles with a lot less during communism lived more sanely than 'poor' Americans with lot more.
Pew Perplexed? Calling Dr "Regression to the Mean" for two populations with different means.
ReplyDeleteRobert Hume
Regression to the mean is mean to blacks.
ReplyDeleteThe new report called the performance of blacks on a key standardized test a factor that accounts for virtually the entire mobility gap separating the races. Black males scored much lower than white males on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures reading comprehension, vocabulary and math ability.
ReplyDeleteKind of odd for WaPo to print this since race is a social construct and IQ tests are fundamentally flawed. How did this paragraph ever make it by an editor? Has newsroom employment been so decimated that junior reporters are allowed to discuss matters of race without supervision?
Now all we need is for some up-and-comer journalist to put two and two together and figure out what jobs middle class, two parent black families were doing a generation ago - and who's doing those jobs now.
I'm not going to bother reading the article, but I'll bet the phrase "reversion to the mean" never occurs.
ReplyDeleteYes, if not for massive legal and illegal immigration I wonder how many of these AA's would have stayed in the "Middle class"?
ReplyDeleteAA's are- and always have been - political idiots. That's why the Jews love them.
If they had any brains AA's would be 110 percent against immigration. But of course they're not. They *hearts* illegal immigration.
The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew
ReplyDeleteLOL. Some things are just too mysterious to be understood by mere mortals.
And this can all be readily explained by regression to the mean but that would mean acknowledging the 1 sd difference between average black and white scores on measures of intelligence!
ReplyDeleteEven if The Bell Curve never had a chapter 13 it would still rank as one of the most illuminating and prescient books I ever read...15 years on and you're still not supposed to mention this book in mainstream academia or media, amazing!
ReplyDeleteThe racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew
ReplyDeleteMeet Erin Currier (pretty!), one of Pew's puzzled researchers. She has all the education necessary - a master's degree in Women's Studies and Public Policy from George Washington University. But the puzzle is simply too hard. Clearly not meant to be solved.
Okay, I see that my knee-jerk reaction toward Pew folks was inapproriate. The entire Pew Report uses AFQT simply as a synonym for IQ, allowing to never mention the cursed acronym. And here is part of its Conclusion section: "The findings presented here raise several important questions for future research. Because AFQT scores explain a large portion of the black-white difference in downward intergenerational mobility, it is important to better understand why AFQT scores differ so substantially,
ReplyDeleteeven among youth raised in middle class families." Maybe they should simply give it another twenty years, then ask the question again. And again.
Col. Reb Sez said:
ReplyDelete"How can a reporter of reasonable intelligence report this and not reference The Bell Curve? Amazing!"
Assuming a reporter of reasonable intelligence has a mortgage to pay and kids to feed, how could he mention The Bell Curve? You'd have to put a gun to my head to get me to publicly state something as blatantly obvious as, "Most ghetto parents couldn't care less about their children's education" or "The majority of the low income black children have such extreme behavior problems that even the most respected teachers can't create a classroom environment comparable to that without such children, and that is why we will never persuade the neighborhood hipsters to send their kids to our school." At staff meetings we just nod, agree that it's possible to make all children succeed and vow to do better by our students. If we don't comply, we WILL get surplussed, if not fired (Yes, a teacher can get fired for willful racism. Otherwise, tenured teachers are such well protected union workers that we can't get fired, only surplussed. That means we get to enjoy an awesome unpaid, indefinite vacation, and as soon as someone in the district needs our services again, 2, 5, 10 years down the line, they'll be sure to call us!) A lot of us grew up in liberal environments, and we didn't realize that our chosen careers would require blatant dishonesty. And then, it's too late. There are loans to be paid back and other responsibilities.
How are people at the 30th percentile of income and who have no education beyond high school "middle class"?
ReplyDeleteWhy pretend that the working class doesn't exist, when it is working class people who are suffering the most from the social changes of the last few decades?
