In the aftermath of the Baltimore riots, there was a great deal of partisan debate about the root causes of the many woes of the urban black underclass. Many on the Right went no further than to blame black “thugs” and “race-hustlers”, and to call for militaristic crowd-control, while the Left settled in comfortably to sing their familiar song: institutionalized racism and the inexpungible legacy of slavery.
One thing the Right was also quick to point out was that all of these cities have been under continuous Democratic control for decades. This is, to be sure, an important part of the problem. In particular, I’ll call your attention to something called the “Curley Effect”. Here is how it was explained in a recent Forbes article:
As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.’ Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.
Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support””e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.
Meanwhile, the anti-rich rhetoric of these clever demagogues, combined with higher taxes to fund the political favors, triggers a flight of tax refugees from the cities to the suburbs. This reduces the number of political opponents on the city’s voter registration rolls, thereby consolidating an electoral majority for the anti-wealth party. It also shrinks the tax base of the city, even as the city’s budget swells. The inevitable bankruptcy that results from expanding expenditures while diminishing revenues can be postponed for decades with the help of state and federal subsidies (“stimulus’ in the Obama vernacular) and creative financing, but eventually you end up with cities like Detroit””called by Glaeser and Shleifer “the first major Third World city in the United States.’
Thomas Sowell joined in with an incisive column of his own, called The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown. Here’s a longish excerpt:
The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact ”” for those who still have some respect for facts ”” black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Very good points all round. (And you really should read Mr. Dalrymple’s book, by the way.)
There is, however, another causative process at work here, one that is quite convincingly self-evident once you see it, but which gets very little attention. In his description of the comparatively well-functioning black communities of pre-1960s America Mr. Sowell glimpses it, but stops short of calling it out.
During the crisis in Baltimore, many on the Left reminded us that violent disorder by whites against blacks was a commonplace a century or so ago. One example given was the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot of 1921. You can read about it on Wikipedia, here.
Wikipedia’s article describes the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, which was destroyed by white mobs, as follows:
The traditionally black district of Greenwood in Tulsa had a commercial district so prosperous it was known as “the Negro Wall Street” (now commonly referred to as “the Black Wall Street”). Blacks had created their own businesses and services in their enclave, including several groceries, two independent newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and numerous churches. Black professionals — doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy — served the community. Because of residential segregation in the city, most classes of blacks lived together in Greenwood. They selected their own leaders, and there was capital formation within the community. In the surrounding areas of northeastern Oklahoma, blacks also enjoyed relative prosperity and participated in the oil boom.
Does this sound anything like today’s all-black communities? Of course not. Why is that? I will suggest a heterodox explanation: it was due in large part to white intolerance — the very same barriers to meritorious black advancement that we have rightly done so much to eradicate. The mechanism is simple.
As a preliminary heresy, I will ask you to accept that most human cognitive and behavioral traits are highly heritable. This premise, I believe, has been so amply confirmed as to be beyond all reasonable doubt — but if you cannot accept it, there is no reason for you to read any further. I bid you adieu.
Still here? Good. Then consider also that in any human population there will be a statistical distribution of these traits. There will be some intelligent, conscientious, cooperative and industrious people, with the low time-preference that makes successful long-term enterprises possible. There will also be people who are dim-witted, unscrupulous, combative, lazy, and impulsive. Generally those of the first sort will seek out others with these superior qualities to marry; their children will likely inherit them as well. (This is known, by people who pay attention to such things, as “assortative mating”, and it works at every level of society.)
Now consider the difference between America in 1921 and America today. In 1921, no matter how richly blessed with the aforementioned genetic assets a black man or woman might be, and no matter how successful as a result, there was nowhere to go. Because of the wall of racism that excluded blacks from the upper (or even the lower) strata of white society, talented and successful black people remained, willy-nilly, in their black communities. And so did their genomes.
