As I’m now focused on this concept of “accident of birth”, Nobel Prize winning economist has an essay at Boston Review which begins, front-loaded:
The accident of birth is a principle source of inequality in America today. American society is dividing into skilled and unskilled, and the roots of this division lie in early childhood experiences. Kids born into disadvantaged environments are at much greater risk of being unskilled, having low lifetime earnings, and facing a range of personal and social troubles, including poor health, teen pregnancy, and crime. While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate.
This powerful impact of birth on life chances is bad for individuals born into disadvantage. And it is bad for American society. We are losing out on the potential contributions of large numbers of our citizens.
If you believe that birth is a lottery, that your being is the function of chance rather than fate, then you’re more likely to buy into this argument that birth is an accident. As such, your success or failure is not your own. It is shared in a sort of pre-natal pool. As if you were sitting around pre-sparkle-in-your-father’s-eye vowing to share in the misery or success of your pre-natal peers. Others accept the opposite, that a being is a function of the genetic investments and choices of their ancestors. They don’t have to share. I understand both arguments but I cannot bring myself to accept that I am so random. I am not a blank slatist.
Heckman’s essay has several responses, most notably from Charles Murray, Geoffrey Canada (Harlem charter school czar and another Obama succubite), Robin West, and Cato’s Neal McCluskey.
West points out that Heckman is making a rational economic claim on a topic that is usually addressed in terms of social justice. I was struck by the same thought. Is this about what is most profitable for the State or what is morally right? Or are the two concepts always tied together?
Charles Murray points out that many studies which show that early investment in infants and children lose their impact as these children age. As McCluskey also argues, it is probably not correct to allow institutions which have a vested interest in promoting these social programs to design these types of studies.
Finally we come to Geoffrey Canada who hits on the arguments I’ve been making all day. He writes:
To make the kind of dramatic progress we need, we have to rethink our definition of public education, so it begins before kindergarten and goes beyond classroom walls.
In other words, cradle-to-grave paternalism. You just can’t succeed without the government intervening as soon as you shoot out of the womb.
Canada later writes:
Children at risk belong to all of us; we need to start acting that way.
Is this true? Would a wealthy parent exercise their claim on a poor child with as much gusto as a poor parent would exercise their claim on a wealthy child? Going back to the Gawker piece which sparked all of this, something is lost when we begin thinking of our existence as random chance. Our autonomy isn’t ours; society rules us. Freedom is ultimately lost, and the State comes to own our soul and then our body. If the paternalists can convince us that we’re all functions of chance then they have us by the moral short hairs.
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None of these writers seem to grasp the possibility that our meritocracy has succesfully sorted groups by IQ, such that now the children of the very unsuccessful generally have (allowing for some exceptions) a much lower IQ than the children of the successful, if we ignore for this purpose the children of ditzy entertainers (although even they tend to have higher IQs than trailer park trash or ghetto moms). That’s an unpleasant thought that upsets people, but that makes it no less true. And, since low IQ types tend to breed much more irresponsibly, all of these policy prescriptions of theirs will clearly lead to long term disaster unless they are prepared to accept unthinkable things like a sterilization policy for the stupid or poor (at least as to the poor who accept government aid for their children). Setting up a subsidized breeding contest with the lower classes is not good policy. Obviously, we already have done that to some extent, but these people seem to want to double down on it or triple down on it.
Murray understands it. Heckman and Canada probably don’t.
I can’t believe that GLPiggy didn’t notice the subliminal message. BostonReview wrote “teen pregnancy”. It did not write single motherhood, because that would be offensive towards feminists, since being an older single mother (thanks to IVF) after not being able to catch Mr. Big is fabulous. Feminists are offended at very young mothers, not because they are sexual young, at birth risks due to being physically underdeveloped, bad strategists and their innocence has been ruined, but because they are very young mothers (and in their mind “Patriarchy”).
In reality most patriarchal religious women start to have babies in their 20′s, and like Todd Akin has suggested, possibly only abort during legitimate cases, where a strange man, who has no claim on her, nor has the permission from her father to be her husband (which is far fewer than liberal women, since liberal gals are all over casual sex with strangers, attract their attention through their promiscuity, don’t find nothing wrong with NSA sex, and consistently seek the affection of men who have no claim on her). Of course liberal feminists scream that this is barbaric. It is not. Legitimate cases (e.g. deformities, life’s mother in danger due to mutations, etc) deserve abortion, getting drunk and regret-the-next-morning rape sex is illegitimate. One shouldn’t lie to get abortions. THAT is barbaric.
If you look at out-of-wedlock births, the highest predictor for single motherhood is race, with 70% to 90% of single mothers being Black, 40 to 50% being Hispanic and only 20% of White working mothers being single mothers.
That means roughly half to maybe 2/3s of white women that get pregnant outside of marriage (age not specified), do not suffer from single motherhood and the fathers are present until the child has grown up (and possibly even further). This pattern can be replicated in some parts of Europe, where while women have babies outside of marriage, the child can have both a father and a mother at the end.
The best people among us hope all people, young and old, have good lives; however, outcomes cannot be equal because people are not “one-size-fits-all.” When leaders start designing social systems, school systems, food pyramids, health benefits, and what can play on the radio so we can be “equal”….see where it has gotten us? Eventually the people that have anything will be expected to share with the rest until no one has much at all, and the specialness of everyone is lost in the noise of trying to be the right kind of “equal”.
