I'm an outsider, but I used to spend a lot of time at Invisible Adjunct, and everything I've been hearing tells me that within academia (especially lit and history) the disaster has already happened. People just haven't all realized it yet. A combination of factors means that younger faculty, and people trying to break in, are mostly screwed, and it won't get better.
John Emerson | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 7:57 am | #

Baby #2 doesn't always require that 2nd FT salary. In my neck of the woods it often just puts the childcare costs way over the limit & mom is likely to have to quit to stay home & make due on an ever tighter budget. You are making a huge assumption about most people's earning power.(Oh and did you also presume that someone was home with Baby #1? Since it's my observation that the majority of singleton babes are in some kind of childcare.)I am concerned that you are not getting it in kinda the same way you say the "senior colleagues" don't either.
anotheranon | 05.26.05 - 8:12 am | #

It's not just academia, either. People all over are finding it tough to locate a good house for something other than a small fortune, and parents everywhere are struggling with the stay home vs. work/career dilema.

Houses in my neighborhood are going for $375 K to $440 K. We bought ours 6 years ago for $185 K. And it's not even the smallest house in the neighborhood. It's crazy I tell you, crazy.
suburban misfit | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 8:18 am | #

my U is an area where assistant profs starting salary is 50K, but houses cost at least a million bucks. i live a ways away and commute, but small two br houses in my neighborhood- and I'm talking a neighborhood full of visible prostitution, drug use, people living in their cars, insane people talking to themselves in the street, kind of dirty and scuzzy- sell for 500K and up. (plus gas is 2.60 a gallon and everything else is expensive, too).my dept is having a lot of trouble retaining people because of this and because the U's workload (committe responsbiliities, etc) is really high. so new faculty keep leaving within a year or two or three, and we grad students keep getting screwed. it's hard to finish a Ph.D when your committee keeps disappearing.
Alley Rat | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 8:29 am | #

I am concerned that you are not getting it in kinda the same way you say the "senior colleagues" don't either.
I meant that with the first child (or only child) the family has several options that become precluded with the second child's arrival. Especially when deciding to live in a costly environment. I was not assuming the one-baby family has the kid in childcare, or the mother works full-time, or stays at home, or anything like that. Its more about the ways that the second child makes these decisions/tensions far more acute. I could also be wrong on that; I have only one child. But I'd like to hear more/be more educated on this.
PorJ | 05.26.05 - 8:41 am | #

I read Sailer's piece. Aside from the nauseating racism he throws around so casually, what I noticed most of was that he's not too particular about separating correlation from causation, and I think he's conflating the two on purpose. He says straight out that what people want to hear is how they're morally superior to their opponents, so instead of recognizing that people in cities with higher housing costs aren't terribly happy about the cost of housing, he notices a difference between Blue and Red voters (or found it in a David Brooks column and looked up the numbers, whichever) and then suggests that conservatives need to send out the message that that difference means that Blue staters want to take away your yard.

I'm on the outside looking in, but I really don't get how the economics of Lit and History departments has been able to survive without hitting a crash state. Every time a tenure-track position goes adjunct, it decreases the pressure on the university to keep its tenured people happy, because it makes them that much easier to replace. And why individual grad schools are still churning out so many grads is way beyond me: once you figure in the cost of instruction, graduate students cost way more than adjuncts. I did the math on that one and asked a prof about why any but the most prestigious universities would continue with grad programs when they could fill all their Eng 101 classes with adjuncts for cheaper, and her answer was that professors like teaching bright graduate students. But if there was such a thing as a Mad Economist pulling the strings behind the scenes, he might say that keeping the supply of new PhDs high is what makes low salaries for everyone from adjuncts to full profs possible.

Monstrous system, really. Unionize, post haste.
jenniebee | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 8:41 am | #

Be vewwy vewwy careful when citing Mr. Sailer (and accordingly, Mr. Kaus). A cursory Google search will quickly reveal why.
Grant | 05.26.05 - 8:53 am | #

You can always sell your soul to the devil. But that has its own costs.

