Comments by "Brenda Rua" (@brendarua01) on "Lessons from the longest study on human development | Helen Pearson" video.

Much of what she describes in Britain has also been found in the U.S. and Canada. In both locations, critics have claimed that it is all "only correlation." But that is myopic and self-serving. In fact the public housing policies provide a controlled experiment on the effects of poverty. Outcomes are similar no matter the ethnicity or race. For example, those in poverty have less upward mobility relative to their parents than those in the middle to upper middle classes, when all other known factors are allowed for.
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Vahid That is child abuse.
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Jarful Sorry I wasn't clear. Low Income public housing projects are an administration's way of providing cheap housing to people at the bottom of the ladder. But you find poor in many different situations, such as rural fishing, lumber, agriculture too. There were claims going back to Jim Crow days that the residents of the projects were less "able" to participate in the economy and society. This may have been what we call dog whistle talk for racism. But they claimed objectivity in the observation. Anyway, some of the first mobility studies looked into these projects and then later compared the residents with poor elsewhere. They found no statistically significant difference in mobility relative to parents, based on the housing/life style. Of course, the projects were not created for the purposes of these tests. I didn't mean to imply that and should have been clear.
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Theav Sure, those could. Off hand I can't provide all the different things the studies adjusted for. The researchers wouldn't say it was everything, maybe not even every significant factor.. Just known significant factors. But you never know for sure. You have to be very careful in these things, because it may be that they are an effect of poverty. The lovely thing about the public housing studies were that they could directly test for race and ethnicity, two things that had been claimed to be causes, and showed the ideas were wrong.
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Jarful I think you don't understand how the math works, or perhaps I don't understand where you are going. It sounds as if you want the pool of people to be proportional to the general population. But that isn't necessary for this test. There are techniques to control for that and look at both movement within segmentations and between them. You get no statistically significant difference between races when you vary the style of life from rural to urban etc. But my real point was not to address that; I only had a smaller point: People would criticize the presentation and try to say that it is only correlation, so you can't talk about causes. I was pointing out that sometimes it is possible to control for things.
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Jarful you are not listening. Also your statement that the environment controls for race via IQ is just plain obnoxious.
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Jarful I get that. I think you are confounding different questions and methodologies. It appears that you want to draw conclusions to a larger population in which case, yes, the sample should represent that population. But the studies are not doing that. They are looking at factors at work within the poor. In this light, you're missing the impact of distributions within groups. . Even within the set of poor (segment in stats terms), if race or IQ is a factor then we should see that distribution effect. We don't. The question is why.
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