The Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the German...Made it!

Of course culture is a part of it, but in the large scheme of things, culture isn't the biggest. A bigger one would be the educational and socio-economic background of the immigrants.

 

And generally, people who integrated into American society who are from those ethnic groups listed above... were able to look "White" (then blend in culturally) at some point in this society's history. That has been a distinct and substantive 'advantage', in America. But being Black? Not so much an advantage. People who simply 'look' that way... are were (and still are) often assailed by those who seek to place obstacles in their path. So, they still have to fight to be treated as fully-privileged and properly respected Americans. There is a longer curve to success than some others have experienced.

Honorable and reasonable people realize that what I've shared above, is certainly true-enough; even 'today'.

 

"Maybe they dont want to..."

Taxcutter says:
Then they have little right to expect prosperity.

Russians are notoriously resistant to assimilation, too.

 

... and there'd be no crime at all.

 

Education and socio-economic background definitely play a large role. But did asian immigrants come to the US rich and educated? I don't think so, unless I am mistaken.

 

So the crime rate would be cut by 28%, what about the other 72%?

 

They were definitely educated. Rich, I think we can look more at the result of their education. They farmed land that was previously thought to be useless desert. Afterward WWII, with the cold war bringing in all sorts of smart people from around the world, and the role of race starting to diminish, they started to become wealthier. So I would say, educated but became wealthy here. Or at least that's what I think happened.

 

... Which is a product of culture. As Thomas Sowell said, Chinese, whether here, or in Malaysia, have a tendency to go after highly technical degrees, which is quite attached to high standards of living.

Here or Malaysia, and you can bet your ass in Malaysia, the resident Government doesn't give a crap if the Chinese schools have enough computers or chalk for everyone. The Chinese still do better than the Native Malays.

Because they make it worth it, they take advantage of it.

Blacks were once able to outperform whites in poor areas of the country, despite having underfunded, under equipped schools. What made the difference was the cultural attitudes the schools themselves espoused. If they pushed students, the students succeeded. If they didn't push them, if they just gave them the barest passing grade and wrote them off, the students would under-perform.

And that's the history of many black schools, they started off under-equipped, but since they pushed their students, they still turned out well-educated graduates for decades... only to in later years succumb to unions and useless Bureaucrats who added nothing of substance and merely sucked the energy out of the schools like parasites.

EU interference = centralization of political power. That's always a bad sign.

But no, you mistake my point here. The WEST started out on top, because they had the more productive culture, having a commonality in the Greco-Roman legacy that binds them. The Eastern Europeans are only now set to overtake them, because the East are better learning new lessons for this new Information age, and tailor their cultural habits to follow, whereas the West is stagnant, caught up in what they once were, unwilling to adjust, and are even destroying many of the habits that made successful in the first place.

The East is essentially re-creating the Scottish Enlightenment, where a poorer, less educated culture, managed to become a dominant force by learning the lessons of their more successful neighbors, and improving upon them.

I never said a "better culture" I said a more productive culture. Let me be clear, productivity is just one parameter, it's up to you to decide if that means that they're are "better", but what it really comes down to is what it is you want out of that culture. Maybe you want a family emphasis, maybe you want social consciousness, maybe you want environmental consciousness, or maybe you want everyone to be geeks, etc.

Whatever it is you want, it likely comes with a trade-off where you are then sacrificing something else, to get more of the parameter you want. Just to give an example, the Japanese are some of the most industrious people in the world, but they also have one of the highest rates of suicides among the developed nations. The two trends likely have some relation, the high pressure for success leading to people more consistently feeling like abject failures when things don't go as planned.

History didn't seem to matter for the Chinese in Malaysia, or the Germans in Russia until the domestic Government began pushing them out.

Again, Fee simple, I have the data to back this.

Dawes does not ruin it, because Native Americans who were actually put under Fee simple didn't fail, it was all the others that bureaucrats with the Department of the Interior failed to deem "competent" so that they could get that recognition.

I say, don't even bother with the "competent" determination, just make all of the land fall under fee simple.

Except, not, as there's difference in terms of experience, what hours you're willing to work, if you're willing to travel, and even a pure difference in reputation.

