Dec 28, 2023 08:52 PM
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/qua...n-america/
EXCERPTS: . . . The answers to these questions lie at the very core of what constitutes a fair society. [...] When poverty, being Black, and living in a neighborhood with poor schools all predict worse outcomes, how can we disentangle them?
Statisticians call this problem multicollinearity, and a number of straightforward methods using some of the largest databases on social mobility ever assembled provide surprisingly clear answers to these questions—the biggest obstacle children face in America is having the bad luck of being born into a poor family.
The immense impact of parental income on the future earnings of children has been established by a tremendous body of research...
[...] Although there is no substitute for being born rich, outcomes for children from families with the same income differ in predictable and sometimes surprising ways. After controlling for household income, the largest racial earnings gap is between Asians and Whites, with Whites who grew up poor earning approximately 11 percent less than their Asian peers at age 40, followed by a two percent reduction if you are poor and Hispanic and an additional 11 percent on top of that if you are born poor and Black.
Some of these differences, however, result from how we measure income. [...] Just as focusing on household income obscures differences in marriage rates between races, focusing on all children conceals important sex differences, and boys who grow up poor are far more likely to remain that way than their sisters. This is especially true for Black boys who earn 9.7 percent less than their White peers, while Black women actually earn about one percent more than White women born into families with the same income. Chetty writes:
"Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women."
So, what drives these differences? If it is racism, as many contend, it is a peculiar type. It seems to benefit Asians, hurts Black men, and has no detectable effect on Black women.
A closer examination of the data reveals their source. Almost all of the remaining differences between Black men and men of other races lie in neighborhoods. These disadvantages could be caused either by what is called an “individual-level race effect” whereby Black children do worse no matter where they grow up, or by a “place-level race effect” whereby children of all races do worse in areas with large Black populations. Results show unequivocal support for a place-level effect. Chetty writes:
"The main lesson of this analysis is that both blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility."
Multiple studies have confirmed this basic finding, revealing that children who grow up in families with similar incomes and comparable neighborhoods have the same chances of success. In other words, poor White kids and poor Black kids who grow up in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles are equally likely to become poor adults.
Disentangling the effects of income, race, family structure, and neighborhood on social mobility is a classic case of multicollinearity (i.e., correlated predictors), with race effectively masking the real causes of reduced social mobility—parent’s income.
The residual effects are explained by family structure and neighborhood. Black men have the worst outcomes because they grow up in the poorest families and worst neighborhoods with the highest prevalence of single mothers. Asians, meanwhile, have the best outcomes because they have the richest parents, with the lowest rates of divorce, and grow up in the best neighborhoods.
The impact that family structure has on the likelihood of success first came to national attention in 1965, when the Moynihan Report9 concluded that the breakdown of the nuclear family was the primary cause of racial differences in achievement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor (who later served as Senator from New York) argued that high out-of-wedlock birth rates and the large number of Black children raised by single mothers created a matriarchal society that undermined the role of Black men. In 1965, he wrote:
"In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.
A closer look at these data, however, reveals that the disadvantage does not come from being raised by a single mom but rather results from growing up in neighborhoods without many active fathers. In other words, it is not really about whether your own parents are married. Children who grow up in two-parent households in these neighborhoods have similarly low rates of social mobility. Rather, it seems to depend on growing up in neighborhoods with a lot of single parents... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . The answers to these questions lie at the very core of what constitutes a fair society. [...] When poverty, being Black, and living in a neighborhood with poor schools all predict worse outcomes, how can we disentangle them?
Statisticians call this problem multicollinearity, and a number of straightforward methods using some of the largest databases on social mobility ever assembled provide surprisingly clear answers to these questions—the biggest obstacle children face in America is having the bad luck of being born into a poor family.
The immense impact of parental income on the future earnings of children has been established by a tremendous body of research...
[...] Although there is no substitute for being born rich, outcomes for children from families with the same income differ in predictable and sometimes surprising ways. After controlling for household income, the largest racial earnings gap is between Asians and Whites, with Whites who grew up poor earning approximately 11 percent less than their Asian peers at age 40, followed by a two percent reduction if you are poor and Hispanic and an additional 11 percent on top of that if you are born poor and Black.
Some of these differences, however, result from how we measure income. [...] Just as focusing on household income obscures differences in marriage rates between races, focusing on all children conceals important sex differences, and boys who grow up poor are far more likely to remain that way than their sisters. This is especially true for Black boys who earn 9.7 percent less than their White peers, while Black women actually earn about one percent more than White women born into families with the same income. Chetty writes:
"Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women."
So, what drives these differences? If it is racism, as many contend, it is a peculiar type. It seems to benefit Asians, hurts Black men, and has no detectable effect on Black women.
A closer examination of the data reveals their source. Almost all of the remaining differences between Black men and men of other races lie in neighborhoods. These disadvantages could be caused either by what is called an “individual-level race effect” whereby Black children do worse no matter where they grow up, or by a “place-level race effect” whereby children of all races do worse in areas with large Black populations. Results show unequivocal support for a place-level effect. Chetty writes:
"The main lesson of this analysis is that both blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility."
Multiple studies have confirmed this basic finding, revealing that children who grow up in families with similar incomes and comparable neighborhoods have the same chances of success. In other words, poor White kids and poor Black kids who grow up in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles are equally likely to become poor adults.
Disentangling the effects of income, race, family structure, and neighborhood on social mobility is a classic case of multicollinearity (i.e., correlated predictors), with race effectively masking the real causes of reduced social mobility—parent’s income.
The residual effects are explained by family structure and neighborhood. Black men have the worst outcomes because they grow up in the poorest families and worst neighborhoods with the highest prevalence of single mothers. Asians, meanwhile, have the best outcomes because they have the richest parents, with the lowest rates of divorce, and grow up in the best neighborhoods.
The impact that family structure has on the likelihood of success first came to national attention in 1965, when the Moynihan Report9 concluded that the breakdown of the nuclear family was the primary cause of racial differences in achievement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor (who later served as Senator from New York) argued that high out-of-wedlock birth rates and the large number of Black children raised by single mothers created a matriarchal society that undermined the role of Black men. In 1965, he wrote:
"In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.
A closer look at these data, however, reveals that the disadvantage does not come from being raised by a single mom but rather results from growing up in neighborhoods without many active fathers. In other words, it is not really about whether your own parents are married. Children who grow up in two-parent households in these neighborhoods have similarly low rates of social mobility. Rather, it seems to depend on growing up in neighborhoods with a lot of single parents... (MORE - missing details)