Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking: Here’s What Economists Don’t Understand About Race tells where Darrity has difficult with Obama’s rhetoric on on race.
“If you buy the black dysfunction story, then the key is for young black men to pull up their pants or the equivalent,” he says. “But that’s a very different policy from saying, well, we should assure all Americans a human right to work. Or even if we don’t talk about an employment guarantee, then at least the basic income guarantee.”
“If we’re concerned about black-white disparities specifically and we want to have a race-specific policy, then I think we have to start talking about a program of reparations [for slavery].” (Darity and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, are currently completing a book that details how a reparations program might be executed, due to hit the shelves by mid-2017). /blockquote>
And on Daniel Patrick Monyihan:
Many social scientists have sought cultural explanations for racial disparities, rather than the structure of stratification Darity proposes. For example, sociologist and former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Labor Secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson, argued in his influential 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” that the high rate of families headed by single mothers was in large part to blame for economic inequality. Darity notes that this line of thinking has very deep roots.
The cultural argument has been an argument for deferred economic justice until African-Americans prove that they are worthy enough, something that white Americans and never required to do (see Trumpism).
What has fascinated me about the economics of inequality is that it is a fairly straightforward analysis of imperfect competition, which typically means that free-market competition has not in fact been allowed to happen because of political of cultural manipulation of market rules or economic political manipulation of supply and demand.
Monopoly is well-known to the public and increasingly so is oligopoly. Less well known are the opposites, monopsony and oligopsony that rig the labor market.
Least well known of all to the public are the mechanics of price discrimination, which is the economic form of racial discrimination. Denial of supply to a particular set of consumers results in raising profits on both sides of the discrimination line. Or in its -sonistic form instead its -polistic form, Denial of demand to a set of vendors or employees results in raising profits on both sides of the discrimination line.
All of this used to be Intermediate Microeconomic stuff.
Darrity, however is making a different argument, one that goes to inheritance (and not just through estates) of assets. His argument is that economic assets enable success, and they primarily come from parents. Systematic discrimination in the ability to build and pass on assets, through redlining or mortgage discrimination, or discrimination in openness to renegotiating loans–all characteristic of the underlying pattern of housing loss in the Great Recession is an example of how that discrimination in generating assets works. Unemployment and foreclosure start from the bottom among people who have most recently lifted themselves to a better economic situation, another way that minorities get caught in the downturn in greater numbers.
An economic approach to compensating for continued discrimination and political regulations penalizing discrimination, as well as continued cultural action de-normalizing ethnic discrimination might eventually undo 400 years of institutional racism, but only if agressively pursued over a period of time. The time to do that is now.
It blows a huge hole in the myth of meritocracy for minority AND white economic underclasses. One can be as deprived as the other, no?
It is not just material assets, it is the cultural environment (or cultural IQ) that is inherited, too.
I don’t buy the cultural IQ argument. Cultural norms however set up different values. And those predispose people to different preferences in what knowledge to search out, what style of living to adopt, who to associate with, and what symbols of values to see the world through.
Meritocracy makes the assumption that one’s economic income is related to one’s “contribution to society” — the larger the income, ipso facto, the greater the contribution, the lower or absence of income, the less the contribution.
One thing not often notices is how loss of income or homes can turn very functional families into quite dysfunctional families just from the daily stress that this situation imposes.
Class seems to be inherited no through some psychological IQ but through the freedom that the parents’ ability to supplement education, provide a pathway to a more secure financial position, and the political skills of coping with bosses provide. The financial resources (such as the ability to have time off with the family, or the dignity accorded the parents in society) affect all of that. So do the stereotypes (and the cost of conforming to them) as well as the societal class typing of one’s self-selected style of being.
“Dispossessed” means one does have to have sufficient regard for ownership. Negative of “without regard to ownership”. What is the ownership from which one is culturally deprived? On could make a case in the 1960s that African-Americans were dispossessed from African-American culture and African cultural roots. One could also make the case that “white trash” or Apppalachian whites or you identity other white demographics were dispossessed from some definition of “civilized white culture” as the dispossession stereotyped in working class or rural sitcoms. What happens when people own Archie Bunker, Sanford and Sons, the Hooneymooners, or the halfway middle class world of Desi and Lucy? Evemtually you get Duck Dynasty and hip hop and a whole lot of other cultural permutations. And megachurches such as Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye in the 1980s and 1990s. That process of owning it too economic assets and created a return on economic assets in return. But it still operates within a systems of price discrimination — cultural genres is one current form, as is exclusive neighborhoods, and narrowcasting. Ever wonder why promoting cultural schism is so attractive to businesses? The economic payoff is price discrimination.
One can make a similar argument about who benefits from the politics of “rural” Congressional districts and why populism is like a cultural appropriation instead of an actual political strategy.
Perhaps I have a different appreciation for cultural IQ from closely following Kenyan and South African political developments. Certainly a much wider disparity between their urban middle class and rural/pastoral class.
Is the Cultural IQ you are talking about Cultural Quotient, which has these marks?
I believe the folks pushing this psychological model are also pushing training to make employees (or executives) better and negotiating inter-cultural situations.
Here’s the issue with rural/urban middle class or general middle class/urban working and lower class comparisons. Who in the less affluent communities have the assets that allow them to engage in safe relationships with other cultures in which both parties have respect for each other’s dignity? There are all sorts of people-to-people programs that Western nations and NGOs conduct with other cultures. It generally is (1) one-way–a little exoticism for the more affluent people and (2) expensive in terms of low income finances. And they do not relate nearly enough people to each other.
