To paraphrase commenter sb, none of you are going to want to hear this. I’m not sure I even like typing it. But Megan McArdle has an excellent post about why life is different for poor black children then it is for middle-aged white men with sinecures at Forbes. It goes on forever, so there’s probably some crazy stuff in it, but it genuinely makes a lot of good points. Credit where credit is due.
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Svensker
I’m glad you said that cuz I saw her post yesterday and thought my brain must have been addled — it just didn’t seem that bad and made some good points. Was scared to mention it to anyone lest I get carted off.
The Moar You Know
Stopped clock, all that.
Good for her.
rlrr
Even a blind squirrel can find a nut…
trollhattan
Not getting off the boat, so here’s Paul Campos with a good smackdown of the original piece.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/12/if-i-were-a-rich-white-guy-2
Raven
A broken clock is right two times a day.
The Ancient Randonneur
So someone with a sinecure at The Atlantic is writing about someone with a sinecure at Forbes. Any benefactor of a NY Times sinecure (who shall remain nameless!) weighed in on this yet?
MikeJ
Dear Megan,
It might interest you to know that somebody is posting sane columns under your byline. I assume you’ll want to stop them.
geg6
Nope. Nuh-uh. Nuh gah doit, DougJ. No fucking way I’m reading anything by that asshole. Stopped clocks and all that, ya know.
BGinCHI
Well then, we finally found her field of expertise: stupid privileged white guys don’t know anything about underprivileged people of color.
I assume she’ll apply this to the GOP and her husband next.
Chuck Butcher
I’ll be go to hell, McMegan does have two live brain cells that talk to each other – on occasion…
MTiffany
What’s next? Bill Kristol getting something right? Stopped clocks or End Times?
DougJ
@geg6:
It was a really good post. Too long for my tastes, she needs an editor. But it was thoughtful in a way that not much else you see in establishment media is.
Schlemizel
something, something blind squirrel something, something acorn
ETA – I should have known someone would get there first, sorry for the repeat
The Moar You Know
I take back the stopped clock comment. It is a reasonably well written, extremely well-thought out piece in which she honestly and intelligently acknowledges her lack of understanding of either the black or poor experience while utterly laying waste to the Forbes piece.
R Johnston
A broken clock provides no information at all and is never right. Sometimes, however, through no accord of its own, a stopped clock mimics the appearance of being right and can be mistaken for a clock that’s right if you don’t know that the stopped clock is stopped.
Megan McCardle is never, ever right. She’s completely content free. Occasionally due to random chance she manages to string random words together in an order that produces something that isn’t prima facie ridiculous, but that doesn’t make her any less content free.
Liz
I’m just stopping by for a Tiffany update.
EdTheRed
March winds will blow all my troubles away.
wrb
but her mind it just kept wandering like some wild geese in the west
DougJ
@The Moar You Know:
Very well put.
norbizness
I mean, if you don’t link to her, your fucking fingers will fall off or something.
jibeaux
I’m glad she was able to write about
but frankly that seems like the soft bigotry of low expectations right there, it does.
Hill Dweller
Can we get an open thread? It looks like we’re on the verge of a government shutdown, and the White House says they aren’t going to veto that awful Defense Appropriations bill.
Soonergrunt
@The Moar You Know: @rlrr:
We can close the thread now.
cathyx
I always appreciate it when someone gives credit to someone they don’t like when it’s warranted. It’s a sign of maturity and fairness.
Gex
What good is it to understand the disadvantages of poor black youth if you don’t feel there is anything that should be done about it?
I get back to my brother in law, who is now convinced that there should be better care for anyone who has a stroke, even if they are poor. But if he doesn’t stop demanding tax cuts, there’s no point to having that position on health care. Might as well convince yourself that poor blacks and poor stroke victims deserve to be where they are at, rather than to admit they are where they are because you don’t give a fuck.
chrome agnomen
@rlrr:
in this case a nut found a blind squirrel.
The Ancient Randonneur
BTW DougJ I am losing faith in the FSM’s ability to make us happy. If the FSM really loved us you would have a sinecure at NPR so you could write about MM, Bobo and the Moustache of Understanding. Of course part of your compensation package would have to be all the tote bags you could carry!
smintheus
If I were a poor black child I don’t think I would be reading on-line commentary at The Atlantic or Forbes or much of anywhere.
Brachiator
I find it interesting how many Balloon Juicers think of poor people of all races as though they were a species from another planet with ideas and values intrinsically different from Real Middle Class White Peoples(tm).
McCardle is fool.
