Is Obama hurting the Black community?

Here are some graphs of black and white unemployment over time:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/01/black_and_white.html

Caveats:

  1. The blog post was made in January, 2006 - the series appear to end in 2005.

  2. The first graph uses 2.5 as a baseline instead of the more logical (IMO) 0.0.

The black line is the gap.

It appears the unemployment gap widens during recessions. It appears to me there has been little long term trend in the series (outside of the spikes during recessions). Possibly a very marginal long-term increase in the overall gap - hard to say from simple eyeballing.

I think out and out racism in the workplace, schools and public venues is largely a thing of the past. We don’t see people discriminated against based on skin color or ethnic background when they apply for jobs, attend school or go to the movies or a sporting event. There is still “personal racism” going on (like the example someone above posted of the racist neighbors) but time, education and exposure will help stamp that out in years to come.

The problem we face now is a class system that perpetuates some of the problems we had when overt racism was more prevelant. Too much of the lower class in this country is made up of minorities and it’s been that way for so long that it’s corrupted every social service ever put in place to try to remedy the problem. The education system is failing lower class people of all races. The welfare system is a twisted parody of it’s original purpose. Healthcare is structured all wrong for people at or below the poverty line. Damn near every aspect of the systems that are supposed to help the working poor are actually keeping them firmly emplaced in the lower class with little hope of change. It’s important to remember that this effects people of ALL ethnic backgrounds, from inner city blacks and Hispanics to Appalachian whites. Our Social Services and Education systems in this country need a serious overhaul and redesign. Only then will we be able to address the class gap and truly begin to eradicate racism and promote equality. That’s a hell of a lot of work, and will take more than the term of any single President to accomplish.

Fun detail - incarceration is a labor market outcome. Which means the black/white unemployment gap has gotten far worse since the 1970s, what with the enormous number of black men in prison.

I’m not suggesting that incarceration is disguised unemployment (though obviously it reduces measured unemployment). Rather, I’m saying that, like unemployment, incarceration should be regarded as a (bad) labor market outcome. If you want to evaluate the performance of the labor market, you need to look at both.

There’s nothing radical or leftist about this viewpoint: it’s one that is at least implicit in all economic models of the labor market of which I’m aware, and is most particularly explicit in that of the Chicago School*. Most of the crimes for which people are imprisoned in the US can be understood as reflecting economic choices which in turn are determined primarily by the labor market in which those choices are made. This is obviously true of property crime and drug dealing, and it’s true, directly or indirectly, of lots of violent crime as well. As Gary Becker put it (quoting from memory here) “a burglar is a burglar for the same reasons as I am a professor”. (You don’t have to buy Becker’s assumption that criminality is a “rational” choice, to agree that it is a choice and that choices reflect the attractiveness of the available options).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060201780_pf.html

Eventually, Mansoor finishes with a video of an experiment conducted by a television station. The clerk at a bagel shop pretends to refuse service to a Muslim woman, and the camera focuses on other customers’ responses. Three customers congratulate the clerk for taking a stand against “un-American terrorists.” Several others leave the store in protest. One man, moved to tears, tells the clerk that, “every person deserves to be treated with respect, dignity.”

Fun detail - incarceration is a labor market outcome.

I don’t know about that. I’d argue that it’s a bad policy outcome. We greatly over-incarcerate and this not only inflates our prison population but probably hurts more than it helps (people enter prison as people who made minor screw ups but live normal lives and leave with a social network made up of criminals and are far more likely to become serial criminals themselves).

The argument only seems to make sense when applied to theft. Is drug-use, rape or murder a “rational choice” by economic standards? A “laber market outcome”? According to [insert random Google hit] only 20% of state prison inmates in 2000 were convicted for property crime.

I think we can definitely find instances of people being idiots but it’s reached the point where it doesn’t add up to a lot more than other acts of random ignorance. I think that arguments about prevalent racism today are a stretch even if we can find individual anecdotes that prove that general stupidity is alive and well.

To me it’s clear that people have become more tolerant over my lifetime. It’s just a matter of the older generation dying out and a newer generation growing up surrounded by more and more diversity. It seems pretty certain that Obama couldn’t have been elected when I was kid. It also seems reasonable that there’s an that argument that black Americans haven’t improved their incomes in the past 20 years. Of course, I’m not sure you can argue that the average white Americans have really improved their incomes that much in the past 20 years either. However if you combine the two, improved tolerance and a lack of economic improvement for Blacks, I think it demonstrates that this is not a problem with racism but rather a problem of poverty and our economic demographics.

I’d recommend reading the comments in that post, they discuss your followups.

Inadequately. For one the guy who wrote the post seems to think that our current incarceration levels are required for reducing crime. I disagree and I don’t think he’s demonstrated his claim.

I don’t think they reduce crime, but it’s irrelevant. The point is an awful lot of the US prison population is there because their best rational economic action is crime, specifically profitable drug-related crime. The more you dig into the data on virtually everything the lack of other economic opportunities is an enormous contributing factor.

Poverty correlates well with crime but there are a lot of factors involved there, education being a big one (which then also correlates with unemployment). It’s a giant leap to say that what’s going on is a “rational choice” to engage in crime instead of taking on a job. It’s also a giant leap to say that most drug-related crime is profit-motivated.