To borrow what Danny Bonaduce said about teenagers, sneakers and birth control, when white folks say they need government jobs, it means they want government jobs.
ReplyDeleteWhen black folks say they need government jobs, they need government jobs.
Those confused by Kylie's [and Steve's] reference can 'brush up their Shakespeare' here.
ReplyDelete"Kylie, please explain.
ReplyDeleteThanks"
You mean explain this?
"'The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults. That report underscored the feeble grip many African Americans had on middle-class life, prompting researchers to probe deeper, said Erin Currier, project manager of Pew’s Economic Mobility Project.'
Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard..."
Well, if researchers really are "perplexed" by this phenomenon, they might as well call the Three Stooges to explain it to them since they obviously aren't prepared to listen to anything science has to say.
Just for fun:
Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard AKA Men in Black
I think Murray may have laughed for 12 hours or so after reading that one. You know what was so funny about the Bell Curve release? Initially, the NYT Book Review actually gave it a good review. But then a bunch of academics and intellectuals realized that " Hey, wait a second, we are the new establishment, we don't have to accept this, we run the universities, the media, the entertainment industry, we get to decide what is true and what isn't. " And just like that, The Bell Curve went grudging praise, to being classified as "unscientific" and "pseudo-scientific" and then Diamond wrote his rebuttal, which didn't even have the pretense of being objective and duly got it's author the Pulitzer Prize.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that link, Nanonymous.
ReplyDeleteThis is slightly off-topic, but can you believe that Pew Foundation spokeswoman's voice? She sounds like a nasally-occluded 12-year-old.
I've lived outside the USA for 20 years: is this really what (presumably) well-educated young women sound like now?
Middle class, schmiddle class.
ReplyDeleteI'd assumed we'd all tweet ourselves to wealth and fortune.
In fact, as befitting his status as a leading thinker, Mr Sailer ought to be in the vanguard (if it's not too late for that) here as well, and start tweeting -- or is it twittering? -- his ruminations, pontifications, etc to the twitterverse.
Yes Steve, exactly right.
ReplyDeleteIncome distribution is a function of IQ distribution.
Despite the screams and lies of the left there is no dispute about this, it is an incontrovetible truth.(On a side-note, everything the left espouses is either just plain stupid or wrong and most likely both).
Anyhow, we should view this income assortment due to IQ as Darwinian in nature, with IQ being the measure of fitness instead of brute strenght or hunting prowess, for example.
The only fly in the ointment is that the low income unfit are , contrary to the theory, the main breeders.
I remember reading somewhere that the IQ scores of children of the poorest and lowest status whites were higher than that of the children of the highest income and highest status blacks.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading somewhere that the IQ scores of children of the poorest and lowest status whites were higher than that of the children of the highest income and highest status blacks.
ReplyDeleteSTANDARDIZED TESTS: THE INTERPRETATION OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC GAPS
From the link:
Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.
Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.
Note: The SAT is probably best characterized as an achievement test that correlates well with IQ.
There's also this recent paper that looked at upward mobility, concluding that "blacks experience much less upward mobility across generations than whites... most of this gap can be accounted for by differences in cognitive skills [=AFQT] during adolescence."
ReplyDeleteI suppose this is a good place and time to plug freely downloadable audio files of Charles Murray reading from The Bell Curve. Two hours worth of reading in total.
ReplyDeleteImpressive diction!
"can you believe that Pew Foundation spokeswoman's voice? She sounds like a nasally-occluded 12-year-old."
ReplyDeleteAw, c'mon! America discovers answer to insomnia.
nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults.
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming regression to the mean with the lauding of pop trash culture as a helpful boost along the way.
Can you imagine how ugly these numbers would be if NAMs we not overrepresented in all levels of government employment?
ReplyDeleteUsing hard drugs and having a broken home . . .
ReplyDeleteAlmost enough to make you find religion. Hedonism is an expensive lifestyle.
It'd be interesting to see what the differences are for drug use/broken homes based on race. My gut tells me that whites are somewhat more insulated from their poor choices than blacks, for whatever unfair reason.