How many middle class kids graduate each year with an engineering degree? How many each year become, or marry, or become the mistress or boy toy of, investment bankers?
And does anyone, short of dopes who are overly impressed with “The Wire,” believe that drug dealing is the typical job that poor kids get when they are old enough to run in the strets?
Are all you Balloon Juicers engineers and investment bankers?
And here’s another gem
Note how she rather swiftly elides from middle class kids who can get favorable treatment to something more pernicious, how the privileged class does all it can to identify and to stigmatize those who they do not want to be among them.
I will give her this one though:
And it’s not just employers who engage in this vile practice. I’ve seen workers who disparage or sabotage the efforts and contributions on nonwhites, women, anyone who they don’t think are part of the tribe.
I’ll give McMegan an E for Effort, and for usefully exposing a nasty can of worms than she may understand.
DougJ
@jibeaux:
True, but I thought she honestly did a very good job with it.
Makewi
Does adding black to the description of poor help or hurt the basic understanding of the difficulties of achieving financial security among the poor. Is it going to be different for poor whites than it is for poor blacks than it is for poor hispanics, etc.?
dogwood
@smintheus:
That was her point.
FormerSwingVoter
Well, yeah. Now that I think about it, McArdle being coherent every once in a while probably makes sense.
All of her arguments are based on what makes sense in her head. That’s a terrible way to make decisions on anything measurable or concerning the smallest amount of data or research, but a thought experiment like this? This is right in her wheelhouse.
Midnight Marauder
It is certainly a better piece of writing than we typically see from McMegan, but it absolutely still needs to be said that the people who populate her comment section are atrocious.
The Moar You Know
@Makewi: It is different for all three groups, thanks to a slew of variables far too long to list.
I grew up poor white for the later half of my childhood. While that was pretty bad, I know for a fact it beat the shit out of growing up black and poor.
pragmatism
i miss jerry
Amir Khalid
This is a damn sight better then recommending US$1,500 kitchen appliances and fancy pink(ish) salt in goofy containers. Why doesn’t Megan McArdle write like this more often?
Okay, her writing here could use some tightening up; I think I could have made that piece a third shorter and still kept everything she wanted to say. But it does show that she’s well capable of human empathy and insight, when she wants to be, and can write intelligently if the subject at hand doesn’t require numeracy. Maybe she should be writing about something other than business and economics.
Godlesssailor
I wish I was a headlight on a North bound train.
AdamK
Even a stopped clock can find a squirrel’s nuts.
TooManyJens
Yes. This is what TNC was getting at in his “Muscular Empathy” post, too. People want to think that we’re exceptional, that we would never get caught in the traps other people do. But for the most part, we’re not and we would.
eemom
I never read her when you hate her. Therefore I don’t have to read her when you like her either.
Also too, there are probably a few hundred people who ALWAYS think about poor black children, are NOT clueless emmessemm assholes with $1,500 blenders, and DON’T write stupid shit all the rest of the time, who wrote fine worthy articles today that are much better worth reading.
trollhattan
@chrome agnomen:
Me likie!
Makewi
@The Moar You Know:
In terms of identifying possible solutions it’s probably a good idea to try to separate out financial stumbling blocks that are attributable to race vs those due to household income. For example, if it is true that most poor kids that go to college don’t get high paying engineering degrees then it is it likely due to race?
carpeduum
Megan fucking McArdle? Seriously?! Are all the BJ bloggers on crack today?
Samara Morgan
Do you know who McMegan actually is? She is the RL version of conservative male pinup girls….she is as close as these poor troglodytes will ever get to the conservative fantasized ideals of Vichy Fournier, Hot Abercrombie Chick, Libertarian Girl, Gay Girl in Damascus, and Courtney Messerschmidt.
All those fantasy women turned out to be oldish white conservative males.
McMegan is as close as they will ever get in RL– only she isnt nearly as smoking hawt as all those imaginary conservative females.
DougJ
@Samara Morgan:
Do you really think that’s it? I don’t like her blogging, but I don’t think she got there by being “hot”. I think she’s just a female Robert Samuelson.
Anyway, this was an excellent post on her part.
gaz
Squirrel, Blind
meet
Nut…
/yawn
GeneJockey
@TooManyJens:
Very true, and conversely if they are successful, they overestimate their own contribution to that success.
A good example was an acquaintance on another forum. He bristled at the idea that he’d been ‘fortunate’, and that this had played any part in his success. When pressed, it turned out his parents had paid for him to go to college, and helped out financially with law school. But he didn’t see this as privilege, or good fortune. No, he’d got there all on his own!