Even when you think the odds are even, they're not. And it's been that misunderstanding that's been driving the entire debate.

Because women make different choices.

They:

1. Are more often to choose part-time jobs
2. Are more often to not work overtime
3. Are more likely to follow their spouses career opportunities, sacrificing the optimal career opportunities for themselves.
4. Are more likely to decide not to take a promotion to a higher-up position, as it would mean working more hours.
5. Are more likely to of had a disruption period in their career, so they have less experience/a less developed reputation than men they compete against or work alongside with.

Public Schools have been around for over a century. The trend of Women going to work in nigh-equal numbers to men only arose in the last 30 years, and it's because they were hiring nannies (or full time daycare, whichever), having only just now be in a position where nannies weren't just something the rich or upper middle class could afford.

It's because, per family, Americans became more wealthy, and by becoming more wealthy, their options expanded.

I did not. I'm saying there is no measure for discrimination, it's merely the statistician, failing to know what they don't know. Just like EEOC, when it sued Sears. Their numbers indicated victims, but they could not find any that were flesh and blood.

If you're going to represent the whole, then you need to account the choices most women make. If you don't, you're being dishonest. Once you account of those choices, it quite clear there is no problem, there was only a statistical artifact.

Because we were for over a century the world's largest free trade zone. Capital and labor were allowed to move and adjust at will.

We have been the world's largest economy since 1870, long before the Government became guilty of the hand-over-fist corporate welfare we see today. Before 1913, the U.S. Gov't wasn't even 10% of the U.S. economy. Before 1900, not even 5%. Beyond tariffs, the Federal Government was a virtual non-entity in the economy.

But I wasn't talking about their performance in the U.S., was I? I was talking about their performance while in Russia. The bit of them being in the U.S. is just to highlight the fact that, while they were in Russia, they did not assimilate. And they lived to a higher standard than the native Slavs regardless.

But we haven't been looking on the personal level, have we? We've looking on the macro level, to ask why these groups as groups, have been unsuccessful. And if we're going to do that, Culture is the closest thing to determinism we will get.

Lack of Economic Freedom will suppress results, true, but even among non-free societies, we see contrasts. Malaysia being one, much of the Middle East being another.

 

I don't think they were. Many immigrants from China labored hard building the railroads when they first got here, among other unskilled professions. Anti-Chinese sentiment was incredibly high, and they were criticized for offering cheap labor (sound familiar? Now its just the companies doing the moving). The Irish were especially poor when they first arrived, often living in ghettos. They were even discriminated against, with employers hanging signs reading "NINA" (No Irish need apply).

So why did the Chinese and the Irish rise (as a group) yet African Americans never have? All three started out poor, uneducated, and discriminated against. So there is another barrier getting in the way. Is it all culture? I don't think so. I think government policy plays a large role (minimum wage in particular).

 

What do they have in common? They're WHITE. You can't see them in a crowd of native white people. By now, our racism towards the black community is so ingrained into white consciousness, you might as well just make a class in kindergarten on how to be a racist towards black people.

Also, we didn't own the irish, italians, polish or german folk. We did make their lives difficult to an extent, but we never owned them. Also, consider their country of origin in their original introduction to the United States...I believe the African people were more community driven, not government driven, thus had no true defense against their abduction and forced slavery. We've literally forced white ideals onto them via our intervention into their history. Just because a people are 'content' with not being like you does not mean they do not have happiness. However, we saw their 'simple' ways (which far exceed our own in terms of values) as easily exploitable and early Americans did just that.

Such a crap chapter in the history of man as a species, in my opinion, along with manifest destiny, a majestic word for 'if you don't cooperate, we will slay you'.

For these reasons, I feel ashamed to be a white person in America. I don't have white guilt. It's more or less white embarrassment because my ancestors were just complete @$$holes. Leaving me to apologize for them and have to pick up the pieces they left behind from their own savage ways. And yes, it is savagery. I find it funny how 'savages' seems to invoke an idea of someone who's not educated in modern ways, but then you have a bunch of seemingly educated people committing these insane acts of pure evil to their own kind...it's unforgivable.

