Comments by "buddermonger2000" (@buddermonger2000) on "Explaining America's Identity in 10 Ethnicities" video.
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@MrIke86 Welfare in the American context comes down to the systems that those in low income tend to use as they are under a certain income level and thus qualify for certain benefits in terms of subsidies and tax credits from the government. In this capacity, it is put into brackets with hard cutoffs. So the American system disincentivizes going slowly up the ladder as you'll lose the floor that it has given you once you make X amount of money. And so being one dollar less than that will give you more money than trying to say getting an extra 3k from another job. In this capacity, it incentivizes people to stay within that unless they've already built up a culture of working hard and genuinely fell on hard times. Someone who falls on hard times but is genuinely in a higher tax bracket will not benefit as much as someone who has always been in the low tax bracket as they will see a significant standard of living reduction despite being on welfare. This is the intention of welfare. It is not meant to be a replacement for income and only a temporary floor for people who'd otherwise go all the way to the bottom. However, what you will end up seeing in many cases are those who, because they were always in a low bracket and perhaps were never married, benefit more from staying on welfare than genuinely attempting to better themselves and get into a higher bracket or find a partner who can and is willing to support them. These are abusers of the system.
My question, because this has seemingly not been studied besides a general trend around the same period which has many factors, is if this contributes to the decline in marriage in many populations specifically. Of course there are actually situations where there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem which eventually creates a cycle (such as the poverty created by drug addiction), and thus you do have to watch out for that as well. With marriage of parents being the NUMBER 1 determinant of the well being of a child from a given couple, I am wondering if welfare has this adverse effect of driving down marriage.
Why is this not related to any of the factors you've mentioned above? While those factors will create local poverty, they're largely not related to the function of marriage. Marriage, in the legal context, allows two people to tie themselves together and fundamentally tie together their economic power. If this economic power is not necessary due to receiving that power from the government, it would be a factor which pushes out marriage from many of the economic considerations.
I'm NOT asking if it has an overall effect on poverty. I'm NOT asking if it depresses wages. I'm not even asking if it is a bad thing. I'm asking in a very specific context, if it declines Marriage. Marriage, because it has such a strong correlation with these issues, is likely a confounding variable in poverty. It is enough that it is significantly correlative with economic power in general. Now it can often simply be a marker of social capital, but it's such a deterministic metric that it cannot be ignored.
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@MrIke86 Well that is when they started to decline. And then in the 1990s there was a spike which then mostly held flat until about 2000. 2000 is when everything started to again go down and we're actually seeing a slight uptick in the higher brackets.
However, I would like you to explain why income inequality would AT ALL cause this? Why would that matter in any capacity? It makes 0 sense as a corollary.
The cultural story, would actually in many ways support this as while yes you have a destruction in families, that in of itself creates a new culture in which it isn't respected which then continues the situation. Initial events can change cultures drastically as a result of them and have lingering effects for generations because something happened. It's the reason why blacks who's ancestors weren't slaves do better than those who's ancestors were. A manifestation of a reaction of one event will not simply stop having effects. Those effects take generations to die down. I'm very interested in looking at the book that you're referencing.
And actually it does demonstrate that in many cases. The institute of family studies shows that across demographics married couples are much less often to be in poverty. Regardless of educational level. It's a reduction of nearly 75%. There's nothing which is so connected to the chance of poverty as not being married and thus the idea that it's a cross section for race/gender/class is actually a lie on the face of it unless you know nothing about it. I'd love to compare the marriage rates of the US compared to Finland but it's really difficult to find comparable data.
And finally, I can't believe I have to say this, BUT I'M NOT JUST REFERRING TO THE USA. Yes the struggles of the jews and Chinese historically are not the same as those of the blacks in the US. However, looking beyond the scope of the industrial age and the USA, you find the story holding true of them being effectively the merchant classes as that is all that they're allowed to do and then they own the economies of multiple countries as a result. Horrible specific oppression on these groups and then they still pull off dominating the economy. A specific example of this is modern Indonesia where they're actively discriminated against and 2% of the population, but dominate 70% of all businesses according to a book published by Amy Chua and used in a paper published by the University of Hawaii.
And this is the type of result which leads to the ultimate conclusion that the benefits are in social capital within a given ethnic group that gives them a leg up on others and by the same token can doom them.
Australians and Canadians are on a mostly desolate rock and mostly frozen wasteland but are as wealthy as most of Northern and Western Europe. Norway is an oil state like Saudi Arabia but with none of the corruption. And then Russia has been basically in a continual downward spiral since the collapse of the Soviet Union and their men drink themselves to death.
This tangent is a bit strange to bring up, but they're a point here. These things all point to things which aren't simply structural but factors which are cultural. They show up on the macro level as well as the micro. Great potential can be wasted and literally nothing can become wealthy. This makes no sense if those structural and economic limitations are what's actually holding groups back. Our environment affects us that's not up for debate. However, we also have a culture that we build which in it has certain incentives that can lead people to success or failure. It's strong enough that you can pluck people from bad environments and they can be successful via almost exclusively a strength of culture. It's very interesting to see these things play out.
And while I know you're dead set on structural and institutional forces as that's basically the default position of a lot of people because it takes the blame off of the group (and said blame easily creates an attitude of racism) without realizing the lack of agency that it creates, but it's an attitude which continues to ignore the result of macro-effects of individual decisions or the result of cultural effects because it's not okay now to say that some cultures are actually better than others (because it also easily slips into racism). It's the type of thing which facilitates the reduction of envy. But it's really only one part of the picture and people seem to not want to accept that. Which is the entire point of my initial question: "did this structural change, induce a cultural change which has since lasted to today?" and thus the source of this argument.
Also worth noting that the political persuasion which is most present in academia (those who do the most research on sociological issues) since the 1970s has overwhelmingly been of one political persuasion. One in which believes in social constructionism and that people in many ways aren't actually individuals but simply formations of circumstance.
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