05-14-2019, 08:50 AM
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So Fucking Banned
Industry Role:
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Your mom's front hole
Posts: 40,910
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Grapesoda
On the very serious side Doctor Thomas Sowell Attribues democratic politics
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Sowell is always on point.
Quote:
A second determinant of economic success is culture, by which Sowell means customs, values, norms and attitudes. For him, the proof of culture’s importance is to be found in the experience of minority groups, in various countries, that have achieved extraordinary economic success: Germans in Eastern Europe, Lebanese in West Africa, Japanese in Peru, Chinese in other parts of Asia, Jews and Indians everywhere. These immigrant groups arrive with a taste for entrepreneurship, a focus on education, a commitment to family, a reputation for honest dealing and an instinct for hard work. They also have high levels of trust and cooperation among themselves. Successful countries have learned to incorporate these cultural traits into their own, in contrast to “lagging” ones that envy and resent these minorities and concoct grievances against them to explain their own lack of success.
So far, so good. But it’s when Sowell adopts these historical lessons as the only explanation you need to understand inequality of incomes and opportunities in 21st-century America that he reveals how little he’s learned in the past 20 years.
Culture matters, of course, and Sowell has been courageous in calling attention to the growing acceptance of a black “ghetto culture” that has rejected traditional values. Dressing neatly, speaking proper English, achieving academic success, raising children in the context of stable marriages — by the 1970s, Sowell argues, these were demeaned as “acting white,” setting back the economic prospects of a generation of African Americans after decades of advances.
“None of the usual explanations of racial disparities — genetics, racism, poverty or ‘legacy of slavery’ — can explain this retrogression over time,” he writes. “One of the few possibilities left is that the culture within black communities has in some respect changed for the worse over the years.” And what is Sowell’s proof of this “retrogression”? That elite high schools such as Stuyvesant no longer boast as many black students as they used to.
In fact, while “ghetto culture” may help to explain the stubborn persistence of a black underclass, there is ample evidence of the progress of black Americans since the 1960s in statistics on poverty rates, educational achievement and household incomes. Gains relative to whites have slowed, but there are still absolute gains. Nor can “ghetto culture” explain the growth in poverty, the decline in marriage, the slowdown in educational achievement or the widening income gap in white America.
As Sowell sees it, this “retrogression” took root because of a virulent multiculturalism, imposed by academics and the media, that now makes it socially and politically unacceptable to criticize any group’s culture. And it is reinforced by an overly generous welfare state that has lulled poor blacks into a permanent state of dependency and sloth — “non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive behavior,” in his felicitous phrasing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...f2174#comments
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