 

Your analysis too easily brushes-over the sustained dehumanization most African Americans endured as a part of this nation's history. You make some interesting points, but I don't think your conclusion is completely correct.

 

Let's start off with Chinese immigration then. 1840's, yeah they were discriminated against, well up to the 1950's. But with the communist uprisings in various countries, many immigrated to the US. The parents would have been poor, displaced, or well educated trying to flee. Poor, they want to make sure there kids do well, so education is the key. Displaced, they have some skills that allow them to be useful to society. Educated, need I say more?

Irish. The Irish have always been discriminated against too. But the bulk came in the 1840's. By the 1920's, they were assimilated into American culture, even if they kept their own aspects of it. They also settled mostly in Northern cities. There, the sheer number of them, voted Democrat, gaining political pressure, and thus was able to overall improve. The reason we can look at them as a bloc is because they were all discriminated against equally. It didn't matter if you were single, poor, wealthy, married, you were hated for simply being Irish. Democrat, I don't know his name off the top of my head but the 1920 Democratic candidate was Catholic. We can also look at the Great Depression. The "Brother can you spare a dime?" mentality shook everyone. It didn't matter where you came from, what you were like before hand. Everyone struggled. It didn't matter who was going to spare a dime, just someone. So ethnicity didn't seem as important afterwards, just race.

Now as African Americans. Most of them were in the South prior to the Great Migration. They didn't have political influence due to the Jim Crow laws, and other voting issues. Economic, no. Sharecropping forced many into debt. Also the educated would have also had trouble finding jobs, due to simple racism. After the Great Migration, we start to see a change in adittude towards African Americans. One reason was the Great Depression, but that in itself wasn't enough. So then, how do we explain the rise of the African American middle class? We also have to look at Hitler. FDR wanted to fight the racist Hitler overseas, but if you can't fight the Hitlers at home, how can you fight him overseas. This idea did two things. 1. Forced the Federal Government to stand up against racism at home. We see this through the banning of racial discrimination in the war industry, and the GI Bill. Now you had the basis for precedence. The second, many African Americans joined the NAACP, gaining a much louder voice. After WWII, The GI bill helped finance a lot of things, houses in the suburbs, college etc. Many of the people joined the NAACP were middle class African Americans, who tired of discrimination despite the fact they were college educated and now living the American dream. The civil rights era- they gained rights. They couldn't be discriminated against in the workplace,housing, voting rights etc. But we need to remember something. This was a southern thing it wasn't nation wide. 1965, race riots in the north over the lack of change there. People were also upset over the New Left, Hippies, all the chaos of the 1960's. The Silent Majority just wanted things to end. They did, with Nixon. All the change that still had to be made, wasn't accomplished. No economic reform for African Americans, there were laws to protect them, but not enough to give them a chance to get out of poverty. So basically, the civil rights era wasn't able to do all that needed to be done.

 

So I read through all nine pages and thought I'd give my input as one of my first posts here.

Yes, and China was absolutely ransacked in WW2. So was Korea, and pretty much Japan. The Soviet Union was burnt to the ground. Africa had a great chance post-colonialism much like Asia or South America but managed to do significantly worse for many reasons. Saying that it was mere colonialism is a bit too general.

Because unbelievable incarceration rates separate predominately minority parents.It's also a population that, with modern media, has over-emphasized sex and under-educated on sexual health and responsibility.

Asians have been the dominant immigrant group in America for the past hundred years or so. With periods where Eastern European or Hispanics have eclipsed them, but overall the trend is clear. Currently, even, Asian immigrants outnumber Hispanics.

They were segregated for a long time, though. A really long time. It's why we have little towns in major cities. Little Italy, Poland, etc.

Actually, Asians are wealthier per family; but their families are typically larger and per capita they usually fall just a bit less than the average white American. That said, current trends show them eclipsing the white American handily because the older, jobless and non-English speaking generation is passing and the younger college student is graduating.

Yes, and settlers to China and East Asia were some of the slowest. China was many hundred, if not thousands of years behind Mesopotamia in ancient times. Japan much behind Korea and China for an even longer time. When Korea was transitioning from bronze to iron, Japan was beginning to enter the bronze age. But things changed. Europe went into darkness and the Chinese dynasties rose. Then they fell with the Mongols and Europe was the big one on Earth. By time the Mongol yolk had been repealed, Europe came around with Imperialism and so on. Now Asia looks better poised for the future than Europe.

