To save time I'm going to cherry pick a few comments to respond to. I apologize if I didn't get to everything (it doesn't mean I agree with you. ;D ;D ). .
There seems to be a higher fraction of unwed black mothers, but yes an uptick in out of wedlock births has crossed all demographics. This is another cultural shift that can probably be traced back to media presenting it as OK. I recall the uproar over a TV show Murphy Brown where back in the early '90s the lead character got pregnant and decided to have the baby herself. TV shows and movies are a powerful force to influence modern culture. That is just one example and there are more. A second factor influencing the breakdown of the nuclear family, is government support sometimes including housing allowances that can make it too easy for a pregnant girl to escape her family structure. Not always a bad thing with the poor parenting many experience, but not like the good old days when several generations lived in the same house and there was so much more private support. I will avoid the conspiracy theories, insert your favorites here.
If we allow the vast majority of the public to be productive we can create more than enough wealth to support the small fraction who will always be incapable of supporting themselves. The problem comes when we try to have government manage the entire private economy as this hurts productivity and reduces wealth creation, making it literally impossible to help all in need. We have seen this play out around the world with unfortunate consequences for a number of countries.
Now i'm surely repeating myself. Racism has been ingrained into our culture over a couple centuries. You do not flip a switch and change peoples belief systems overnight. In my lifetime i have seen HUGE advances and more recently I perceive a reversal in that progress due to politicians and an industry of pundits that draw power from racial conflict so stir it up.
I have an adult neighbor that I know I can not change, while i can stop his abusive language at least when I am around. That said I see a completely different attitude and awareness in the young, who have grown up in desegregated schools, with the worst abuses prevented by law.
I really miss my weekly basketball game that i had to stop because of my bad knee. It was my regular interaction with young black kids, and after they overcame the shock of playing ball with an old white guy, i became just another player on the court (a weaker, slower player, but with skills). These days my more common interaction is from kids dumping litter in my yard.
We need to take a breath and show a little patience. The culture of race relations evolves over generations, not election cycles. It is better today than it was a decade ago, and I expect it to be better a decade from now, if the politicians shut up and stop stirring the pot for personal gain by inflaming the public.
People seem to forget what happens when the government tried to help them. Look at the housing crisis. In a classic case of politicians thinking if home ownership correlates with better outcomes, lets put everybody into a house. The government supported and almost mandated too-easy mortgage lending standards that greedy bankers were all to happy to play along with, at least while the music was playing. Economic theory predicts what will happen with unlimited credit as more money chases a finite number of homes. For a while everything goes up, and people started flipping houses for profit pushing the prices higher. People bought houses they couldn't afford, with mortgages they didn't think they would ever have to pay back because of increasing prices. Of course prices never go all the way up to the sky so eventually the music stopped.
At the end of 2014 there were still more than 8 million homeowners underwater, and 35% have less than 20% equity in the homes. I recall when we had to have 20% down to buy a home. A free market way to resolve this, while painful, would have been to recognize all the non-performing mortgages as what they were (worthless). People would have had to leave the houses they couldn't afford and move into more appropriate housing they could afford. It would have been a massive disruption short term, but then with a rational housing market we would have recovered to a more normal growth rate too.
While we talk a lot about income inequality I suspect a lot of low income people lost all or most of their modest nest eggs in that "government help" inspired debacle.
In a similar vein the government saw a correlation between college education and better outcomes, so decided to wave the magic government wand to increase education lending to all who wanted. As before this confuses "what is" with what looks like "it is". Education is indeed a path to higher earnings, but that doesn't come from just showing up and getting the degree, but from actually learning merchantable skills, and how to apply them. Spending 4 years studying basket waving is not going to facilitate a good career. Just like easy money inflated home prices, a similar trend occurred for college prices, while in some cases the curriculum also got dumbed down to handle the new population of less qualified students. (Don't get me started on education).
I won't predict how this will play out, but the government is already making noises about forgiving this student debt, but that doesn't fix the real problem. We need to educate people to do the jobs that we need filled. Sometimes we need welders more than physicists, but we can use good skilled workers for both.
There is place for government help, but it needs to use a light hand. The more it tries to force an outcome, the more unintended consequences that we must deal with.