With regards to drugs, I wonder what happens if you look at abusing prescription pills. I love vicodin and valium, but wouldn't do coke or heroin because there would be no way to be certain I can manage my dosage. Anyone who abuses the latter is taking a dumb risk. I go to an elite university...
Arghh! Reversion toward the mean, fools!
ReplyDelete"...when white folks say they need government jobs, it means they want government jobs.
ReplyDeleteWhen black folks say they need government jobs, they need government jobs."
I'd say it's more a case of when black folks say they need government jobs, they need government hand-outs.
Like so much of the vocabulary the left insists we all use re blacks, "jobs" is a euphemism.
PC is like the movie LADY VANISHES. The young woman knows for sure that the old woman who got on the train with her is missing, but people around her tell her the old woman never existed, never got on the train, and etc. They tell the young women that she is mentally unstable, imagining things, hysterical, obsessed over nothing, pathological, and etc. Then, a psychologist on the train diagnoses her memory as a kind of hallucination.
ReplyDeleteWe are on the train of history driven by people with an agenda, and they are telling us lies. And many people on the train have been recruited to spread lies while other passengers go along with the charade out of fear, convenience, or having been brainwashed themselves.
So, who hijacked the train that was built by our people. And where is this train headed?
Truth Vanishes is the movie of our time.
ReplyDeleteEasy. 1968 was the point when Jesse Jackson took over the leadership of black culture.
ReplyDeleteBefore Jesse, blacks aimed at becoming middle-class Americans, and were making considerable progress in that direction.
After Jesse, the goal of black culture is criminality and dependence on government, and they've made considerable progress in that direction.
"The Atlantic Magazine article, "Can We Save the Middle Class," which may have drawn from the same study, found that high school graduates and high school dropouts are most likely to drop out of the middle class. These are the groups that most immigrants compete against for jobs."
ReplyDeleteImmigrants the new middle class? Should it be called the immiddle class? Or immiggle class?
In a way, it's very American. Upward and downward mobility. No position is assured. Wasp were the elites, but Jews pushed them down. In fact, fall from wasps from the top of the ladder is the great story we don't hear much about since it would mean Jews took over.
What happened to wasps on top may be happening to whites and blacks in the middle. They too are slipping in the competition against hungrier immigrant groups.
Complacency takes away the fighting spirit, and generations of American middle class since end of WWII got to thinking that good stuff--good jobs, trust funds, government programs, easy credit, etc--will be awaiting them no matter what they do.
How the West was Bust.
ReplyDeleteImagine America in the 19th century. There's lots of land to til, crops to harvest, homes to build, churches to erect, etc, etc. Imagine today's American transported to that time. He or she would be standing around, whining, 'where is my free healthcare, where is my free housing, where is my cellphone, where is my free college education, where is free blah blah blah???!!! They are RIGHTS and I want them NOW!!!'
ReplyDeleteWith such spoiled clods, America never would have been built in the first place.
The Stamper family in SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION, though no bunch of saints, sure had what it takes. Now, it's about 'what I can take'.
A good portion of the racial gap in the rate at which people fall from the middle to the bottom income percentiles can probably be attributed to the effects of Affirmative Action on income distribution. Affirmative Action has placed large numbers of blacks, perhaps 10% of the total, into the middle class, who otherwise wouldn't be there on the basis of skills. Affirmative Action is sort of like a lottery with a very big payoff, but unlike the Megamillions lottery, there are a very large number of winners. Think of public sector jobs, many of which pay above $30/hour to people with at best marginal literacy and numeracy. Discrimination in hiring for these coveted public sector jobs has placed a large swath of America's low-IQ black population far above their low-IQ black peers who have been unlucky enough not to win the lottery and so work in the private sector or not at all. These unlucky peers have a similar level of skill but they often earn two or three times less than the lottery winners. Unless the offspring of the middle class lottery winners are also lucky enough to win the lottery, they are likely to experience the fall described in the report. By the same token, though, you are likely to find this fall somewhat offset by the rise of Affirmative Action lottery winners whose parents were poor workers or on welfare.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe they actually mentioned IQ (albeit in a roundabout and indirect way) in discussing the greater tendency for blacks to fall out of the middle class than whites. That sounds like one of those "Thing which must not be said" in the MSM.