I've been tempted into the professorate twice, and I've declined on both occasions. Working in the drug industry has its benefits, and being able to go to one salary is one of them. However, it's not all peachy keen here, either.

The disconnect between growth in wages and growth in prices is prevalent, and you'd better find a place right now that doesn't have that, before economies everywhere assume that you're going to have a two-income family.
John Johnson | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 9:04 am | #

FWIW, my own economic situation is not, in fact, manageable. We've accumulated a lot of debt "supplementing" my salary in the last couple of years with the goddamn credit cards. I currently have about $50 in my wallet to last me another week--on vacation, no less. Fun stuff.

One question. How are people who don't have kids excessively screwed by the economics of home ownership, etc.? Surely having two incomes without daycare costs, without worrying about school districts, etc., is an enormous advantage?

(Having said that, I am firmly on the record that "worrying about school systems" is structurally racist; middle-class whites pay a premiuim to self-segregate, so I'm less sympathetic than I might be to the argument that one "has" to pay a lot for a "good" neighborhood. Even though I also realize that the fact is that racism has, in fact, created some really fucked-up bad school situations that no parent of any color wants their kid to have to deal with.)
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 9:22 am | #

Dr B beat me to the question: how are the childless/free being screwed here? I have, and will have, no children, and as far as I can tell it gives me an enormous financial advantage. (Know what I hate more than parents who think there's something wrong with my choice? Non-parents who don't want to pay for schools etc. and claim they're being "forced to pay for other people's choice to breed". But that's another rant.)
sennoma | 05.26.05 - 9:59 am | #

"One question. How are people who don't have kids excessively screwed by the economics of home ownership, etc.? Surely having two incomes without daycare costs, without worrying about school districts, etc., is an enormous advantage?"

I am a single woman, one income household...should I wait for a "man" to have a kid and a second income? So I considered having a kid on my own but I can't because, honestly, financially, there is no way I can give a kid any kind of better life when my account balance is in the negative....I don't know if I am answering any one of your two questions but I just thought I'd share that I don't feel the "enormous" advantage.
Analisa Guzman | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 10:07 am | #

Or perhaps, the advantage is that in being childless I am less screwed financially? It is all a matter of perception. And by the way, I wanted to adopt, so I was not necessarily "choosing to breed."
Analisa Guzman | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 10:10 am | #

Yeah, I meant basically that kids are, among many other wonderful things, a terrible financial and temporal burden, especially in a culture that believes so strongly in "individualism" that we often don't think of kids as members of society but instead as some kind of weird lifestyle choice, like owning a Bengal tiger as a pet or something. Obviously supporting a family of any kind on one income ranges from "pain in the ass" to "impossible" (believe me, I know).

And doesn't it suck that we end up choosing--or not choosing--to have kids not because we want them, but because we can or can't afford them....
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 10:27 am | #

"(Having said that, I am firmly on the record that "worrying about school systems" is structurally racist; middle-class whites pay a premiuim to self-segregate"

We pay a premium to self-segregate from criminals, not minorities. We do it because we don't want to get shot, and we don't want our kids to get assaulted at school either. (Yeah, every once in a great while, someone shoots up a "good" school - and it's so unusual it still makes nationwide headlines. Not so the unprosecuted criminal assaults that routinely happen at not-so-good schools).
Ken | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 10:36 am | #

It does suck to not afford kids. Though I'm not a accademic, I'm in a realted field with similar compensation. I was single when I bought my house. The mortgage, taxes & insurance on one of the lowest priced homes in my city took up almost 50% of my take home pay. I could just barely get by.

I was also strongly considering adoption. Before the house, I thought my biggest obstacle would be convincing people that a single man could do a good job of parenting and wasn't a pedophile. After the house, I knew it was finances. I'd have to wait for several years or more until my salary grew enough for me to afford food & clothes for the child.