Sorry if this seems like a veer but it's all related.
================
This took more time than I planned... Play nice.
JR
As the saying goes it takes two to tango, so both parties in the "beast with two backs" share responsibility, while one has a harder time avoiding the consequences. With modern contraception widely available (in the west) it seems there is some calculation involved.Sahib said:Because they are no different than the young white men who do the same. It is not a race issue.
There seems to be a higher fraction of unwed black mothers, but yes an uptick in out of wedlock births has crossed all demographics. This is another cultural shift that can probably be traced back to media presenting it as OK. I recall the uproar over a TV show Murphy Brown where back in the early '90s the lead character got pregnant and decided to have the baby herself. TV shows and movies are a powerful force to influence modern culture. That is just one example and there are more. A second factor influencing the breakdown of the nuclear family, is government support sometimes including housing allowances that can make it too easy for a pregnant girl to escape her family structure. Not always a bad thing with the poor parenting many experience, but not like the good old days when several generations lived in the same house and there was so much more private support. I will avoid the conspiracy theories, insert your favorites here.
Not one of my best.mattias said:I don't see your point...
Nature is not a problem as I see it. It is a given we must deal with.mattias said:If you want to overlay something then it is an already unfair system onto mother nature, which in turn is also not fair. Layering that up doesn't help, it exacerbates the problem.
If we allow the vast majority of the public to be productive we can create more than enough wealth to support the small fraction who will always be incapable of supporting themselves. The problem comes when we try to have government manage the entire private economy as this hurts productivity and reduces wealth creation, making it literally impossible to help all in need. We have seen this play out around the world with unfortunate consequences for a number of countries.
We do not agree on that reality which is pretty common in such discussions. You or me just repeating that the other is wrong, or ignorant, or "ignoring" something is a waste of everybody's time.mattias said:Well you're free to do what you want John, and ignoring reality and hoping others do to may seem appealing to you. It doesn't appeal to me though because reality has an annoying habit of, you know, being real.
Free market capitalism where people are paid based on the value they create is the fairest way to compensate workers. The government "fixing" wages will have the opposite effect. If anything history has demonstrated that government needs to stay out of business. That includes the rampant crony capitalism that i suspect will get even worse here if Hillary gets elected making the Clinton foundation a one stop shop for international cronies (probably signing up now before rates go up). Note: the republicans don't get a free pass. and perhaps a complete re-write of the tax system, could like a magic slate undo all the deals that big business have engineered over the years to level the playing field somewhat for small business.Mattias said:But their wealth didn't scale linearly according to the labor they put in. If that was the case then bus-boys busting their asses in restaurants would be richer than Bill Gates.
For every one of your individual stories you can provide we can find stories of people who have worked incredibly hard and aren't even close to having the same amount of wealth. Anecdotal evidence isn't particularly convincing. Germany at least had significantly higher mobility than the US, and it is far more "socialist" than the US is.
Nature doesn't create people as equals, and on top of that we put a system that exacerbates that inequality. That's what we're doing. It's not about fostering a "victim mentality" so much as just waking people up to that fact so that other solutions can be found. You're winning, so what do you care? The blame for lack of success is placed by you onto those who don't succeed so of course to you the system appears to be working.
Mattias said:So it seems to me that the issue still could be financial along with just good old racism. So even if they didn't bring resentment with them from the colonies I'm pretty sure they were about as disillusioned as some blacks in the US after having fought in Vietnam, meaning that they risked their lives for a nation only to find racism restricting what their options were when they got back "home".
Now, my point is solely that just because there isn't the same type and extent of racism today, this group can surely be in a crappier situation today because of said financial problems which in turn stem from prior racism. It's just to say that of course we shouldn't automatically blame current white people for being racists that prevent current black people from prospering, just that we can't ignore that history is what it is.
Some people try their hardest to not acknowledge that there's a quite frankly surprisingly large amount of racism still existence, and this massacre sort of illuminates that I think. I think John's right that there are other issues that are really important, such as economics, but in my opinion the problem is that by "ignoring" or "downplaying" the widespread nature of racism AND then not see the real problem with the system in which we all exist you're just exacerbating both problems. Relatively speaking poor people of color will get angry because they experience racism and just see it downplayed or ignored, and then in addition are told that they're just stuck financially because they're just incapable or lazy.
