The July/August issue of The Atlantic arrived in yesterday's mail. Lots of great stuff to read, as usual. Last night I made it through two interesting essays touching on issues of race and class (neither of which is available on line).
The first is a long reported piece by Hanna Rosin, examining crime patterns in the US. The reduction in crime in inner cities has been achieved in part by demolishing public housing projects and dispersing the poor from concentrated areas via the Section 8 housing voucher program, which provided vouchers to allow the inner-city poor to find housing on their own. Problem is, areas around the country that had been relatively crime-free are now suffering from serious violent crime, of the sort that used to dog the inner cities.
Why? Because the inner-city poor brought their dysfunctional culture with them, and are now blighting the areas they moved into.
Rosin reports that nobody wants to face this, mostly because to admit that this problem exists would raise painful questions about race, class, culture and the intractability of poverty. Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis, is frustrated by political correctness squelching debate. From Rosin's piece:
"You can't begin to problem-solve until you lay it out," she said. "Most of us are not living in these high-crime neighborhoods. And I'm out there listening to the people who are not committing the crimes, who expected something better." The victims, she notes, are seldom white. "There are decent African American neighborhoods -- neighborhoods of choice -- that are going down," she said.
The second article of note was the always-provocative Virginia Postrel's meditation on how race and class affect patterns of consumption. It has been widely known for some time that when compared to whites, African Americans tend to spend more of their income on cars, clothes and jewelry -- things that advertise to others that the person who has these things has money. But new research indicates that this phenomenon is more class-based than race-based.
Postrel:
Sure enough, all else being equal (including one's own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group's income went down. African Americans don't necessarily have different tastes from whites. They're just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, indiidual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households -- about like going from South Carolina to California -- leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. "Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 a year person in Boston," says Hurst. "The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 prson in Massachusetts." That's why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams "nouveau riche." It signals that the owner came from a poor groups and has something to prove.
So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today -- and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor. Veblen was right.
But, Postrel says, Veblen didn't go far enough. It's not that the wealthier suddenly start saving their money and economizing. We can now see that the richer a society gets, the less its spending goes into conspicuous consumption for raising one's status in the eyes of others, and the more it goes into purchasing expensive items for private pleasure. Bobo-ism, basically.
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You also must read the Book Review by Sandra Tsing Loh in this issue and her critique of radical feminism. My wife and I were laughing out loud reading it; it was hilarious.
Brian Horan: take a breath, good sir. You have a lot that needs to be said. Break it up into manageable chunks. The vast majority of our fellow citizens (contributors to this blog being notable exceptions) have a very limited cognitive attention span.
I am wondering -- out loud, as it were, and as I often do here -- why so many people are keen on emphasizing the past. Certainly, historic trends and influences are important towards understanding the present, but they often have almost nothing to say about what we need to do next.
I say, redress the abuses of the past by making the future better than the present. Identify what those improvements can be, and go about accomplishing them.
It can be as simple as breaking the "other" ice with your neighbors, and going from there. Sometimes, it takes becoming a nuisance to the powers that be, who will sometimes try to shut you up by giving you just a little bit of what you are asking for. Sometimes it takes starting or joining grassroots movements; those require rather more time and energy than some (many/most) people have, but the returns on that investment are often proportional.
My wife -- white, Jewish, middle-class -- has been teaching inner-city black kids for 35 years. I've lived with her in their neighborhoods for 25 years. I don't mean to say that it has been her "mission" to improve their lives, and we didn't decide to buy in our neighborhood for that sort of reason. But we have learned a couple of things along the way:
They are mostly just like anyone you might meet nearly anywhere. The differences are not in them, but in what surrounds them.
They are not represented by the reparations/help-us-poor-victims/get ours by getting back crowd. Those are just the most vocal -- and truth be told, the sources for the sexiest and best ratings headlines. They want a fair chance to work and live. Mostly, they don't get anything close to fair. Mostly, they try harder instead of turning to crime.
My wife has been at her most effective when the city has supported education to the extent and in the ways that work. Those ways were still working when No Child Left Behind was passed. It was the support that changed, not the quality of the services. The justifications entered spin mode, giving us such canards as every child must go to college, that test scores can be and are the sole criterion for measuring progress, and that any college-prep program will prepare a HS graduate for any job.
End of rant. :-)
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/hanna-rosin-in-atlantic-american-murder.html
http://vdare.com/sailer/080608_crime.htm
"A few killjoys, though, have quietly suggested an alternative theory: while federal housing projects were a bad idea, their worst problem was neither their architecture nor their policies, but their residents."
URL for the online article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
The problem with Federal housing projects, low rent areas, inner city abandonments, etc., is that the people there are left there or trapped there for the most part. That would be well and good if the areas weren't left to be the most despicable places to live, with nothing for them to do that's good or productive. It becomes the best thing in people's minds to be the worst they can. Be an ass in school, sell drugs, don't care. Become what the world says you are.
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