I'm engaged now after a brief but wonderful courtship. My fiance is expecting and we're currently sweating how we are going to get through her materinity leave (only 12 weeks) without her income. I cannot support 3 on my salary.
Ron O | 05.26.05 - 10:52 am | #

I love your blog, and this is a great discussion. But I question your claim that childless-by-choicers, gays and such are 'screwed"by being geographically concentrated. Geographical concentration is politicial ADVANTAGE for minorities. That's what gerrymandering is all about -- you want your people all together and the other guys dispersed and diluted. Take gays -- by moving from Red America to live in NYC, SF and other liberal enclaves they develop the numerical muscle to shape themselves into a self-conscious political interest group that politicians have to take into account. it's the same for blacks -- at 12 percent of the population, they would never be represented in anything like their numbers if they were evenly dispersed throughout the land. That's why black politicians want 'safe' districts, ie those with black majorities. Lani guinier talks about all this -- the way majority rule can be structured so that the minority always loses out totally (for example when city council members are elected at-large, ie by whole city, instead of by neighborhood. If a town is say 70% white, the whites determine every seat.)
A handful of childless couples in every child-happy suburb would make the childless less powerful, not more.
Katha Pollitt | 05.26.05 - 11:15 am | #

One of the reasons that I opted out of academia was that I knew that I could not live comfortably on what I would make at a teaching college. If I wanted to fight for the big grants and a reasonable salary comensurate with my training (4 years college, 5 years graduate school, 4 years post-doc), I would have my paycheck on the line every three years with grant renewals. I now live in a city where only about 11% of households can afford to buy a median priced house. I bought my place on my own and my fiance paid rent for a while, but lost his job and I decided that it was more important that he not rack up his credit cards and continue to pay his student loans/ car payment/ old credit card debt. We do not have children and do not have any intention of having any (and do not know where we would put them in the house if we had any), but I am not sure where the money would come from to pay for them now or put them through college when the time came. Many trendy cities are seeing a huge drop in the number of children of school age despite a population boom (Portland, Ore comes to mind). I do not think that the childless by choice are getting screwed by the system locally, but I do not like what is going on federally. The blue states are putting more money into the pot than they get back and the red states are taking more than their share. I have no complaint paying for the education for everyone, but I do have substantial issues with what they are teaching in the schools in many of the red states (but that is another rant).
colleen | 05.26.05 - 11:19 am | #

Ken, not all the people who live in "bad" neighborhoods are criminals. And speaking as someone who went to an inner city school, the major problems with "bad" schools are lack of funding, not kids getting shot on campus.

I stand by what I said. The dangers of poor neighborhoods, especially poor neighborhoods that are populated by people of color, are (1) in many cases exaggerated in the minds of middle-class whites; and (2) largely due to cultural and institutional racism. So while, as with so many other things, I do, in fact, understand why middle-class white parents are willing to pay that premium, I absolutely insist that we understand that poor brown parents also want safe schools and safe neighborhoods for their kids, and that simply running away from the problems only exacerbates them--because, sadly, middle-class whites have a lot more political clout than the poor do. White flight, imho, has been one of the most disgraceful cultural shifts of the post-civil rights era.

And please note that I said "structural racism" on purpose, precisely to try to prevent people getting personally defensive.
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 11:25 am | #

Oh, and I also agree with Katha. (Katha, it wasn't my claim--it was PoJ's claim.) Although I also want to point out that PoJ was *specifically* talking about academics, who don't have the option of choosing where to live--at least, not if they want to remain on the 4-year college/university tenure-track.

On "where to put the kids"--ours sleeps in our bedroom.
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 11:27 am | #

I agree with Katha *except* that most geographically dense places are located within populous states, so most of us liberal city dwellers are drastically underrepresented in the Senate.