Long story short, the world is a delicate fabric that changes everything; and Africa hasn't kept up for a variety of reasons.

No, most weren't. The educated and rich went to Taiwan. The majority of the Asian immigrants were displaced from war or escaping Communism.

 

Then perhaps you'd like to explain why more blacks use drugs and turn to hopeless lives of crime and self-destruction today than they did 100 years ago. I have my answer. I'm just curious to hear yours.

 

Corvus - you did me the favour of quoting me - African countries have historically been colonised which means they were treated as resources for imperialist nations. Their colonisation was to provide needed goods for the imperialist nations and because they were colonised they became markets for goods from the imperialist nations. Simple really.

And your response was - Yes, and China was absolutely ransacked in WW2. So was Korea, and pretty much Japan. The Soviet Union was burnt to the ground. Africa had a great chance post-colonialism much like Asia or South America but managed to do significantly worse for many reasons. Saying that it was mere colonialism is a bit too general.


Let's compare like with like. China was a mature empire before it was partitioned by the West. Japan learned from China's mistakes and dealt with the West (the US in particular) in a much more constructive manner. Neither were colonised. The Soviet Union suffered greatly in the Great Patriotic War but it was hardly "burned to the ground". Again, it wasn't colonised. Africa has probably been the most colonised region on Earth, probably followed up by Central and South America and parts of Asia. Colonisation not only takes natural resources, it also imposes government and not usually a democratic government. The success story of colonisation is probably the Indian Sub-Continent which managed self-government after independence in its various parts. True there are problems in those nations now but certainly nothing approaching Africa's issues.

 

China was not a mature empire. It had been at one point, but between having the Qing (Manchurian) imperialism, and then a fractured attempt at a national one with competing warlords (similar to Africa) it got decimated in WW2. That's after western nations segmented ports, flooded the market with opium, and then fled with all their investment when WW2 came around. Lost over 20 million people then. The Soviet Union, similarly, still hasn't recovered the population decrease the war created.

Africa was heavily colonized, but so was Asia. Hell, Hong Kong remained for much longer. India, Southeast Asia, etc. Korea was a "colony" of China and then Japan.

Africa's situation is exacerbated by colonization, but it is much more than that. Asia and South America rebounded better because they had a foundation prior. Africa's situation predates colonialism, then.

 

But that doesn't apply to the Chinese Malays. They started out Socioeconomically disadvantaged by virtue of the Malayan Emergency. Their eventual rise to the top, had nothing to do with what their domestic Government offered them, because their domestic Government, is anything but friendly to them.

Their domestic Government, dominated and influenced by ethnic Malays, is "helpful" to them, but biased against the Ethnic Chinese. And yet, it's the Chinese, not the former, who earns an income twice that of the other.

Which is a product of culture. If they value the kind of education that allows their kin to get ahead in life, then it would show. And it does.

The source came from within themselves, they didn't start with wealth, rather they earned it the hard way. They bettered themselves and earned a place in their societies, in the same fashion Booker T. Washington said blacks should earn theirs. And which most did, right up until the 1960s.

You're not following. I'm saying even blacks in poor neighbors, who went to school, succeeded, so circumstance cannot be to blame. It's work ethic, and promoting in school a culture that breeds success. Once schools were divorced from that, made to be institutions that work at the pleasure of Administrative bodies and public sector Unions not the students, even the good schools fell apart.

These schools used to regularly turned out African Americans that could join the middle class or even higher, Thomas Sowell was one of them, despite himself being a High school drop-out.

And have ultimately lead to their downfall, whether it's the Romans, or the Ottomans, or the Chinese dynasties. The innovation introduced by the U.S. Constitution, was the creation of Concurrent Jurisdiction, recognizing power had to be divided between National and Regional authorities, in order to get the best result. It was a similar division of power that earned the old empires their success to begin with, and once it was taken away, their status waned, and their prosperity declined.

