Good post. Sociologists and anthropologists doing studies of urban ghettos have made similar points, i.e., that behaviors which allow for survival in extreme poverty are not conducive to middle class success. For example, survival generally requires some sort of collective pooling of resources, which then makes individual saving, the backbone of middle class morality, impossible, because those who come into an amount of money or a higher paying job are embedded in a network of obligation. Likewise, studies on teen pregnancy show that teen pregnancy and single motherhood is beneficial for the very poor, while deleterious for the middle class or working poor. So, the decision to get pregnant at 15 is generally option A for a girl in an urban ghetto, but option C for the people commenting on this blog.

Secondly, your point on prison gangs should be highlighted. Joining a gang in prison is option A, the best option, for most people in prison. However, gang affiliation does not end at the prison walls and is very hard to exit. Given the incarceration rates of black men in the US, gang affiliation, this is not a trivial point. Likewise, incarceration also affects the other issues, such as singleness. When most men in your cohort are in prison, scarcity of mates makes singleness a rational option in addition to the lack of desirability. Secondly, it means that initially stable and long-term relationships are far more likely to end with the incarceration of the man in the relationship.

Finally, racism. Comments comparing black people unfavorably to immigrants miss that urban ‘white’ ethnics engaged in widespread violent gang activity and organized crime and lived lives that were ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ in the tenement slums of NYC and other urban ghettos. However, the ability to assimilate into WASP society coinciding right about the time of mass migration of blacks from the South to the North (for precisely the reason that they were whitER than black people) allowed for Italians/Irish/etc. to escape cycles of poverty after few generations. As black migrants never had that option, the standard upward immigrant trajectory was unavailable to them.

Finally, the creation of Northern urban ghettos is also predicated on the widespread collapse of manufacturing and the layoff of black workers, who then for reasons including discrimination had fewer options than white factory workers. Lack of gainful employment options over generations completely changes the landscape of what is a ‘rational’ goal in life. My guess is most commenters here, if the options were 1) lifelong unemployment & borderline homelessness, 2) stressful minimum wage jobs, or 3) a comparative interesting and remunerative career in the black market would choose (3), particularly if they were intelligent. If left with (1) or (2), an early death as a side effect of using drugs, alcohol, and drug foods as analgesics also seems more rational than a long physically and psychologically miserable life.

i’m taking a class with caplan right now… he is clearly an intelligent guy – but he reeks of entitlement – he’s got this cocky self righteousness that makes it hard for me to listen charitably to his arguments.

keep up the awesome, peace.