America in 2015 is a very different place, and has been since the victories of the civil-rights movement of the 1960’s. Nowadays any black person who “makes it” is immediately up and out. For a few years my daughter taught high-school science in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which is one of the toughest inner-city neighborhoods in America. I visited her there, and met some of her brightest students — and they were very bright indeed. Their aim, first and foremost, was to do well enough to get away. Who could blame them? I know a lot of exceptionally talented and successful black men and women, most of them musicians. I cannot think of one who still lives in these blighted ghettos.
What this means, then, is that since the 1960s a mechanism has been at work that continuously “boils off” all of the best genes from black communities, leaving behind an increasingly concentrated and dysfunctional underclass. Of course this is not all of the story — as noted above, for half a century it has been the government’s policy to subsidize dysfunction, and when the government subsidizes anything, it always creates more of it — but this is an important part of it, and one that is almost completely unmentioned in public discourse. It is further evidence that no great social transformation — no matter how just and well-intended — is without unintended consequences.
What, then, is to be done? I really can’t say. But I do know this: there can be no hope of treating any of these ills without an accurate diagnosis.
18 Comments
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?search=1&entryID=7404
The Curley effect…aka the Blue Governing Model according to Walter Russell Meade. Re enslavement through social policy and its accompanying bureaucracy which is, naturally loyal to the party machine.
Also during the 60s and 70s, in the name of Urban Renewal, many prosperous black communities were often cut in half by work projects like highways. This UR often had the effect of destroying what was good. Everything that makes a prosperous community just that was rendered out of reach by unseen hands that only knew policy and nothing else. I saw much of this growing up.
I know you write often about this issue Malcolm and I’ve looked at the hbd chick site several times too, but honestly, if you assess traits in any group,you can say, oh this group demonstrates higher intelligence than that group”, etc. etc. etc. I remain resistant to your theory.
Some groups promote a family structure and social order to allow the human spirit to soar and some devolve into barbarism. For instance, Jewish people from the time of the Old Testament have promoted a social order that promotes learning and individual achievement. Their success, even when living as a small minority , among other cultures has fueled envy and hate, because they were more successful than the majority culture. Groups that are content to live at barely subsistence levels, due to entrenched belief systems, that rely on superstition over even basic common sense, will not develop the cognitive skills to ever advance their society.
As neuroscience develops, more answers will emerge, and please accept that I am clueless on science, but truly, I have read that humans don’t use large portions of their brain, with severe head trauma, people can learn to form new connections and that even as technology changes, I’ve read reports that our brains are changing just by our computer usage. All these make me wonder if perhaps things might not be as clear as that mating hypothesis, you suggested.
History is peopled with many, many examples of people living in a social order where all members in a group were prevented from learning or even maintaining a family structure, yet, many black slaves in America escaped and once free let their human spirits soar. Frederick Douglass, is one of my favorite examples. He does write about his anger at other black people, who meekly accepted their bondage. I’m of the mind that what we believe determines our destiny; it has built and doomed entire civilizations.
Are individuals born with inheritable gifts, most definitely, but I believe that if a Downs Syndrome child can learn many things, in addition, learn to behave like a civilized human being, there’s no excuse for just about anyone else.
South Africa awaits if we let it happen.
Well, libertybelle, as I said, I believe it is established beyond reasonable scientific doubt that the great majority of human traits — cognitive and behavioral traits as well as overtly “physical” ones — are highly heritable. (Nowhere have I said that all members of some group are one way, while all members of another group are another way; any individual from any group can possess any combination within the entire range of these various innate qualities.)
If you are resolutely in disagreement with this essential premise, then, as I said in the post itself, we really won’t be able to have a productive conversation on this topic. I must add that you will also have foreclosed on the most parsimonious explanation of a great many other pressing social questions, too, and will be forced thereby to accept some very unjust and destructive alternative answers, because they will be all that is left. (Just as they are also, as it happens, all that is Left.)
libertybelle,
On a second reading, I think that perhaps I didn’t give your comment all the response it deserved.