ReplyDeleteAlfonzo,
ReplyDeleteSome those who got lousy grades in law school were already out of the middle class to begin with.
How does someone with lousy grades get in law school? If they were lousy students to begin with why were they let in, if they were not lousy students why did they get lousy grades?
I think you missed the point entirely.
"...who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs".
Are symptoms of lower IQ in general. If someone with an aptitude or work ethic disposed to not attend college (low GPA) or do poorly on standardized tests (IQ test, SAT, LSAT, ect) gets into to law school, the problem is not the "Law Student" but rather the shameless avarcious TTT "Law School" that would admit such an unsophisticated person.
If they were capable students to begin with, I.E. good GPA ,an indication of good work ethic. A good lsat, an indication of good aptitude/IQ. In this case the fault lies entirely with the student for being perceived as a racis’ homophobic chauvinist anti-semitic closet case.
Tell me you are law student/lawyer… wow teach us all to “think” like a lawyer!
Signed:
"racis' homophobe": society's new n-word k-word q-word
"Affirmative Action is sort of like a lottery with a very big payoff"
ReplyDeleteA lottocracy?
Re: Col. Reb Sez
ReplyDelete"How can a reporter of reasonable intelligence reportthis and not reference 'The Bell Curve'.?
It's a skill of strategic amnesia demonstrated and imparted by university professors, especially in pschology, history, sociology,
hue-manities, etc. There are psychology graduate students who have never heard the names Jensen, Eysenck, Lynn, Brand, et al. mentioned in class from the time they "graduated" from hi skool. They endure every anti- rrrrracist rant coming their way without ever realizing that John R. Baker's RACE was ever written.
These days, if you pick the right partner, you'll learn lots more across the pillow within a torrid campus love affair than you'll learn from the lectern--the moreso if it's the lecturer you have with you there in bed.
Yes, having a low IQ, getting divorced, drug addiction, and not finishing school can lead one into ruin.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, of all those metrics, low IQ is the least harmfjul according to the study. Which seems to indicate that even a dumb person can climb into the middle class if they behave themselves.
JBL "Even if the BELL CURVE never had a Chapter 13...you're still not supposed to mention this book in mainstream academia or media..."
ReplyDeleteMaya: "We didn't realize our chosen careers would require blatant dishonesty..."
At the time TBC was published, a very glaring omission re the chapter on racial differences in IQ, was the omission of mention or citation of the late Prof. John R. Baker's great book, RACE (Oxford University Press, UK, 1974/reprinted 1981 in the US) But the two authors of TBC and their brilliant chief editor had very complicated waters awaiting their navigation . The glaring omission was probably fully justified and prudent. The 1974 edition was not kept in print by OUP even if sales were robust. TBC has been out of print even though it would have a steady sales potential. Great Books cut short.
@ Anonymous 9/7/11 6:12 PM
ReplyDeleteI'm not following. How does the AA's being "political idiots" benefit jews?
"The Bell Curve...classified as
ReplyDelete"unscientific" or "pseudo-science"
Yes, given the brilliance and clarity of the book, it is notable how many bright persons uncontaminated by any extensive course work in psychology--e.g.,
lawyers, accountants, engineers, MD's, etc.--were unabashed in their admiration until some social science graduate at the Country Club or bridge club or community symphony told them of the smear reviews in the prestige media. Even then, it is a tribute to human steadfastness how many continue to support the book on its merits. One lawyer told me that a law professor had proposed using the book in a first-year course as an example of clarity of exposition and thought and keen use of evidence--only to be told from on high that it would be "imprudent".