The Romans never conquered the Russians. There is a notable difference between those cultures who once lived under Roman rule, and those who did not. The fact that the Russians do not have the Roman, but the Cyrillic alphabet, which was adopted centuries later, hangs a lantern on how limited and late the influence was.

It's not the Eastern countries who are lagging behind, rather, it's the EU that's lagging behind the rest of the world.

By 2016, the U.S. will be a bigger economy, despite having 200 million less people, and less resources.

By 2020, less than 5% of economic productivity in world will take place in West and central Europe.

If trends continue, Eastern Europe will itself come to surpass the EU, both because they have higher birth rates, and have economies that are growing at far more than just <1%. It'll take a while, but if they stay on track, it will occur, just as Brazil surpassed Russia, or Japan surpassing all of the old colonial power.

The Estates in France were very much a product of culture, you're pretty much splitting hairs here.

Scottish Enlightenment. I' am not speaking to the Enlightenment as whole, rather, I'm making a parallel to a specific event in history, where, once again, a poorer, less educated culture compared to its neighbor (The Scotts), became a dominant force because it took the lessons of its more successful neighbor (The English), learned and improved upon them. In doing so, Scotts were for a time richer than Englishmen.

Hence, it's not just "better because Enlightenment", but better than the neighbors who had already benefited from enlightenment in the first place, because, they distilled what had made the latter succesful. This is a truly rare occurrence, and I'm saying Eastern Europe is setting themselves up for the same thing.

Productivity, wealth creation per capita. China produces more wealth than England, but they are not more productive (yet), because they have less wealth "per head".

No no, read this now:

No native American under Fee-simple suffered, not now, or 50 or 100 years ago. Your source does not dispute this. Rather, as it states, all the other Native Americans who had failed to qualify, which was the MAJORITY of them, continued to suffer. The department of the Interior simply set the bar too high, and continued to manage the bulwark of Native lands under the same old trust system that was leaving them in abject poverty.

All Native Americans, TODAY, who live under a Fee-simple system, not only equate with all other Americans in per capita income, in some cases, they surpass them.

So if we want to improve their lot, the path is clear: manage all of the land under fee simple. If private property rights are allowed work as they should, people prosper, that's been the case everywhere it's been done. It's why even Honduras is considering erecting an autonomous Common law city within their borders, everyone wants to have a Hong Kong.

Except what exactly "2" here is, is subjective, not a fixed concept as it is in true mathematics. If you try to treat sociology or economics as a clear cut science the same as physics, you will get burned.

... But it's women who are choosing to do it. No one is forcing them, they made the decision to have kids, they made the decision to augment their Husband's/signifigant other's income, they made the decision to prioritize other things other than their careers. And it was all their choice.

I know of a Female co-captain for United Airlines, who specifically chose to remain a co-captain (right seat) years after gaining all the seniority she needed to take promotion to captain (left seat), because it would take more time away from her kids. She discussed that with her Husband, another pilot for United, and came to that decision. No one forced her, it was her choice.

I know of another women, a retired Army Officer. She could have become a one-star, a Brigadier General, people who knew her were already set to offer her the command if she wanted it. But she instead decided to end her career as a Colonel, a battalion Commander, because she simply wanted to retire and spend more time with her kids. It wasn't that she'd be sent overseas, these were all domestic positions, it was simply that the job itself took away her time with her family. She too discussed that choice with her husband, also a Colonel in the Army, and came to that decision. No one forced her, it was her choice.

Women choosing not to further their careers is their choice, and what's more it's a legitimate choice, because career advancement isn't always their top priority. They have other concerns that rival it.

Biological imperative dictates at least some women are going to have to stay out of the workforce to ensure continuity of the species. You're mistaking discrimination, for simple reality.

And by virtue of the fact those women will always exist, they skew the measurements for the equality you speak of.

When we get down to brass tacks, either you measure women who are not Mothers, Divorcees, nor followed their Husband's career opportunities, to measure against men int he same straits, or you are measuring arbitrarily. Markets value people, or rather, their Human capital by what they can OBJECTIVELY add. And a Mother who took time (likely months to years) off of work to raise their kids, has human capital inferior in value to a man (or even another childless women), who did not take that same time off.

