Did you actually just blame de-segregation for black poverty?
Look, Diogenes, this is going to be a discussion about something more complicated than “Bush bad”. It is therefore going to be beyond your capability to understand.
You have to accept that there are topics on which your particular brand of knee-jerk, determined stupidity disqualifies you from serious attention. Run along and play with the other idiots.
Regards,
Shodan
WTF are you talking about? I haven’t even mentioned Bush. You’re just being evasive, not to mention hypocritical. If you can’t answer my questions, just say so.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, my experience in Hawaii produced rather different results.
[ul][li]Not only did I graduate from high school, I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese and moved to Hawaii, which is where the first job offer in my field came from. (Before that, I worked for a local department store, then McDonalds.) The first job I got paid $1,000 per month before taxes. Of that, $350 per month went for a one-room apartment, the cheapest housing I could find.[/li][li]Over the next several years, I changed jobs a few times, each time for an increase in salary, although in one case, since I was no longer averaging 20 hours of overtime per week, it proved to be a net loss. The average increase in wages was $100 per month, as I recall. [/li][li]I have never married and have no children, although I was engaged for a while.[/li][li]I even took advantage of opportunities to increase my skills, which is how I went from tour escort on my first job, the entry-level position I referred to earlier and the job I lost because of racism, to translator/programmer/receptionist on my third job.[/ul][/li]
Nevertheless, five years later, I was still scraping to make ends meet and could not afford even a telephone. My rent went up along with my wages, so it generally worked out that about half my take-home pay went for housing. One reason my fiance and I never married is because we couldn’t afford even a one-bedroom apartment with our combined earnings.
While I admit that the economics of living in Hawaii are different from those of living on the mainland, my experience differs from what Shodan says it should have been. I was at least lucky enough to live in a city with good mass transportation and a supermarket within walking distance. My current city’s poorest neighborhoods don’t have supermarkets and the cheapest bus fare is $1.75 one way, $16.50 for a weekly pass, or $60.00 for a monthly pass. You can carry a fair amount on a city bus – at one point in Hawaii, I actually carried a television home on one – but it isn’t easy. Jobs in my city and, I gather, others, are increasingly moving out to the suburbs, which are less well served by mass transportation and more expensive to get to. My former employer was on a bus route which was 3 zones out from downtown and those poorer neighborhoods. To get there would cost $2.75 one way; $3.25 if you had to transfer. Last fall, they moved to a new industrial park which isn’t served by bus service at all as far as I know. I admit that $60.00 is less than my car payment, and I drive a cheap car, but I think people who use Shodan’s formula underestimate the logistics.
CJ
This is the grossest oversimplication of a remedy for poverty I have ever heard, Shodan.
I will concede that the third point will do wonders to stem the tide of generational poverty. But your first point is perfunctory; your second point is wrong; and the fourth is a damn lie-- you can easily still be poor after five years, especially if you only possess skills to earn minimum wage with incremental pay increases.
The futility of this board as a way to fight ignorance is evident when longtime posters reveal their asses to be chock-full of head.
Wow, what a shock. A right-wing anti-government pro-privatization “think-tank” discovers that – gasp – poverty is the fault of the poor.
I reject all findings from research that begins with a conclusion, not a question.
By weird coincidence I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell essay about this topic this morning. You can read it here. It’s long, but you would probably find it very very interesting. I can vouch for his claims about Toronto.
He discusses the phenomenom of “good blacks” and Jamaican immigrants. He went to school in Toronto, where I live, and now works in New York. Both cities have a large West Indian population. He argues that in New York, West Indians are treated as “good blacks.” He provides some cites for his stating that. Examples of employers who would rather hire a black recent immigrant than a black American because they are seen as more hard working and honest, etc. So a West Indian person would be more advantaged than a black American. In Toronto, on the other hand, West Indians are not seen as “good blacks” because they are pretty much the only blacks, and all of the same stereotypes of laziness or criminal tendencies or whatever are applied to them in a way that US West Indians are considered exempt from even by people who discriminate. And my experience living in Toronto is that is very true. Everything that racists Americans seem to attribute to African Americans–that they just mismanage their lives somehow–white racist Canadians say about West Indians all the time.
His conclusion is basically that “someone always has to be the nigger.” Maybe if there were no African Americans, no West Indians, no Jews, then Koreans would face more discrimination. It would be intuitive to say that Koreans are facing all the same disadvantages as black Americans born in the US, but Toronto versus New York is a good example of why that might not be true at all.