You are quite right that there is more to the story than innate qualities alone. And although I believe, as I have said elsewhere, that in general the people make the culture, rather than the other way round, there is no question that external, cultural constraints can have, over generations, a profound effect on a population’s genetic makeup.
You mention the Jews, for instance; the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any human group. That they were for centuries both an extremely well-isolated mating pool, and were restricted by the cultures they inhabited to intellectually demanding social roles, is, I think, no coincidence — and indeed the whole point of the latter half of this post was an argument for the long-term genetic effect of cultural change on an isolated population. (I should point out also that your example from slavery actually presents no difficulties for my argument, in that during slavery there was nowhere for the gifted black man or woman to go. In this sense it was more like the America of Tulsa in 1921 than Baltimore in 2015.)
Where we part company is, then the extent to which we believe the different statistical distributions of various innate and heritable traits, aggregated within long-isolated human populations, is historically and prognostically significant. I think it is very significant indeed.
I have long thought it ironic that a millennium of European anti-Semitism provided a genetic selection pressure to account for some of the observed intellectual superiority of Ashkenazim. This, of course, provided a survival advantage for my peeps.
Now I discover that this irony has a name — the “Curley Effect”. You learn something every day.
Malcolm, From a Mom viewpoint and having some direct extended experience of working with young poor black people, many males btw, I’ve made some observations. This demographic is from the Deep South, not urban ghettos, although almost all black people I talk to here have relatives and often they themselves have lived in northern urban areas too. The migrating back and forth is quite common.
The cultural decay, pretty consistently, intensifies as you move down the economic ladder, and breakdown in basic order hits you in the face. Just drive through neighborhoods, but skip downtown Baltimore! The collapse of nuclear families is striking. This decay and erosion does cross boundaries into poor white, Hispanics and blacks communities too. And yes, people usually marry within their group – but the glaring lapse of basic order in daily lives of so many children in these communities dooms most from any hope of ever achieving anything.
I have despaired many times when dealing with militant young black male employees, who refused to follow even simple rules, do not follow instructions and their lives are drugs, acquiring material things like cars, electronic items and trying to fit in with their peers. They have potential to do many things, but end up fired. I also worked with many black women who are mothers of children like these – and most are shouldering the parenting alone, most have male children or spouses who are or have been in the prison system. The absence of fathers and basic order in these young men’s lives is glaring. Even the mothers who are trying to keep their kids in school, making them go to church, battle the peer pressure from the cool black male groups (gangs and thugs and drugs).
My husband grew up in a troubled home in downtown Baltimore and was on the fast track to ending up in the criminal justice system. He is white, but I have observed this same phenomenon, with black men from the same type of home environment for 35 years around the Army. They become indoctrinated with a value system and their violent tendencies are channeled to being soldier and belonging to a team; they thrive and succeed. I believe values and working to create stable homes and schools, where common values can take root is the solution. In our victimhood, wallowing in pity, permissive society, where urban slums serve as some Frankenstein Progressive experiment, all attempts to teach citizenship and some common values get viciously repressed – without a return to some common values, there is no hope for these communities.
Malcolm, I recommended this book, “The Discovery of Freedom” to my children and several other people recently. You may already have read this, but at long last I have found my kindred spirit in Rose Wilder Lane, an American original and although I disagree with her on some points (that’s my contrarian nature, btw) her observations fascinated me. Her storytelling ability turned a history book into a captivating adventure.
https://mises.org/library/discovery-freedom
Sorry for the long-winded posts, but I wanted to add that I don’t refute or deny your scientific findings on genetics, but findings like those can easily be turned into abhorrent social policies. My view is that, regardless of your draw in the genetic or social pool at birth – there’s a moral imperative to help all American children lead the most productive, fulfilling lives possible. That said, based on what you said, and what my revered Dr. Sowell and Theodore Dalrymple, present, this sharp decline has been observed in approximately a century, correct? From genetic research, is a century long enough to dramatically alter genes pools?
