For a red necky measure…I have the “el camino index”…the more el caminos…the more red necky the neighborhood.
Agree with your overall post. As to the snip:
My point was not that rich kids simply inherit a corner office from Daddy Warbucks. As you say, by and large they don’t and their own performance matters.
My point was that rich(er) kids, statistically speaking, attend better schools, have more involved parents, experience more extracurricular enrichment, and are generally actively groomed for superior performance from a young age.
And as a consequence, generally (at leat partly) live up to their better grooming by outperforming their less-groomed peers of less wealthy or less educated parents.
My social complaint comes in when so much of the governmental system is designed to reinforce these individual differences which flow from the accidents of birth rather than to reduce them.
As a trivial example, imagine if all public elementary through high schools in the US had the same funding, facilities, curriculum, and teacher quality. We’d still have a meritocracy going into college, but I’ll posit that the specific named individuals who’d rise to the top in that world would be a different list of specific named individuals from who rise to the top in the current system of incompetent falling apart schools in poor areas versus highly funded very functional schools in the comfy-class suburbs.
I’m all for folks investing their own money and effort in their own kids. I’m not sure we do the total society a favor by letting well-off parents divert tax dollars regressively to further enhance the advantages of the already well off.
Each of us is as good as we’ve been trained to be, plus/minus some individual variation. IMO society as a whole would improve more by improving the worst rather than by further improving the best. That’s certainly where the high ROI low-hanging fruit is. In any arena other than politics this would be a total no-brainer.
So we probably agree, it would be a more ideal world if somehow the differences in what parents privately put into their kids’ outcomes didn’t differ on a group basis on average. But it does, and changing that generally means what are IMO, I won’t put my exact words in your mouth, an unacceptable infringement on people’s basic right to do for their own families as they see fit. Plus that doesn’t work practically.
When speaking of what everyone (or a consensus anyway) agrees is in the collective sphere like public education it’s more of a reasonable debate. However I doubt how much school funding really factors into school performance. The small city I live in has sometimes been No. 1 in NJ in spending per pupil. It’s closer to worse than best in student performance statewide*. Whatever the real core reasons for that, it’s at least one example where it’s not funding. Also private school teachers around here get paid much less than public. But they aren’t asked to work in as difficult an environment. The public school demographic would change if private schools were prohibited (until people moved at least), but that’s back to the first paragraph.
There’s absolutely a danger in throwing up one’s hands at problems that need to be solved. But there’s also the potential for harm in increasingly invasive social engineering to solve problems that aren’t really solvable. If/where schools are genuinely underfunded compared to a basic standard that should be addressed. Expecting that well off suburban school funding levels will replicate anything like well off suburban school performance levels at ‘inner city’ schools is more doubtful IMO. In general I’d look for solid evidence that any big change** would really produce a very different situation at reasonable cost (in money, rights, and performance of the best students; average people in any society aren’t the ones producing the innovations).
*albeit not a horror story like ‘The Wire’ school in fiction, and NJ is one of the top performing states academically.
**separate but related to schools would be for example municipalities’ scope for zoning restrictions, which sets up some of the basic landscape of who lives where, though again without squelching public school alternatives, mixed communities don’t necessarily mean a single student body.
Are there any majority-black areas that are low crime?
Sure. I had to double-check the statistics, but take Pasadena Hills, Mo. 70% African American, population 930. A total of 29 crimes in 2016, only seven of them crimes against persons. There’s no breakdown of how many of those seven were actually domestic assaults, but I’d have to guess it’s at least one or two.
Of course it helps that Pasadena Hills is a solidly middle-class town with a median household income >$80,000/yr.
I may be doing my math wrong, but it sounds like you’re describing a place with a violent crime rate that’s about double the national average. By “crimes against persons” did you mean violent crimes?
8% of blacks live in poverty in concentrated urban areas. 92% do not because they fail one or both of those tests (under poverty line, in concentrated urban area). The black poverty rate is 27%, but only a fraction of that 27% live in concentrated poverty in urban areas.
When people have negative images of blacks, they tend to think of poor blacks living in concentrated areas of poverty in the inner city. Only 8% of blacks live like that now (however, I don’t know if it matters much if some other blacks are barely above the poverty line. Will a black family with 2 minimum wage earners really be safer than one below the poverty line).
It looks like you mean to say (I added the underlined words):
So the other 92% of black people live above the poverty line, or in suburbs, or rural or other non-urban areas.
You have to define what you consider (crime) as, and also there are issues with reporting rates, case closing rates etc…
Once you correct for those the reality that outside of the effects of the social construct of race, including that minorities are more likely to be charged and convicted the trends are very similar among all groups.
The BJS just released this report,
Warning PDF
So 1.2% for white on white, vs 1.65% for black on black for one metric, which is way too close to make major claims about anything being related to the social construct of ‘race’.
So I would challenge the original precept of the original post: 'Are there any majority-black countries that are finally prosperous and peaceful?’
How about starting with showing that black communities are especially less peaceful when corrected for socioeconomic standards and provide similar ‘white’ communities with similar conditions that have demonstratively better statistics. I know that I live in Seattle, which is very ‘white’ yet has one of the highest property crime rates in the country. In fact in the past few months I had my checking account stolen and the thief passed several class B felony checks before I noticed.
Despite the fact that I provided actionable evidence who the person was, and even though this individual was out on Conditional Release for a drive-by, possession of stolen goods and several felony firearm charges over the past 12 months my police report will never move past being filed. Note the thief was very very white. This is just anecdote, but it illustrates a point that if one cannot directly demonstrate ‘white’ populations that are *‘prosperous and peaceful’ * one cannot do so for a minority population either.
Can you provide cites to what is ‘prosperous and peaceful’?