Is inequality of results even important?

[Seattle]

Everyday I read some study about inequality of income or wealth between some group or another. It’s largely meaningless, IMO. It creates the false premise that something is wrong and needs to be “fixed”.

If a nursery school teacher and a doctor don’t have the same income and wealth is that something that needs to be “fixed”? I saw a study that showed that black women had more degrees than black men and made less than white women with no degree.

These are just statistics with no meaning other than to create yet one more cause for victimization.

Not everyone that gets a college degree wins the lottery regarding increased wages. Having some degree is just helpful from a personal knowledge standpoint and as a basic requirement for the job market.

Having a BA in Black Studies, a Master’s in Black History and a PhD in Black Education doesn’t mean that there is necessarily a high paying job that was looking for those credentials.

I got a BA in Political Science because I was interested (not in politics) in political systems around the world and how they worked. I didn’t think I was going to make more money just because I had a political science degree.
How many white women major in Psychology? Does that usually lead to a lucrative job the minute they leave college? No.

In my case I went to law school for a year and then switched into an MBA program in International Business.
I largely did that to be marketable and because it was still a subject that I was interested in.

You can’t compare people who get an engineering degree or a computer programming degree with someone studying black socialization and expect the incomes to be the same.

You can become a plumber or electrician and not even have a college degree and you will make more than many, many colleges degrees. The statistics here mean nothing.

The statistic that matters when comparing income and wealth is what are you doing that should create wealth but isn’t? If you aren’t actually doing anything that could be expected to create high income and/or wealth then what are we even talking about? “Micro-aggression”? “Intersectionality”?

IMO, that’s ridiculous. You will be going down those roads forever and nothing will change because you aren’t doing anything that could be expected to change. You don’t need to be a “social justice warrior”, always fighting for some “noble” cause. Don Quixote is a fictional character.

If you want to build wealth, invest. If you want high income, enter a field known for high income, marry someone who is also doing the same, have few children and you too will have high income.

There is no secret here. Working as a single mom with multiple kids, for the government, in social work is not a path to high wealth or high income. Not understanding capitalism, finances, investing, entrepreneurship isn’t going to help. Pushing for “equality of results” isn’t going to work just as it hasn’t ever worked anywhere.

Social protest doesn’t make billionaires (nor should focusing on billionaires be a goal). Use a little common sense and you will end up in the middle-class and don’t worry too much about the extremes. There will always be extremes. Take away poverty (not entirely possible) and you will still have crime.

There will always be fewer people at the top. That’s why it’s called the top. The economy is an expanding pie, however much the top ends up with, it isn’t at your expense and it’s a result of the system that brought the living standard up for everyone. As they say “don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg”. Focus, be rational, be informed. We don’t need to keep talking about racism, bigotry, inequality for the next 200 years.

If you don’t like black people, don’t marry one. If you do fall in love with someone who happens to be black and that happens over and over in our society, soon there will be nothing to talk about. Everyone will be the same with slightly different skin color and that’s about it.

Now if there is inequality of results it will just be because that’s the way humans are. It’s not something to “fix”.

[Syne]

That's either boilerplate Republican rationale or preparing a defense for higher inequality in Democrat-run areas.

[Syne]

Everyone will be the same with slightly different skin color and that’s about it.

Although many blacks discriminate against other blacks based solely on the shade of their skin. So it's not like the utopian "everyone a shade of brown" would even remove all overt bias.

[Seattle]

That's either boilerplate Republican rationale or preparing a defense for higher inequality in Democrat-run areas.

That's not a very nuanced response, is it?  "Republican boilerplate"? I guess even if you give a long nuanced response, if I'm feeling lazy (or stupid) I can respond with "Democratic boilerplate"?

If my post was brief, I guess the response would be , "That's too simplistic". If it's too long, "Republican boilerplate" even though I'm not a Republican.

[C C]

Everyday I read some study about inequality of income or wealth between some group or another. It’s largely meaningless, IMO. It creates the false premise that something is wrong and needs to be “fixed”.[...]

Systemic oppression concepts provide humanities scholars and social sciences investigators with career sustaining fodder in their "publish or perish" environment. It's a mainstay of political empowerment, and even a sloganeering moral facade for today's businesses, and the administrative policies of research and learning institutions (in the context of being champions fighting against it, in all its forms).

