Flint
Posts: 478
Joined: Jan. 2006
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ericmurphy:
| Quote | | My point is not that wealth disparities exist in America. My point is that those wealth disparities are unnecessarily extreme. |
No question about it, wealth disparities can be manipulated a great deal through national policies of various kinds. The real question isn't whether American disparities are unnecessarily extreme, but whether they are unnaturally extreme. Since the US has been engaged in a rather massive wealth-transfer program for some decades now, I suppose it's prima facie the case that these disparities are unnaturally small. I grant you that the Swedish (and similar) experiences demonstate by dint of truly extraordinary effort, these disparities can be reduced quite a bit more. So the question is whether these highly artificial wealth transfer programs are "good" national policy. And the answer to that question typically depends on whether you are an involuntary donor of the fruits of your effort to someone else, or the happy recipient of fruits someone else earned.
| Quote | | But most developed nations do in fact have just such redistributive schemes in place. |
You're right. Is your argument that if most do it, it becomes righter? I doubt you could find many people so heartless as to refuse to lend a hand where a hand is required. A kind of "when you have to go there, they have to let you in" sort of thing. But perhaps what you do NOT want is to purchase institutionalized disincentive to achieve personal potential.
| Quote | | But I think there are significant differences in the degree of discrimination which are largely responsible for the difference in economic progress Asian Americans have enjoyed by comparison to their African American brethren. |
With all due respect, I think your point about "systematically eradicated culture" is hogswallop. I admit I don't understand what the real reason is, but I notice that the other immigrant waves had essentially abandoned their cultures within two generations, voluntarily. They all became Americans. I grew up in an ethnic neighborhood where the grandparents (off the boat) spoke no English, the parents were bilingual, and the kids my age spoke ONLY English. We all ate the same food, dressed the same, etc. The melting pot, for these waves, was very real.
Now, what I'm trying to emphasize is that this basically total adoption of the new nation in language, dress, food, and values happened within the living observation of the immigrants. In other words, people are amazingly malleable, and these cultural adoptions happen FAST. Newborns brought to America from anywhere on earth and raised by Americans AS Americans, are as solidly American as anyone else. Indeed, enough such cases exist to indicate that there is nothing either historical or biological that can predict any such newborn's eventual social success. Instead, the best predictor is the social circumstances of the adoptive parents.
I certainly agree with you that there are "significant differences in the degree of discrimination" between African and Asian Americans. But why?
| Quote | | Of the Asian Americans who work for my company, the majority were born overseas, in their own cultures. How many Americans of African descent were actually born in Africa? |
And how many of the Irish-Americans were born in Ireland? How many of the Italian (or German, or Russian) Americans have ever been to their ancestral countries, or know anyone who lives there, or even speak the language anymore?
ericmurphy, if an interbreeding population remains unassimilated after 150 years of full citizenship, the problem isn't isolation from some ancestral culture. These (as I point out) ancestral cultures are readily discarded by most groups, and don't remain central to the lives of ANY groups for more than a few generations. Even a group as insular (and targeted by bigotry) as the Jews has no need of Affirmative Action. Indeed, the Jews have been resented for being so successful.
| Quote | | I believe this difference in the history of African Americans versus Asian Americans really is at the root of the current disparity in achievement. Asian American culture receives a steady influx of immigration from the home country, something African American culture does not. There is no "root stock," so to speak, of African culture which can inform African American culture. |
I admit I don't find this very plausible. Why is it that all those other immigrant groups have assimilated so successfully despite no greater "fatherland influx"? For that matter, Africa is a seething mass of microcultures, many of which are rapidly vanishing beneath the steamroller of Western language, dress, movies and TV, the internet...
(And it might, for all I know, be worth noting that Asians have been discouragingly successful managing their own nations, to the point where they present a genuine economic threat to US interests. By extreme contrast, Africans have systematically wrecked *every nation they have undertaken to govern* across all of Africa. And this despite massive injections of foreign aid (something the Asian nations have needed none of.) African nations are without question the most corrupt, brutal, vicious and racist governments anywhere on the planet. Several genocidal campaigns seem to be in process at any given time. Why?)
So something else is going on here. I don't know what it is.
| Quote | | Moreover, while there is a history of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States, it has simply never been as brutal, or as institutionalized, as anti-black discrimination. In short, the differences in the experiences of Asian Americans and African Americans are much more notable than the similarities. |
While you're entirely correct that anti-black discrimination has been notably more vigorous than anti-Asian discrimination, and that levels of discrimination matter, I still submit that you are basically kidding yourself. Why would discrimination, even of different LEVELS, cause one group to excel above and beyond the caucasian baseline, while causing the other group to fall well short? Why would a quantitative difference in the same direction result in a truly drastic qualitative difference in opposite directions?
I admit I find your rationalizations reek of special pleading - for every justification for African-American performance problems, you can find several analogous groups defying your proposed pattern. Indeed, the Africans are the exceptions in every case. Discrimination - yep, against every one. ONLY the Africans need Affirmative Action. Assimilation? Yep, in every case EXCEPT the Africans. Divorce from original homeland's history? Yep, but harmless in every case EXCEPT the Africans. Why? Why?
Look, I want everyone to succeed. I'm opposed to all discrimination. But I can see pretty easily that giving every single member of some identifiable subgroup a fish every single day isn't working. Even if we followed Dean's all-heart-no-brains preferences and gave each of them a DOZEN fish a day, I strongly suspect we would not drive much personal achievement. It's not that I don't wish to help, it's that I want help to WORK. Repeating (or doing more of) what manifestly doesn't work, in the hopes that pretty soon it will work because we so very much WANT it to work, is futile.
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are the 'Aristocracy'.