Libertybelle, I am a North Carolinian by birth and residence. Without repeating much of what you already said, let me just validate all the points you made above. In my part of the country, we, black and white have always been around each other. We often know each other and have known each other for decades and generations in some cases. The history of my region is well known.
This familiarity with each other began to fade by the late 1960s. As the decades went by, the families I knew began to experience just what you have described with the younger males. At the same time, the young girls started showing up pregnant and no prospects of a husband.
On our current course, I see no way to turn it around. The failure of the Great Society era has been so complete that its proponents seem to have no choice but to defend it and then demand more of it.
Libertybelle, while even a few generations of selection can alter a closed breeding population, I should make it clear that that isn’t what I’m talking about in the case of inner city populations. What I’m describing isn’t a closed system at all, but rather an open one, in which advantageous genes are continuously removed from the population. The result of that is not the alteration of existing genomes, but rather the concentration of unfavorable traits in the population left behind, as the more gifted individuals go off to have their babies elsewhere. As far as the inner cities are concerned, you might as well be rounding up all the people most likely to improve the community and shooting them before they reach childbearing age. It’s not hard to see how this can have a very drastic effect in very short order.
And as Sowell and Dalrymple point out, the social programs that have brought such ruin to poor blacks can harm any group you apply them to, regardless of ethnicity (although some populations will be innately more susceptible than others). Enfeebling and infantilizing government policies that subsidize fatherlessness, high time-preference, and dependency can wreak tremendous damage in just a few generations; the constant genetic “boil-off” made possible by the decline of rigid and isolating racism in America has simply accelerated the process in our black communities.
I’m not sure how to present something, for lack of a better – accurate – rumination for convenience I’ll go with instinctively.
(It’s possible Whitewall can help me here.)
Has something to do with crime rates – and the attendant manifestations – comparing for instance largely poor black Baltimore, and other locales with, largely white Appalachia for instance.
Admitting I don’t really have a grip on family coherence/deterioration patterns on the latter.
“Enfeebling and infantilizing government policies that subsidize fatherlessness, high time-preference, and dependency can wreak tremendous damage in just a few generations”. Aka, how to create and maintain a political plantation.
The members of this population that do escape the physical constraints of the “community” are in dire need of finding anyone else like themselves on the outside. Often these individuals will marry outside their ethnic or racial group thus changing the “gene pool”. Among poor Appalachian whites, it was different due to isolation. Many of them were poor in one respect which is what we would be shown on PBS at times. In the 1960s, Sargent Shriver took along the Rev. Billy Graham on a tour of mountain communities where Shriver informed the masses that they were “poverty stricken”. Well yes by one standard anyway. When the gods of social policy in DC introduced the subsidy checks and dependency programs to these people, they became a different kind of poor. Government poor. The very worst kind of all. Even eclipsing spiritual poverty.
Very interesting observation, Robert. Thanx.
Thanks Whitewall. Guess I coulda been clearer though.
Let’s say some white kid gets shot by a cop in Appalachia – would riots .. burning down convenience stores, old-folks homes, beauty salons … [looting a liquor store excepted maybe] … anyway – would riots be expected to ensue?
(I suppose putting some areas to the torch in places I’ve seen on TV tagged “Appalachia” might be called neighborhood improvement.)
JK, no you would not see those results. Most likely the cop would know the guy he shot…also know his parents, cousins and neighbors. Most would side with the cop figuring the nob head deserved to be shot anyway.
I wish Whitewall … I didn’t know/understand what (I think we do)
Just So Storys.
But it’s True – the Cop most likely’d be somebody we all grew up with, most likely a neighbor. And … depending … maybe having some role,
Be present at the funeral. Not standing outside waiting.
Probably feel – pretty much – worse than the nob head’s Mom, Dad; cousins and neighbors.
But. They’d all be at the table don’t you reckon – when the food preparin’ neighbors showed up?
Together I mean.
And the cop’d be mighty sad when he went to work the next morning …
Po po tweet