Gex
@GeneJockey: Now why don’t those poor black kids go get better parents? They lack the initiative he showed when he picked his.
GeneJockey
@Gex:
Silly Gex – don’t you know that No One Is More Discriminated Against In Modern America Than White Male Christians?
ornery
Thank you for this very important information, DougJ. glad you’re on it.
Sebastian Dangerfield
Seeing as the Forbes piece basically demolishes itself by reason of its thoroughgoing un-self-aware stupidity, I would classify it as the broad side of a barn that could contain a herd of Babe the Blue Oxen. That McCardle managed not to miss it is hardly a cause for amazement. And if the excerpted quotes upthread — I refuse to give her hits — are any indication, there’s still plenty of idiocy on display (WTF, for instance, is a “recognizeably [sic] ‘poor’ name[]” for a “poor white kid”?).
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Brachiator: Bullshit on $75K. Engineers in my neck of the woods start out in the range of $25 an hour, which is ~$50K a year, which isn’t bad for a 22-year old.
$75K is what a PE with a couple of years makes, say 10 years after the BS degree.
whetstone
has an excellent post about why life is different for poor black children
It’s not excellent. It’s an overlong mess that manages to jump off of two anecdotes to state the obvious (“being poor isn’t just about stuff”), and then warps that into an argument against anti-poverty programs with some wildly condescending strawmen about progressives (i.e. that they think the poor are more socioeconomically “pliable”).
If by “excellent” you mean “less callous than usual” I’m not even sure if I agree: it reads like she’s trying to sneak her usual hostility towards the poor under a veneer of centrism (“sure, EITC, why not, but I don’t really see the point”).
dave
meh, not for nothing, but i notice that when mcardle considers The Poor Black Kid as a rational actor, she’s thinking of something akin to data printouts and computer models. The Poor Black Kid is just inputs and outputs to her. whatever.
smintheus
‘The poor have only themselves to blame for not investing their money more wisely.’
Almost 40 years ago a girlfriend from my youth told me that in all seriousness. She was kind, considerate, well traveled, and very smart. But she got all her social/economic opinions from the WSJ or daddy (which was the same thing), and could not budge more than a step or two away from that received wisdom. Her response when I pointed out that the poor have no money at all to invest was ‘Because they made bad investments.’ She wasn’t being dismissive or deliberately obtuse, she just thought that made sense to her.
Those who grew up privileged cannot even begin to conceive of how little they understand about the underprivileged. It would be like our comprehension of 19th century Chinese culture if the only info we had available came from missionary newsletters full of empty pieties and second hand misunderstandings.
p mac
I agree, it is a good post.
As usual, the biggest obstruction to starting a new enterprise with existing competitors is the opportunity cost for newcomers. No one is surprised when this applies to startup companies vs existing large firms. It’s crazy to think it doesn’t apply at the individual level as well.
Downpuppy
If you just read TBogg first, everything is much clearer.
slag
Well, if it makes you feel better, here’s a really stupid point in said post:
Yes. There is more of that dreaded soci.alism in poor communities than in wealthy ones. But no, that dreaded soci.alism does not erode the “incentive to get more”. Often, members of poor communities actually–as hard as it may be for McMegan to understand–WANT to help their communities more. So, that dreaded soci.alism can actually serve as an incentive to get more. In fact, said ability to help your community actually becomes (gasp!) a status symbol. Shocking, I know.
The Spy Who Loved Me
@Sebastian Dangerfield:
Krystal, Kristal, Crystal or Cristal: any way you spell it, it screams poor white trash, if you’re looking for an example.
Samara Morgan
@DougJ: she is the best approximation of Courtney Messerschmidt that RL can offer.
True, she’s not very hawt….by liberal standards.
Its like Newt is a crude approximation of an intellectual, and Palin is a crude approximation of a presidential candidate.
Its the best they have.
McMegan is a crude approximation of a smart hawt chick.
Its like Bizarro World.
;)
Barry
@MikeJ: “Dear Megan,
It might interest you to know that somebody is posting sane columns under your byline. I assume you’ll want to stop them.”
It is a good column and possibly the most self-aware column Megan will ever write.
But don’t worry, the commenters are making up for it.
Barry
@slag: “Yes. There is more of that dreaded soci.alism in poor communities than in wealthy ones.”
I’d bet on the other way. It’s just that in wealthy communities, it’s not giving somebody some money to buy food with, it’s talking to somebody who arranges for a (good) job, or a college admission, or for a prosecutor to drop charges.