O/T Political Rants & Raves - Page 44

Maggie

Bucko,

It would be equally as silly to dismiss the racial component of problems that pervade the ghetto.  Cultural norms regarding fatherhood and the nuclear family in the black community are significant factors in the perpetuation of poverty and crime.

What ever happened to DR?

RFS

I have a Ph.D. and I don't know where Bucko found that cite that 90% of us voted for Obama, but I would believe it.

If you include MBAs, JDs and MDs and other masters degrees, of course, the % is much lower.  (I would bet 50% or more of MBAs voted McCain.)

Here is a very interesing cite from 538.com:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/2008%20post-mortem

Note the following:

Obama did best among both extremes (least and most educated).  McCain took the middle (high school graduates and some college).   But the pattern differed by age and race.

Young white voters were very much more likely to vote for Obama if they were more educated.  But young black voters were the opposite!  And for young hispanic votes, their education didn't seem to matter much.

For all races, if you were over 30, a post grad degree made you much more likely to vote for Obama.  But this data mixes all grad degrees, and as sueincc pointed out, the small extreme minority of those have doctorates -- and most doctorates also do the same job (university teaching) so a more consistent voting pattern is not at all surprising.  (I imagine that all civil engineers who work for the public sector have some consistencies, as well, that go beyond just their education.)

I think the fact that 18-29 yo blacks who had the most education were less likely to vote for Obama may be less interesing than it at first appears.  You can't get a postgrad degree until you are at least 23 or so.  So those in this age group with postgrad degrees are also older than the average person in this cohort -- and the older you were, the more likely you were to vote for McCain across all racial and educational groups.

.

Good news for America!  One less racist extreemist in the Whitehouse!

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's environmental adviser Van Jones, who became embroiled in a controversy over past inflammatory statements, has resigned his White House job after what he calls a "vicious smear campaign against me."


The resignation, disclosed without advance notice by the White House in an e-mail minutes into Sunday on a holiday weekend, came as Obama is working to regain his footing in the contentious health care debate.


Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly "green jobs" with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.

As for the research on poverty, I also must agree that no one legitimate believes the problems of the ghetto derive from racial genetics, or whatever the heck some of you are implying.  I am not an expert on poverty and discrimination research, but here are some of the classics:

The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination by Bradley Schiller.

The End of Poverty by my classmate Jeffrey Sachs.

Inner-city Poverty in the US by Laurence Lynn and Michael McGeary.

Poverty and Discrimination by Lester Thurow.

And for those of you who distrust the professoriate, you may find this one interesting:

Politics and the Professors by Henry Aaron.

Aaron illuminates the role of the professoriate in pushing the Great Society under Johnson, and arrives at two interesting conclusions: (1) the liberal professoriate did not push for poverty programs based on evidence that they would work, so much as they pushed for them based on their belief that they were the moral thing to do; and (2) Nonetheless, those programs did not fail because they were badly designed, but instead they failed because we as a nation did not have the stamina, moral conviction, and freedom from outside distractions to make them work.

Both results are pretty interesting IMO.  They also seem to reflect on some of what has happened in this thread.

(One of my graduate school fields was labor economics, and I was offered a fellowship to Princeton out of college to study social welfare and poverty programs, so while this is not my current research field, I did once have a real interest in it.)

I did not mean to suggest that if a group of people (e.g., blacks in the ghetto) have been stigmatized by racism for hundreds of years -- enslaved, torn from their families, given the vote and then having it taken from them by Crow laws, segregated occupationally and geographically, impoverished...and more... that being black in the ghetto would not go a way to explaining some serious problems.

The disagreement, if it is that, is in attributing blame to the right CAUSE.  I would assert that the cause is the LEGACY of RACISM.  Others appear to think the blame should be aimed at the victims themselves.

MVF,

Who said, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"?

RFS

MVF,

Try a direct response to  the discussion  we are having related specifically to your input. Stop talking in circles...We all get it........YOU ARE SUPER SMART......GEEZ .....enough already.........BTW.....I'm a welder........LOL!!!!!!


RPK