We must re-distribute prestigious journalism jobs immediately!
It’s really hard to change who you are. I think people can make small improvements of themselves, but that is usually it. At least that’s how it has always been for me.
“Our autonomy isn’t ours; society rules us.Freedom is ultimately lost, and the State comes to own our soul and then our body. ”
indeed. Though some of them(or most of them?) don’t see it or can even comprehend it, otoh Laurie Penny of the ‘so what if gosling saved me, there are women dying in 3rd world’ fame, writes:
‘Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own …’
the sentiment isn’t new:
“Children will, of course, be the greatest gift possible to the State, and the woman who produces them will provided for, protected, and honoured. After all, this is a question of education.”
http://wombatty.blogtownhall.com/2012/05/14/early_feminists_moderate_or_radical.thtml
the firestone gal had written of this temporary tyranny of women over reproduction before artifical wombs become a reality and we are ushered into the pansexual brave new world.
a funny take on the whole autonomy business is this meme:
http://uberhumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/n7jlt3.jpg
Stacy,
Are you a “single mother” as in you are a mother without a spouse/partner? Or, are you a “single mother” as in you raise your child/children ALL BY YOURSELF (singularly)?
I ask because the latter option is actually nonexistent while the former option was probably “a choice.”
Ironically, it is the false belief in the latter (mothers raise children single-handedly) that justifies the former (mothers can choose to raise child single-handedly).
90% of your life outcome will be determined by your birth. That seems really obvious and I hope its not in dispute by anyone.
Given this some measure of humility and charity seems appropriate (again, is this really in dispute?). However, what form that humility and charity should take is a much more difficult question. Obviously the answers on the left are generally bad ones, as shown by their bad track record. Sadly, many who oppose these measure try to oppose them not by criticizing their results, but criticizing the very idea that the accident of birth is an important factor in outcomes. That is silly.
I can’t believe that people actually think this way. It’s as if they never heard of working hard so your children have a better life. OH. I’m supposed to work hard so YOUR children can have a better life. I see the motivation. Look, I don’t mind paying for a public education system if it does its job, because we’re all better off. But, preventing me from making decisions and sacrifices on behalf of my own children goes against everything nature imbued in me.
Well, it looks like we’ll have to wait 3 or 4 generations for this experiment to be complete anyways since according to epigenetics the habits and lifestyle of my great-great grandfather started the chain toward what I am today. It’s the last beacon of hope for the NURTURE crowd. Four generations of berating the lower IQ kids with high-brow art and extra math and everybody is going to be a doctor, lawyer or professor (and if that fails, a journalist).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/why-fathers-really-matter.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
“The accident of birth is a principle source of inequality in America today. ”
Dammit! “Principle” is a noun, “principal” an adjective. Get it right, moron! Or, do you get a pass because you were born in poor circumstances?
“You just can’t succeed without the government intervening as soon as you shoot out of the womb.”
Why wait until they shoot out? Start at conception
I think about this sort of thing when I see clips of the Maury show. (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1EAFx4DTmE&feature=related). These children are destined to be the lowest of the low class; their mother literally has no idea who the father is.
The harsh reality is that the children of these women SHOULD struggle. A good society punishes the children of irresponsible women.
Throughout history women have evolved to be sympathetic towards men. Good women look vulnerable, act vulnerable, and care for the man that protects them and their offspring. Women evolved to do this and look the way they do, with narrow chins and big eyes and weak shoulders, because it was helpful to them and their children that they appear vulnerable. Their vulnerability and “wifely” compassion for their protector men were their bread and butter evolutionarily. Women who angered and antagonized the men in their lives, or who callously threw the men away like so many single mothers of today, were left to fend for themselves, and so were their children. That was their punishment: facing the world alone without help for their children. It is no accident that the mother and child both bear significant portion of this punishment.
Social liberalism posits that what women have evolved to be is useless, that a woman who can keep her man around is no more valuable than a woman who cannot or will not do so. Regardless of whether the woman keeps the man around, the state FORCES men to protect the woman’s children, through forced payment from the father and/or through social liberal programs like those driven by the equalist schooling fantasy. These programs say to the woman, “It’s okay that you can’t convince men to take care of your offspring, there’s no need for that skill-set in this day and age.”
This is pure idiocy, all of it.
I think the strangest/funniest/most disturbing thing about this line of thought is the way that non-elite outcomes are considered a tragedy. It’s like no American born person should ever be a truck driver or a janitor or an admin assistant. Can’t they let average people be average? They are so quick to dismiss the future of manual jobs, and imagine everyone working with abstract ideas in information-heavy industries.
So, you have NCLB and you have to inflate the self-esteem of average people so their heads are filled with thoughts of VP and DIrector. Actually, the accidental kids are more likely to be less apt for higher achievement(on avg) so sending them off to fail at college is a waste of money.
Gilbert Ratchet, your grade school principal has just sentenced you to detention, for displaying simple ignorance in public.
I was raised by a widow (my Mom), my father died when I was 12. My Mom had 4 kids with no help from her large Irish Catholic family (that family is another issue). I had no money when I decided to go to college and had to survive on my own. Student loans, full-time work and the military helped me through and I now have a good living as an Engineer. So my opine about this is it is BS thru and thru. I saw many like me struggle with no help from anybody but still made it to a degree and a decent life. What I used to see in our society is the message of hard work and you can make it. Just ask the illegals filtering in from Mexico, I live in the SW USA. BS I SAY!