That's not discrimination, that's recognition of an objective fact, that this women, has less skills/ less of a reputation, than the man or woman who did not make the same choice.

Nope. Consumption has gone up, even among the bottom 20% of Americans in the last 10 years. It'd be more accurate to say that the rate at which they are improving their standard of living, has gone down. Which, considering there's still a recession going on, it's not hard to reason why,

Except, the act of women simply getting jobs (not full time careers) is a trend that dates back to the 1840's, where the feminist movement was nothing but a foot note, It wasn't "civil rights", rather, it was a changing economic paradigm which no longer demanded that single women had remain at home to help on the farm. You could also say the World Wars had an impact, further flushing female workers into industry.

If you want the full details, just watch this, if you happen to have the time.

I'm reiterating to you what the court itself determined. Their words. Statistics said there were victims, but interviews, examination of hiring practices, and observance of workplace environments did not. After 15 years of searching, not a single flesh & blood victim was located. The EEOC, got it wrong.

If your model does not reflect reality, then its the models that got it wrong, not the other way around.

For the most part, yes. It would seem discrimination is so rare, that it isn't statistically measurable. The women's own choice have a far more discernible impact.

Once again, we can make control conditions to such an extent, that if anything, it's Men who are being discriminated.
Women who actually compete on the same level as men, who don't have concerns at home drawing their attention, tend to be more successful than their male counterparts, not less.

There's disagreement to be sure, but 1870 is a date many quote as when the U.S. surpassed Britain in nominal terms.

In terms of purchase parity, this list still has us as $2,000 Below, but considering that only 50 years ago Britain had been more than twice our size, that's Phenomenal growth, and then by 1913, we were more than twice the size of Britain.

Many in fact thought in the 18th century that America would surpass Britain by 1800, as even in the 1780's America had a productivity advantage, just not the population that would have made a larger economy. What stalled it was Britain falling into the Industrial Revolution before us.

You keep confusing the time frames and locations, I'm not quite sure if it's intentional or not, but regardless here is my actual point:

Germans in Russia, up to the Mass exodus in the late 19th and early 20th century, did not assimilate. They only engaged with native Russians on their own terms, and remained the richest portion of the Russian population for over a century.

After the rise of Russian nationalism, and then Socialism, most Germans were forced to flee, one of the largest examples being Kaliningrad Oblast, a once majoritivly German region known as East Prussia, that had its population kicked out replaced with Russians.

Those Germans who remained, had no basis to continue the societies they had lived in for so long, the current political landscape they found themselves in wouldn't have allowed it. To survive, they had to assimilate, and thus, over time became indistinguishable from native Russians, to include their productivity.

But history shown is it's not what you have, rather, it's what you do with it.

Lack of supplies just limits, perhaps, how successful you can be, it won't stop you from being more successful if you leverage yourself the more responsibly. Case in point, Hong Kong, they have only one chief export, feldspart, they are not resource rich, and yet, they are rich, whereas 50 years ago they were little distinguishable from any other poor far Eastern Region. The same to Singapore, once one of the poorest places on Earth, who now averages 1 out of 6 households being millionaires.

Then there's the Ethnic Malays, who have every advantage, subsidies for food housing and education, land-relocation's, a Government that responds to them on populist terms.

And yet, it's the discriminated Chinese who just 50 years ago were brutally suppressed re-located by their Government, that are the more successful. You have done nothing to explain this, and it's becoming clear to me, you likely don't have one.

 

"...unbelievable incarceration rates..."

Taxcutter says:
...driven by an astronomical crime rate. Usually convicted by all-black juries.

 

There isn't a study around that says Blacks and Whites are convicted on a proportional level.

 

Suspects are indeed convicted proportionally. There are disproportionate numbers of black suspects.

 

There are a disproportionate number of black arrests compared to the available criminal pool.

 

There is a high crime rate in black neighborhoods. Lots of black victims and black perps. Hence more arrest of blacks.

 

The Italians, Jews, Irish etc made it before the welfare state got started destroying their family units and the education system.

 

1880's to before WWII?

- - - Updated - - -

Because the poor have always used drugs and comitte crime?