Tuesday, January 28, 2014

what drives success?


NYTimes | A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.

Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.

Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.

Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.

Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.

There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

12 comments:

Tom said...

Based on my limited observation, teh "WASP" scions, beginning with those born in the 1950s, still have #s 1 and 3, but they delight in their lack of impulse control.

Constructive_Feedback said...

Today's disposition of "The Black Racial Services Machine" and the Americanized Black in relation to the COINTELPROgressive program run by the present administration shows clearly:


1) The Black Racial Services machine, when it strategically chooses not to be OFFENDED by Federal government surveillance, foreign wars and CIA occupation of Africa are the key forces that RILE UP the Black Rank & File


2) The Black Rank & File, without receiving charge to get outraged over American Imperialism can be induced to focus upon their DOMESTIC RIGHT WING ENEMY - as "The POWER" that they need to "Speak Truth To".


Thus showing, my dear friend CNu - the "Struggle Motion that is the "Stamp Of Blackness" is merely a Paid Mercenary force.

CNu said...

the "Struggle Motion that is the "Stamp Of Blackness" is merely a Paid Mercenary force.

This has never been in question. I went to UMKC and listened to MHP forcefully stir up a gymnasium full of her affluent, blonde-haired delta sigma theta sorors last night, and didn't make a single peep. I found it very amusing to note the high volume of reserve seating up front for dignitaries in the "diversity and inclusion" program.

The least of these were nowhere in sight during any of this presentation. It is indeed a racial services machine. It is indeed mercenary and servant exclusively to its own interests while it misleads others.

No one anywhere - that I'm aware of - has devised a more prescient and spot-on analysis of that living memory history than Adolph Reed.

Constructive_Feedback said...

I listened to Adolph Reed's ANALYSIS about the "Black Racial Services Machine".
I credit him for being accurate in his analysis.


He is on point about saying that since the "low hanging fruit" is gone - now they are going after "Equal Outcomes" (there should be 13% Black inmates - just like the Black population).


I reject the Black Racial Services machine because THEY DON'T SEE THAT THIS IS THEIR JOB to produce better outcomes.


My problem with Reed is that he ONLY has LEFTISM as the "Solution".
When he says "WE" in the video meeting - he is speaking of "WE leftists".


Again - I credit the last 30 minutes of his video.

BigDonOne said...

As Subrealism apparently wants to keep addressing this topic, time for the latest undeniable truth on group differences in success... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SJNVb0GnPI

Tom said...

BD the reason nobody takes this stuff seriously is not just that we wish it weren't so. The real problem is the data set on race and IQ for the US is hopelessly contaminated.


Here. Take two groups of mice, with identical genetics. Raise one population in a "good neighborhood" -- low stress, plenty of parental care, plenty of food, no crowding. Raise the remaining mice in a "bad neighborhood" -- high stress, parents missing or out of the cage 16 hours of the day, chronically poor nutrition, and high crowding.


Which mice are going to run the maze better on average?


That's a huge interfering factor that makes it more or less impossible to prove much of anything for or against this race & IQ stuff. Except that severely stressed African Americans perform worse than unstressed Euro Americans. Which we already know.


The raw data for the US is just farked beyond recognition, and no amount of adjectives ("undeniable" and so forth) can change that. Maybe the UK or some other country has data on white & black human populations who were not so disparately raised. Recent immigrants from West Africa to the US. A US study of black and white kids who were all uniformly raised Cosby Show style. Then you get your underperformance, ok. But just ranting on and on about what you can "prove" with a totally useless set of data, that is not productive.


It's terrible science, just embarrassing, to keep on citing a data set with a massive interfering factor built in. To continue that behavior decade after decade gets you -- you guessed it -- ignored.

CNu said...

After "latest undeniable truth" claims, I embarked on a casual search for a video snippet of John Witherspoon or Redd Foxx comically blustering about "bout to wear that ass out!" or other such preposterous threat of geriatric domination....,

Vic78 said...

Here you go. http://youtu.be/qIbtzX1NzAM

Vic78 said...

Y'all ain't ready. Man, truth is truth.

http://youtu.be/NtvqzK3SX2U

CNu said...

lol, naw man, that won't do. I needed to see some of that classic drunk-uncle bluster about wearing some fine young thang out with the mighty two-inch punisher..., anyway.

Do you ever listen to Alex Jones? A good triangulation on the wits of his audience can be gotten from a cursory glance at his store http://www.infowarsshop.com/ - the tincture of iodine for $29.95 and the Silent Pocket farraday cage for your cell phone $79.95 a pop last I heard it advertised - bout tell the whole and entire story of what's going on thereabouts.

Vic78 said...

I've heard enough of Jones over the years to be concerned. Iodine for $30? All we can do is laugh at them.

BigDonOne said...

"Here. Take two groups of mice, with identical genetics..."


That's the whole point. The genetics are *NOT* identical. If you viewed that entire video, a PRR experiment as you suggest, with humans, *was* indeed performed and described therein -- and resulting adult outcomes were still unequal.....

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