Maybe a big element of racism is scapegoatism. So that’s something to consider if you are following the line of thought that West Indians’ reputation for being hard working shows that contemporary racism shouldn’t matter so much to black Americans.
If you deny that black culture has an influence on perpetuating black poverty, then you’re not being realistic. While I think it is clear that racism against blacks is a factor, there is also a cultural barrier perpetuated in poor black culture against so-called selling out, becoming like the white man, betraying your race, etc. Not to mention certain behaviors that tend to keep one in financial distress, such as spending money on things like diamonds and designer clothes and luxury cars with booming stereo systems instead of saving money for education or a down payment on a house, for example. Not to mention a culture that glorifies crime, drug use and drug dealing.
Disclaimer: I am not claiming that all black americans subscribe to these ideas, or that these ideas are limited to black people. Nor am I implying that poor people deserve to be poor. I am trying to point out that the perpetuation of black poverty is not solely a product of racism. Generalizations should be taken as generalizations, not statements of absolute fact. YMMV, etc.
Actually, this strikes me more as an example of cultural advantage (at least, perceived cultural advantage) over racism in the USA. This would be especially so for second-generation West Indians, whose culture would tend to persist while more obvious markers such as accent would tend to disappear. One would expect, therefore, that the children of West Indian immigrants would drop back behind their parents in achievement, if racists were unable to distinguish them from “bad blacks”. As the examples of Colin Powell and Thurgood Marshall demonstrate, this is not always the case.
I have actually heard the same sort of thing, not as regards North American blacks, but mainland Chinese who migrate/escape to Hong Kong or Singapore. Employers there are said to be reluctant to hire mainland (Red) Chinese who have not been around long enough to pick up on the culture of Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese are percieved to be lazier than those who grew up in Hong Kong, and it takes them a while (according to the employers) to get up to speed.
I believe the right to a daily nap is actually enshrined in the Red Chinese constitution, 
which Hong Kong employers are wont to use as evidence that mainland Chinese are not acculturated in the same way as Hong Kong natives. I don’t know if this has changed since the takeover.
Regards,
Shodan
Here is my short answer: Correlation is not causation.
Do you agree with that or not?
Yes, I did. Did you notice I said I got engaged but we could not afford a place large enough for two people on our joint incomes, which is one of the main reason we neither got married nor lived together?
You have shared a board with me too long to be unaware of this. One of the main reasons I have never married is upright, respectable Christians like yourself made it clear to me how singularly unacceptable and unmarriageable I was. Not everyone has the good fortune to be as blessed as your marvelous self. Yes, you did strike a nerve.
CJ
I think you have an exaggerated idea of the attention I pay to your romantic background. Nor have I ever said you were unmarriageable or unacceptable.
You want to blame me for your marital status, knock yourself out. It is neither true, nor relevant to the discussion.
One of the factors associated with escaping poverty is a stable marriage. Why you would put yourself forward as a counter-example to this when you have never been married is beyond me.
You might want to think a little more next time you take offense, to see if it fits the context.
Regards,
Shodan
You need to phrase your response a little more precisely.
If you mean “not all correlation is causation”, then I agree. If you mean “no correlation is causation”, then I disagree. If you are David Hume and you mean “there is no evidence for causation beyond correlation”, then I disagree.
Which do you mean?
Or if I rephrased my assertion as “there is an extremely strong correlation between (the four factors I mentioned) and escaping poverty”, would that make a difference?
Regards,
Shodan
Your whole “get married” criterion was bullshit anyway. There is no correlation between getting married and getting out of poverty.
That’s closer to the truth than your bald assertion that adhering to those behaviors could end poverty within five years.
Even your cite said: “Certain behaviors are a recipe for success. Among those who finish high school, get married, have children only within a marriage and go to work, the odds of long-term poverty are virtually nil.”
You cannot forget the key words, “long-term.” Short-term poverty can still last an uncomfortably long time.
Your formula doesn’t take into account industry recessions, outsourcing, the costs of job retraining, health care costs, food costs, housing expenses, utility bill expenses, insurance costs, gas prices, child care (I have no kids but I chip in for my niece’s day care) or legal expenses.
Throw in prejudice, discrimination and bigotry and prehaps you’ll see that escaping poverty is not a clear cut route.
“No dogma fits every dog”
(Vance, “Ports of Call”)
Arguing that correlation CAN mean causation doesn’t in anyway demonstrate that in this case it is an apt conclusion.