Recently, the people-to-people program that a lot of small town and suburban working class and middle class folks have been engaged in is training their replacements from China or elsewhere when they company is shutting down their plant and laying them off. Can’t be a disgruntled employee; might not be hired by someone else; but can be angry at the foreigners who “took your job” and the country that manipulates its currency to create an never-ending balance of trade. That is, angry at the mercantilist who is not playing the free enterprise, free market, low tax game you are insisting on because you are tethered to a particular ideology that doesn’t deliver real world results.
None of that is a matter of Cultural Quotient except at the point that the Americans and Chinese come face-to-face to actually do what is called “technology transfer”.
South Africa and Kenya in my reading seem to be more like the city cousin and country cousin of the US in the 1930s and 1940s before the massive suburbanization of the middle class. Maybe now there is a large indigenous middle class with some sort of geographic continuity, if not US-style suburbs. But there were enough folks in the cities with rural roots and memories and folks in the country who had tried the city and moved back to see each other’s situation much differently. In addition in both countries there is a layer of cultural division that is a legacy of colonialism that those countries are working through and if like most societies, those divisions into what the Europeans called “tribes” provides the networks for patronage and the fracture lines for political conflict. The economic assets in agriculture of the non-European population in both countries and the European population creates extreme rural poverty Likewise the assets for having access to jobs in the cities.
And the European population still in South Africa has a form of discrimination with respect to the non-European population with a government fearful to bring an end to the discrimination because of the possibility of European violent movements. In Kenya, it is the use of the cultural fractures as instruments of party politics that creates the recurring political crises.
That’s what I see from a lot of earlier study and a few recent check-ins.
To the extent that outside corporations and governments meddle in both countries, much of what looks like individualistic antagonisms are more social.
If I am not on your argument, tell me exactly how you see “Cultural IQ” fitting into this discussion about the economics of discrimination.
Drat! My reply didn’t post.
I am using CIQ as shorthand for the vocabulary of knowledge and attitudes that a child is taught in its developing years. Granted that can be generational, lol. But it is also sub-cultural and regional. Even gender based–in fact that is one huge area of differences.
Not CIQ as a tool for modifying adults.
Slightly off-topic, but re-development of inner cities by gentrification is gonna be a hot topic for the future. It involves that cultural IQ clash that is as much economic as racial. If hillbillies lived in inner Detroit, the same hostilities would be present. But white poorest of poors have already formed suburban ghettos, priced out of urban neighborhoods some time back.
“Viewed most negatively, Elliott prefers the term “cultural displacement” to gentrification, believing it more accurately captures the phenomenon of what, exactly, happens when a neighborhood improves to the detriment of its long-term residents.
When I ask them what can (new residents) do to soften them [tensions], one person said, `Have them take a test, like immigrants do.’ While that would never happen, it does speak to the need for newcomers to understand the city’s history, the neighborhood’s history, when they become a part of it.”
http://bridgemi.com/2014/08/in-a-gentrifying-detroit-an-uneasy-migration-of-urban-millennials/
Are you familiar with this writer? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-prophecies-of-jane-jacobs/501104/
Jane Jacobs? Yes. I was reading her work in the 1970s.
Continuing the thread, even with your understanding of cultural IQ, price discrimination makes the actual discrimination and available of the culture, even minority cultures (including hillbilly) more difficult o pass on. Or to process into a source of dignity that is not defensive.
“Cultural displacement” is driven by economic discrimination. Neighborhoods are not chosen for gentrification by accident; cities provide economic incentives to developers. Then price discrimination does the rest.
Sustained equal educational opportunity is necessary for real equality.
Sustained, for several generations.
That is not happening, and without that opportunity every other nostrum is doomed to failure.
Why isn’t it happening?
Because the controllers need a certain percentage of the population to function as a low income workforce. People of color are conveniently marked by their physicality and are thus prime meat for the controllers. Every other minority that has appeared in U.S. society has eventually merged into the mainstream. Only people of color are a sure thing.
What happens when…within a short period of time, I believe…robotics completely undercuts the necessity for a low income workforce?
UH oh!!!
We are all at risk of becoming “collateral damage.”
The Permanent War state comes home.
When?
I dunno.
Sooner rather than later, I’m thinking.
AG
It’s the middle class that is in the eye of automation right now. Mechanization did in a whole lot of the low-income workforce and expanded that, such as the growth of the service industry and the manual parts of agriculture that could not be automated.
Might as well go ahead and call that permanent war state Hobbesiana.
Those people who have refuse to automatically assimilate or are institutionally blocked from assimilating are on the list for discrimination and the price discrimination that that brings. We have all sort of exclusive and reverse exclusive discrimination in housing constantly adapting to different attempt to rejigger the price discrimination on both the buying (labor, vendors) and selling (customers) sides. We have elder communities for “senior living” and “assisted living” housing and intermediate care facilities for different ability and economic classes of elderly. We have gentrification price discrimination on the upside for the newly affluent seeking a certain cultural experience. And the price discrimination of the suburbs being left behind, not all racially typed everywhere but enough that those exploiting those transactions can keep businesses going.
When the permanent war state comes home, there will be the price discrimination in corruption like a number of countries in the world.
We already are collateral damage and have been since the change in government countercyclical economic action in the 1980s.