And, while it's clear that there's a financial advantage to being coupled (or, to living with your partner), it's not at all clear how this extends to having children.

And I'll second jenniebie's comment about causation vs. correlation, which was very losely
thrown around in Sailer's arguements. While it's probably true that actually living in a dense, diverse environment, where everyone you meet doesn't have the same color/religion/income level/belief system as you is certainly likely to make one more liberal, I've never seen any studies that actually look at causes. (ie, I'd bet that women are married longer in Utah because they are more conservative, and that if you just made it easier for women in DC to marry, that they wouldn't all of a sudden start voting repub).

On the original point, I too have about $11 in my bank account, and assuming that I manage to get a tenure-track job next year in a city that I want to live in, it's just looks more and more impossible that I'll ever be able to afford to buy a house there! Compare this with my mother, who bought a gorgeous 6-bedroom house in a very desirable urban neighborhood in her mid 20's on a preschool teacher's salary (it's probably worth 30-40 times what she paid for it now).
Pseudonymous Rocket Scientist | 05.26.05 - 12:00 pm | #

White flight, imho, has been one of the most disgraceful cultural shifts of the post-civil rights era.

Leaving aside the issue of causes, and taking it as read that, while their badness is frequently exaggerated, bad neighbourhoods are not as good as good ones: what would you have people do? If they can afford to "fly", why would they stay? On principle? That's great, but it's a bit much to demand of someone else *and* their kids.
sennoma | 05.26.05 - 1:11 pm | #

Well, the black kids who integrated schools back in the day took enormous risks and put up with threats and abuse that no one would want for their children--they and their parents. On principle.

It really angers me that white liberals will bemoan the failures of integration without recognizing that one of the main reasons integrating public schools hasn't been more successful is because we weren't willing to make sacrifices or take risks--including the risk of examining our own racism. It is just flat-out wrong to demand that the have-nots deal with the financial and psychic difficulty of integrating (e.g., poor kids who get accepted to elite schools) when we aren't willing to take any risks ourselves.

What I would have people do is look logically at their situations. If where you live is *genuinely* dangerous, and you can afford to leave, then of course you will and should, imho, do so. But if it's not actually dangerous--just not as "good" as the schools in the suburbs--then I think people should stay and fight. It's what my parents did. And it's what I hope I will do.

I don't blame people, as individuals, for pursuing self-interest over principle. It's only human. I do blame people for rationalizing that decision by saying that whatever it is they're fleeing from is dangerous when it's not, for ignoring the political consequences of their actions, and for making decisions that contribute to structural injustice without pairing that decision with a committed adherence to fighting to make every kid's education the best it can be.

And a final question: is the latest computer technology in the school, or small class sizes, or whatever privileges people are moving towards, really a more important part of a good education than raising children to learn how to get along with people unlike themselves, how to stand on principle, and how to be comfortable outside of a middle-class coccoon? For me, those experiences were far more valuable than any of the academics I learned in school.
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 1:35 pm | #

Hear hear, B. I was bussed to the inner city for 12 years, and don't regret a minute of it. I had the fortune of living in a city which did this on a systematic basis, and actually put good schools in bad neighborhoods and made them racially diverse.
But this worked only because white parents were willing to send there kids there, even though we had the occasional shooting in the neighborhood.
And still I might have learned more french and more physics in high school if I had gone to private school, but then I wouldn't know half of what I know about the world.
Pseudonymous Rocket Scientist | 05.26.05 - 2:50 pm | #

This is probably rude, but thanks for speaking up against institionalized racism. It's just that so few people even have enough courage of their convictions to even say look,we're all in this together.
Shannon | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 6:19 pm | #

Tired now, will read comments tomorrow. But PorJ, thanks for bringing up this angle, I hadn't thought about it this way previously. "Affordable Family Formation," indeed. Damn exurbs.
Trope | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 9:50 pm | #

Taking risks myself is one thing, but risking the safety and education of my kids is another. I do believe there's some racism in our decision not to live in the city and not to send our kids to public shcools in the city. But there was also the commute. Our jobs happen to be out here in the suburbs. We have a 10 minute commute here and it makes the practicalities of having to pick up kids at separate daycare places much more doable. We were worried about being half an hour away from our children while we were at work and they were in school.

