It’s Too Late Now

If you want to read a sad article you might want to check out this one at Atlantic, “Unemployment: The All-but-Certain Fate of Too Many Poor Black Boys”. Here’s a snippet:

To investigate the impact of parental income and neighborhood choice on children, Chetty and his fellow researchers looked at data from the IRS from 1996 to 2012 to determine a sample of Americans’ household incomes and locations. After tracking the eventual wages, college-attendance rates, and employment of these parent’s children, Chetty and his colleagues found that by and large, poor children become poor adults, and rich children become rich adults. Also, kids from middle-and upper income families were more likely than kids from poor families to be employed as adults.

But the outcomes are significantly worse for poor black boys. Girls from poor families are more likely to find work and to get further in school than boys who grew up in similar circumstances. The researchers detected a similar gender gap among poor children who grew up in single-parent households, but of all the variables tested, growing up in concentrated poverty and growing up in an area that was predominately black were the strongest predictors of adult male unemployment.

The malign stew of indifference, historical racism, bad choices throughout an entire culture, and mass immigration have put young black men in a box from which I don’t see the way to extricate them.

11 comments… add one
  • Modulo Myself Link

    Moynihan mentioned black culture being out of necessity matriarchal, and how this was/is deeply in conflict with white culture, which is strongly patriarchal. At the basic level of showing up, I imagine it’s very hard to show up for work if you’re a man and unable to fit in or totally understand what your role is.

  • Guarneri Link

    I think the article and research would carry more weight if they drove to ground the cause of the gender discrepancy. Indifference, historical racism, bad choices and immigration all apply to girls as well as boys. Maybe it’s just semantics, and falls under bad choices, but encouraging unrealistic aspirations to stardom in sports or entertainment to the exclusion of education, or the get rich quick gang option fueled by drug prohibition must have something to do with it.

    Immigration is one of the great vexing problems of our time. I’m just the messenger in pointing out that there are consumers who benefit from immigration, and that despite claims to the contrary, consumers will make buying decisions based upon price, and by inference business price competition. Owners and managers who do not adapt to that fail in their obligations to capital providers and other employees, as they will perish.

  • Maybe it’s just semantics, and falls under bad choices, but encouraging unrealistic aspirations to stardom in sports or entertainment to the exclusion of education, or the get rich quick gang option fueled by drug prohibition must have something to do with it.

    My mom, who’d spent a great deal of her professional life teaching black kids, said that the exposure of kids in the black community to the variety of different jobs is extremely limited. They know about rap music moguls, professional athletes, police officers, and what she characterized as “cats”. A different word may be used now. No accountants, salesman, engineers, architects, etc.

    A lot of young black men end up as cats because that’s the only alternative they know about.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    My mom, who’d spent a great deal of her professional life teaching black kids, said that the exposure of kids in the black community to the variety of different jobs is extremely limited. They know about rap music moguls, professional athletes, police officers, and what she characterized as “cats”. A different word may be used now. No accountants, salesman, engineers, architects, etc.

    They probably see a lot of the working poor. Women who were on their feet all day, struggling to get down the sidewalk. Fatigued men who work for UPS or city transit or as clerks at some chain store.

    Being poor is hard. Being an athlete or a hip-hop star is like an endless teenage fantasy. Salesmen, accountants, architects–imagine selling middle-class labor through an endless slideshow of office drudgery, Excel, bad lighting, meetings, and bearable tedium.

  • Guarneri Link

    “A lot of young black men end up as cats because that’s the only alternative they know about.”

    It’s not my experience, but let’s simply stipulate that it’s true. That, then, would be the line of academic inquiry and I suspect it would lead to the issue of lack of male role models in the home.

  • steve Link

    Lack of male role models hurts, but there are a lot of other things. Lack of adequate health care has been shown to lead to worse outcomes. Lack of basic safety and security. More exposure to harmful environmental toxins, including lead. Unequal enforcement of the law, especially drug laws. I suspect the lack of the male role model may dominate those others, but have never seen it quantified and don’t know.

    Steve

  • michael reynolds Link

    We’re going to need a national guaranteed income. It’s not just going to be black kids, it’s going to be lots of people’s kids.

  • Gray Shambler Link

    I remember Abraham Lincoln, when asked what would the freed slaves DO? He replied, “root, hog, or die.”

  • Michael, I feel confident in predicting that the United States will not have a guaranteed annual income for the foreseeable future. Unlike Denmark, Norway, Sweden, or Finland, all countries with Lutheran cultures (even if most people no longer practice), high levels of homogeneity, and strong social cohesion might be able to manage one but not the U. S.

    A little back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a guaranteed annual income of $30,000 in the U. S. would have a potential cost just south of $10 trillion. U. S. GDP is around $17 trillion. Obvious issues.

    I would also speculate that in the U. S. a guaranteed annual income would not have the result of enabling people to live but of increasing the prices of necessities enough that the guaranteed annual income would be too low.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Dave:

    Pretty sure we wouldn’t try to do it by giving every man, woman and child $30,000 so that a family of four would be making 120k. That would be nuts. The numbers become rather more manageable if we look at it as a floor under the needy. Say, more like 40 grand for maybe 30 million families, families otherwise unable to earn a living. Most of us won’t need it, and unless you think large numbers of folks will go from consuming 0 dollars in commodities to consuming a lot, I think concerns about rising prices would be minimal.

    We need to put a floor under the lower economic classes or we’ll have revolution.

  • Pretty sure the number of needy families will spike if we institute a guaranteed annual income.

    The number I threw out was intended as the maximum cost. What would be the likely cost? I think we’d be amazed at how many families were suddenly earning below $40,000 if we instituted a minimum annual income of $40,000 for a family. Rather than assuming no increase in the number of families earning below $40,000 (as your 30 million figure does), let’s assume a modest increase in that baseline figure to, say, 50 million families. 50 million X $40,000 = $2 trillion (since we’re now calculating on a family basis rather than an individual one).

    Total revenue from income taxes in 2015 was about $3 trillion. I don’t think that borrowing (or issuing credit to ourselves) for operating expenses is a good idea so theoretically we’d need to increase revenues by 65% to pay for it. How do you plan to do that? IMO you’d need to double the marginal tax rates without lowering the effective tax rates. How will you accomplish that?

    Sounds like a hard sell politically to me.

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