Can you imagine? In the United States, 75 percent of blacks were not born into normal, healthy, responsible families, but had babies out of wedlock.
Text: Zhao Xiao (Independent Economist) Responsible Editor: Li Jing
There are many angles to judging the "American riots" in 2020, and this article intends to evaluate them from the perspective of "life economics".
Leaving aside the complexity of ideology and various claims, several facts can be mined from the mining of big data.
1. A few facts about black Americans
First, in the United States, blacks are significantly poorer and weaker overall
Multiple data and studies have shown that blacks not only have higher rates of COVID-19 infection, but also have higher mortality rates after illness. Blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, but 24 percent of the coronavirus deaths in this round. According to The U.S. Department of Labor's Statistics for April, the unemployment rate for blacks was 16.4 percent, while the unemployment rate for whites was 13.8 percent.
Higher unemployment has made more black families lose health insurance and lack access to necessary medical resources in a timely manner, so they are more affected by the new crown virus.
Second, what is the reason why blacks are even weaker? Is it racism? No.
People who like to talk about racial discrimination need to distinguish between "social prejudice" and "institutional discrimination".
No matter which country in the world, as long as there are people in the place, there will inevitably be "social prejudice". For example, in China, urban people look down on migrant workers, Shanghainese look down on the whole country, Beijingers look down on Shanghainese, southerners look down on northerners, and people in henan all look down on henan.
Prejudice is a human pride, arrogance, and bias, which can hardly be eradicated. The United States or China is no exception. If you have to fight against human nature, it's like Don Quixote vs. Windmills, the idea may be very good, but the result can only be utopia.
What good people want to fight and abolish is institutional, systematic racial discrimination. However, this no longer exists in the United States.
As early as 1964, the United States enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is a landmark legislative process in the United States on civil rights and labor law, which outlaws discriminatory practices based on race, color, religion, gender, or country of origin.
With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the economic boom of the 1960s, the overall wage level and educational attainment of black Americans increased, and this increase in turn continued to have a positive impact on education. In the 1940s, the average weekly salary of blacks was only 48.4 per cent of whites, and by the 1990s, this proportion had risen to 75 per cent, and in 50 years it had increased by a total of 60 per cent.
In today's America, whether it is voting or racial discrimination in schools, workplaces, and public spaces, it is subject to lawsuits and punishment. To say that there is institutional and systematic racial discrimination in this country is obviously a bone in the egg.
In fact, in today's America, black people not only have "equal rights", but even enjoy "privileges", such as:
U.S. college admission criteria: Black score lines are much lower than all other ethnic groups, Asians have the highest score lines, whites second, Africans are 280 points lower than Asians on average year-on-year; blacks enter prestigious universities also have discounts, must account for a certain proportion of students, can enter Harvard and other prestigious schools with lower scores.
U.S. social employment standards: the federal government and state governments must give priority to guaranteeing the employment rights of blacks, and must meet the recruitment ratio of blacks; the government gives special preferential treatment to blacks, which is obviously better than that of whites and other ethnic groups...
Walter E. Williams, a Professor of African-American Economics at George Mason University in the United States, wrote an article on June 24, Insults to Black History, which objectively and fairly points out that although no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the main problem faced by the black community. The United States must acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and victorious. Black Americans used to enjoy constitutional protections like others, but now they enjoy constitutional protections.
In fact, if the black American community is regarded as an independent country, and the total income and expenditure of black Americans are aggregated, the black group in the United States will be among the top 20 richest countries in the world. Black Americans are richer than blacks in any other country in the world.
For example, the United States has also emerged a number of outstanding black people, such as the former U.S. secretary of defense, the black General Colin Powell, who led the world's most powerful military; robert F. Smith, investor, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, basketball superstar Michael Jordan, they are among the richest people in the world; in addition, the United States has produced a black president...
At the end of the Civil War, neither slaves nor slave owners could believe that such tremendous progress would have been made in less than a century and a half; obviously, it would have been unthinkable to have institutional, systematic racial discrimination against blacks!
Williams concluded: "It also shows how great America is as a nation. There is no other place on earth other than the United States where the black community can achieve so much. ”
Third, the main reason why blacks are poorer is educational weakness rather than racial discrimination
A 2001 survey by Eric Grodsky and Devah Pager showed that personal factors, including human capital and geographic distribution, played a role in more than half of the factors that contributed to the black and white wage gap; a further 20 percent due to the different occupational distributions of the two; and the remaining ones that were neither personal nor occupational.
On the contrary, the narrowing of the income gap between blacks and whites is mainly due to the narrowing of the educational gap. Mary M. C. Waters and Carl Ashbach studied the reduction in the wage gap between whites and blacks between the 1940s and 1970s, and found that the main reason for this was the narrowing of the gap in educational attainment between the two sides. When the gap in educational levels between ethnic groups decreases, their wage levels are correspondingly closer.
Asians in the United States, if they have to talk about the so-called "racial discrimination problem", it must be far more serious than black people. However, as a minority, the average wage of Asians in the United States is even higher than that of whites, and the "secret weapon" lies in the victory of education. In the 1990s, 23.3 percent of the U.S. male population had a college degree, compared with 48.7 percent, 41.6 percent, and 35 percent of male U.S. citizens of Indian, Filipino, and Chinese descent, respectively.