Seeking and interpreting any kind of data that bolsters those social injustice conspiracies theories as "facthood" is an imperative for the applicable dependent enterprises, intellectual class, and other beneficiaries. Initially sprouting in the 19th-century, it's simply the secular world co-opting or likewise parasitizing on what unscrupulous areas of religion and related charities had opportunistically hogged for too long: the abundant blessings of "altruistic causes".

[Seattle]

I like to read the views of people that I don't generally agree with. I was reading a series of articles written by young, black, female, "queer" (their term not mine) and I couldn't believe the nonsense. They were well meaning but it was all just nonsense.

One described herself as "female, black, exotic with wavy hair, with a "queer" perspective although not certain of her "queerness". Her thinking was that social work in favor of black, female, minorities should be done from the "queer" perspective even if she isn't sure that she is "queer".

This, in her opinion, is because it removes the oppressive male viewpoint from the equation. Of course she threw out a lot of verbiage, such as critical theory, intersectionality, micro-aggression,systemic racism,etc.

Another social activist who was running an organization in Chicago was upset when several black males were shot and killed on the Southside of Chicago. Two were dead immediately (drive-by shooting) and one survived for a few minutes and was taken to the nearest level II trauma unit which was 5 miles away but died before they got there.

She had studies that showed that if a trauma unit was more than 5 miles away it was much more likely for the victim to die. There was one 5 miles away but she wanted one closer. I can't quite picture expecting hospital trauma units to be 3 miles or less away but she and her organization lead protests, crowdfunding and was happy when a trauma unit was finally opened 3 miles away.

You would think the social activist view would be to work toward less shootings rather than working to have trauma units established every 3 miles?

The statistics in this articles were so illogical that it was hard to make sense of anything. Comparing blacks, whites, women, men, degrees, no degrees, the wrong degrees, whether households were married couples, whether they both had degrees and what degrees they had and even after all that, no matter what they had, they still have lower incomes and wealth than most any combination of all the other groups.

However, it was just a statistical mess and it was all predictable and had nothing to do with systemic racism or anything else other than personal choice.

If you compare white and black wealth and how many have college degrees without comparing like degrees to like degrees, none of it makes any sense.

Sure, if you study Black History you aren't going to be as wealthy and two electrical engineers living in the same household.

However, you will likely have the same income as a white Sociology major but that's not the comparison they are making. They are comparing their degrees to STEM degrees.

They complain that black males rarely have degrees but they don't compare that to white males without degrees who happen to be plumbers and electricians and who make more than many college graduates where race isn't even relevant.

No matter what has occurred in society, social programs, free education, child care, etc. It's never enough in their opinion simply because aggregate white and black income and wealth numbers aren't equal.

Of course, white engineer and sociology major incomes aren't equal either but they don't mention or consider that.

The only conclusion from reading all this, on my part, was what a waste of education, time, focus and that's not to say that everyone should have a STEM degree. It's to say that everyone should make their own choices and then be happy with them and not try to compare their situation to those who made other drastically different choices.

Of course social workers don't have high incomes and aren't likely to have much wealth either, especially if they don't invest.

[Zinjanthropos]

Ever worked in a union shop? I can guarantee you there are people vastly overpaid and vastly underpaid for what they do and yet they all have the same job description, rate of pay and representation.

[Syne]

That's either boilerplate Republican rationale or preparing a defense for higher inequality in Democrat-run areas.

That's not a very nuanced response, is it?  "Republican boilerplate"? I guess even if you give a long nuanced response, if I'm feeling lazy (or stupid) I can respond with "Democratic boilerplate"?

If my post was brief, I guess the response would be , "That's too simplistic". If it's too long, "Republican boilerplate" even though I'm not a Republican.

There is no nuance to the reality. Either equity of outcome makes sense in the real world or it doesn't, regardless of skill, talent, effort, or lack thereof.
I'm a Republican, so I know Republican boilerplate. I was either informing you, in case you weren't aware, or positing an alternative of prepping excuses for Democrats.
Like it or not, reality has a conservative bias.