I’m not sure about the idea that prisoners should be considered unemployed. However I certainly don’t buy the argument that this is due to “rational choice” and “market failure”. I think it’s a symptom of something with a lot of correlations going on involving povery, education, opportunities, prevalence of gangs and drugs, etc.

Most of the jobs in the drug industry pay about the same as McDonalds does for low level staff. It’s just in bigger packets over long periods of time.

Steven Levitt mentioned a study about drug crime in one of his books.

Yes, and he’s full of it on that near as I can tell.

The first thing I have to note in expounding an alternative theory of the criminal firm is that there is only a loose requirement on me to be consistent with the contents of the spiral notebooks which contained the “accounts” of the gang and which form the centerpiece of the chapter. With due respect to the risks Venkatesh took in the name of science in getting them, I think that by treating these notebooks as “data” on a par with the output of the BLS, Levitt is behaving in an extremely naive fashion. In particular, one of the things that (presumably) Dubner’s attempts to make the overall narrative swing along doesn’t fully conceal is that in Chapter 1 of the book, Levitt and Dubner are telling us that high school teachers cheat and misreport numbers all the time because there is an incentive for them to do so. However, when it comes to looking at the unaudited self-reported incomes of street crack dealers to a nominal boss who exercises next to no direct supervision over them, this cynicism is gone and we are meant to assume that what the numbers say is what happened. I simply don’t buy this. Because of police busts if nothing else (and the street dealer’s policy of swallowing the drugs he has on him if he even suspects a bust, after which operation the crack is no longer resaleable), the shrinkage in crack dealing must be at least as bad as in other forms of retailing. The opportunity for the street dealer to under-report sales, over-report losses and skim profits is very obvious and in the absence of either audit or supervision I would expect that this would happen all the time. If JT were to attempt to have an IPO of the Disciples, I would certainly not buy shares in it on the basis of the spiral notebooks[4].

They do present some anecdotal evidence that the gangsters were not well paid that doesn’t depend on the notebooks, but it’s if anything even weaker. The simple fact that someone lives with his mother is not actually knockdown proof that he is strapped for cash; something like thirty per cent of young Italian men do it for the simple reason that it’s better than cooking and cleaning for yourself. I also think it’s quite naive to assume that when the gang members (who were, we shall remember, full-time drug dealers) asked Venkatesh to try and get them a janitorial job at the university, this showed that anything, even cleaning toilets on minimum wage, was a better life than the Gangster Disciples. I am hardly the most streetwise guy around, but even I can work out a couple of other possible reasons why a full time drug dealer might want a job which allowed him to wander round a university campus more or less at will. Students buy drugs[5].

Furthermore, even if we take the numbers in the notebooks as reliable, we are faced with the observable fact that crack dealers (even street soldiers) have expensive tastes and hobbies. Even leaving aside the question of trainers and jewellery (on which I have no hard data about ownership to argue against Levitt), it is an undeniable fact that even the most junior members of the Gangster Disciples were able to engage in the hobby of pistol shooting, a popular but expensive middle-class pastime which I would consider to normally be beyond the means of a burger-flipper at McDonalds. The non-salary compensation of JT’s street dealers might be really quite high; access to guns, free admission to nightclubs, favourable deals on stolen goods and clothing, regular social events with local rappers, it all adds up and compares really quite well to the fast food trade, and as far as I can see the informal healthcare plan was also quite generous compared to most mainstream employers in that it covered family members and had substantial death-in-service benefits which would have been worth quite a lot in a neighbourhood that was not exactly Hampstead even for non-gang members. I find the seeming absence of any analysis of the non-salary component of compensation quite strange, particularly since the underlying work was done working with a sociologist who would at least have some analytical framework which one might use to measure the value of the benefit to the gang member of being in a gang and thus having some degree of status in a community where status mattered.

I don’t want to get into it, to be honest. I brought up Levitt’s bit as an aside, not as some kind of proof. If you wanted to seriously get into it, unlike the author of the blog post you quoted, you should look at the actual study he and Venkatesh produced.

The first statement I made is based on my own observations of retail dealers, and one wholesaler, that I’ve met. Like I said, I’m not going to get into it.

Is Obama hurting the Black community?
No he’s too busy kicking the white community’s ass.

The hell?

XNA Community Game

http://www.xnplay.co.uk/2009/06/02/angry-barry/

With the whole “break open crates to get fried chicken” mechanic I’m surprised it hasn’t been pulled yet. I did find the ability to pick up virtually anyone and use them like they’re a barrel in Final Fight pretty amusing though.

And FINALLY the MSM catches on:

Smart article - thanks.

“An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.”

That is just so ridiculous…how Fox News continue to allow this utter trash to be associated with their name speaks volumes for their insanity regarding the President. Man, I don’t know if I can even continue to watch home Lakers/Dodgers anymore as their broadcast games are part of the Fox Network. They are a vile network that clearly could care less about journalistic standards.

Did you read the article you quoted? He says right at the top: “'I’m not, for the most part, reviewing his academic work or trying to establish the truth or falsity of the claims he makes.”

The asshat making the post knows that he is out of his league, but his has a lot of sand in his vagina due to the abortion-crime portion of freakanomcis so he attempts to make a hit piece and you bought it.

Congrats!