Now i'm surely repeating myself. Racism has been ingrained into our culture over a couple centuries. You do not flip a switch and change peoples belief systems overnight. In my lifetime i have seen HUGE advances and more recently I perceive a reversal in that progress due to politicians and an industry of pundits that draw power from racial conflict so stir it up.
I have an adult neighbor that I know I can not change, while i can stop his abusive language at least when I am around. That said I see a completely different attitude and awareness in the young, who have grown up in desegregated schools, with the worst abuses prevented by law.
I really miss my weekly basketball game that i had to stop because of my bad knee. It was my regular interaction with young black kids, and after they overcame the shock of playing ball with an old white guy, i became just another player on the court (a weaker, slower player, but with skills). These days my more common interaction is from kids dumping litter in my yard.
We need to take a breath and show a little patience. The culture of race relations evolves over generations, not election cycles. It is better today than it was a decade ago, and I expect it to be better a decade from now, if the politicians shut up and stop stirring the pot for personal gain by inflaming the public.
The big lie from government is that they can create jobs. Opportunity comes from a vibrant growing economy. As I've noted before our GDP growth has been sub standard, below long term trends since the collapse in 2007-8. There was absolutely nothing permanent about that short term economic crisis, but the government response since then has been like a permanent sea anchor on the economy.Mattias said:People aren't really free to succeed if the opportunity isn't there, practically speaking, and the latter most certainly isn't equal to people. If you want to make it equal you end up with a bunch of problems. Does education make a difference? If 'yes', then it's the government's job to equalize it so that everyone gets and equally good or poor education and thus equal opportunity (using what you stated above as a principle). Of course wealthy people will object to that. The same will apply to health care. And living conditions. At the end of the day pro-Capitalists can try to convince others as much as they like that the system provides equal opportunity, but the truth is that it doesn't, and pro-Capitalists don't want it either.
People seem to forget what happens when the government tried to help them. Look at the housing crisis. In a classic case of politicians thinking if home ownership correlates with better outcomes, lets put everybody into a house. The government supported and almost mandated too-easy mortgage lending standards that greedy bankers were all to happy to play along with, at least while the music was playing. Economic theory predicts what will happen with unlimited credit as more money chases a finite number of homes. For a while everything goes up, and people started flipping houses for profit pushing the prices higher. People bought houses they couldn't afford, with mortgages they didn't think they would ever have to pay back because of increasing prices. Of course prices never go all the way up to the sky so eventually the music stopped.
At the end of 2014 there were still more than 8 million homeowners underwater, and 35% have less than 20% equity in the homes. I recall when we had to have 20% down to buy a home. A free market way to resolve this, while painful, would have been to recognize all the non-performing mortgages as what they were (worthless). People would have had to leave the houses they couldn't afford and move into more appropriate housing they could afford. It would have been a massive disruption short term, but then with a rational housing market we would have recovered to a more normal growth rate too.
While we talk a lot about income inequality I suspect a lot of low income people lost all or most of their modest nest eggs in that "government help" inspired debacle.
In a similar vein the government saw a correlation between college education and better outcomes, so decided to wave the magic government wand to increase education lending to all who wanted. As before this confuses "what is" with what looks like "it is". Education is indeed a path to higher earnings, but that doesn't come from just showing up and getting the degree, but from actually learning merchantable skills, and how to apply them. Spending 4 years studying basket waving is not going to facilitate a good career. Just like easy money inflated home prices, a similar trend occurred for college prices, while in some cases the curriculum also got dumbed down to handle the new population of less qualified students. (Don't get me started on education).
I won't predict how this will play out, but the government is already making noises about forgiving this student debt, but that doesn't fix the real problem. We need to educate people to do the jobs that we need filled. Sometimes we need welders more than physicists, but we can use good skilled workers for both.
There is place for government help, but it needs to use a light hand. The more it tries to force an outcome, the more unintended consequences that we must deal with.
Sorry if this seems like a veer but it's all related.
================
This took more time than I planned... Play nice.
JR