Fourth, black people are relatively under-educated, and the other side of the coin is that the crime rate is relatively higher
If adolescents are not well educated, they are bound to go to society, which leads to crime; and prisons are the worst schools on earth, and the usual situation is: thieves go in, robbers come out; occasional offenders go in, habitual offenders come out; petty offenders go in, felons come out; individual crimes go in, gang crimes come out.
The flip side of the black under-educated coin is the relatively higher crime rate. The Washington think tank says black Americans are put in jail each year more than they can go to institutions of higher learning. In 2010, 1 in 3 black men aged 20 to 39 who dropped out of secondary school went to prison, compared with 13 percent of whites.
The Justice Policy Institute says the U.S. spends a lot more money in prison than it spends on higher education. The American Institute for Judicial Policy compared prison and education statistics and found that in 2000, nearly 800,000 blacks were incarcerated and only 600,000 blacks enrolled in college; in 1980, the number of blacks imprisoned was about 1/3 of the number of blacks in higher education.
According to the us Chinese network news, in 2000, 1/10 of black American men between the ages of 20 and 40 went to prison, 10 times that of whites.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the probability of blacks attacking Asians is at least 88 times higher than that of Asians attacking blacks; because Asians are very low-key and afraid of things, focusing on doing their own thing; the data also shows that the most black people who die are not policemen, nor whites, but other black violent crimes...
The overall picture is that blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, 1.4 percent of the total number of State employees, 48 percent of the total number of prisoners, 53 percent of gangs and criminal groups, 65 percent of AIDS patients, 69 percent of gonorrhea, 57 percent of mold patients, 54 percent of the poor, 65 percent of the total homeless, and 52 percent of the total number of benefits.
The root cause of the lack of education of blacks is not in school, but in the failure of marriage and family
When it comes to education, many people's formula is: education = school. This is a big misconception. In fact, education has three pillars: family, school and society. Among them, family education is the key to education.
"Home and everything is prosperous", the family is the cell of society and the foundation of civilization. No success can make up for the failure of the family; there is no achievement that can match the success of the family.
In his article, Williams points out that "the main problem with the black community is that certain public and private policies in the United States, especially welfare state policies, have encouraged dependent and irresponsible behavior, resulting in a 75 percent black birth rate of babies born out of wedlock, destroying black families." ”
Can you imagine? In the United States, 75 percent of blacks were not born into normal, healthy, responsible families, but had babies out of wedlock. The absence of a father, the absence of a family education, necessarily leads to a higher juvenile delinquency rate among blacks, which in turn leads to a higher crime rate in a lifetime, and a lack of education.
2) What led black Americans into the pit of family disintegration and out-of-wedlock births?
At this point, the problem is clear, the logical chain of the black problem in the United States is: the lack of black marriage and family concept - the proportion of > children born out of wedlock is extremely high - the failure of > family education - > high juvenile crime rate - > low unemployment rate, high crime rate - > "black problem".
What is the driving force behind it? It is precisely the so-called care (in fact, encouragement) policy of the Democratic Welfare Policy of the United States in recent years for the care (in fact, encouragement) of babies born out of wedlock, and blacks have been introduced into the "pit" by the candy of the welfare policy.
In the United States, the housewife mother of a married couple can get a subsidy of 0 yuan a year. And an unmarried couple, as a single mother: $21,600 in disability allowance + $10,800 in free housing subsidies + $6,000 in Obamacare subsidies + $6,000 in free food subsidies + $4,800 in water grid subsidies + $6,000 in federal grants + $12,000 in free college tuition grants + $8,800 in tax subsidies, for a total of $75,000 a year.
Such evil candy leads black people into the pit of "family disintegration" and out-of-wedlock children!
Keep in mind that in 1940, the black birth rate was 11 percent, and most black children at that time grew up in two-parent families. Most of the poverty (about 25 per cent) occurs in households headed by single mothers. Moreover, for more than 20 years, black families with well-parented parents have had low poverty rates and have been in single digits. Today's black people are completely pitted, not by racial discrimination policies, but by single-parent welfare policies.
Williams pointed out that blacks should be thankful that double standards and policies that rewarded blacks for their inferiority complex and irresponsibility did not occur in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Had these policies been implemented then, the blacks of the world who had the intellect and the courage of the spirit would not have produced the most successful civil rights movement in the world.
Martin luther king
3, the basic economics of life economics is to attach importance to marriage and family
"Life economics" regards life as the most important resource, and at the same time, explores how to maximize the value of life. A basic observation and conclusion of life economics is that, in general, people who attach importance to the culture of marriage and family and advocate the value of marriage and family have a better performance in terms of wealth, knowledge, and social status.
From this perspective, Williams' policy proposal is right: Governments should protect the constitutional rights of all. After that, the government should let go and let the blacks manage themselves. The government should not consider "whites guilty" to govern (and misleadingly) blacks in a patriarchal manner, with the result that they are suffocated.
Source: Chinese and foreign management