I do think you're right, Dr. B., that more people should send their kids to "inner city" schools. But it's a pretty difficult thing to do. If I weren't working, I might have the time to serve on the PTA and school board and make things better in a poorly funded school. But the reality is that the houses in those areas aren't that much cheaper than what we've got now, meaning I'd probably have to work. I have a co-worker whose kids are almost 3 now and she's planning to send them to her nearby poorly-funded school and her partner plans to be very active and hopefully make a difference, but I just don't have the ability to do that.

About housing near my place of employment. The average house price is $700k. A senior colleague asked us why we weren't living within walking distance as she does. We said, well when the college pays us a million dollar salary, maybe we will.
geeky mom | Homepage | 05.27.05 - 5:30 am | #

Long-time lurker here. I don't usually post on blogs by people I don't know personally, but there is an undercurrent in the comments on this post that is really upsetting. Apologies if my argument isn't as articulate as I'd like it to be, but hey, it's early. I just didn't see this being addressed much so I wanted to bring it up.

The implication from some of the posts regarding schooling seems to be that the parents of children already there do not also want to make the system better. There seems to be an assumption that only the interference of an outside force - a more well-off parent joining the PTA, for instance - could improve the school system. I think there are some more serious structural problems that are not going to be solved by the sudden involvement of families moving into the area.

It's just distressing that there is the assumption that only a more educated or well-off force could improve the schools; why is there no assumption that the community surrounding the school is not already trying to solve the problems? If you were a parent in a disadvantaged community and your kids were going to a subpar school because you didn't have the resources to move them elsewhere, don't you think you'd be just as dissatisfied as a more wealthy parent faced with the same prospect? Don't you think you'd feel insulted by a lot of the sentiment in here that you're a bad parent, that you don't want to make a difference? The sentiment I heard in here borders on a modern white man's burden, and it's really upsetting to see people dehumanizing others who have fewer opportunities than they do.

Schools in cities are not populated by criminals; they are full of kids like yours that happen to have many fewer opportunities and a less cushy home life. Their parents are still parents; living in a bad area does not make everyone a criminal.

The area I drive home from work through had a shooting during my afternoon commute a few months ago, at 5:00 and in broad daylight. The same street is also home to the recently-ranked #27 school in the country, a science magnet school. It outranks all of the suburban schools in western NY. Go figure.
anonymous | Homepage | 05.27.05 - 6:41 am | #

Also a lurker who loves this blog. I want to second the idea of "It really angers me that white liberals will bemoan the failures of integration without recognizing that one of the main reasons integrating public schools hasn't been more successful is because we weren't willing to make sacrifices or take risks--including the risk of examining our own racism".
I went to a choir performance at my daughter's school in very blue Arlington (VA) county, and was astounded to see not one non-white face in the entire crowd.
Then my wife was telling me about even bluer Alexandria (where she used to live) and how residents are up in arms about an affordable housing project built in their area because it is affecting their property values.
And anecdotally the childless single/couple advantage seems real, as I see gentrification in DC and NoVA expanding, with more dense housing structures (condos) which generate less property tax and increase the resident population of people who could care less about schools because it doesn't affect them.
libertarian soldier | 05.27.05 - 7:14 am | #

It's just distressing that there is the assumption that only a more educated or well-off force could improve the schools; why is there no assumption that the community surrounding the school is not already trying to solve the problems? If you were a parent in a disadvantaged community and your kids were going to a subpar school because you didn't have the resources to move them elsewhere, don't you think you'd be just as dissatisfied as a more wealthy parent faced with the same prospect?

Just as dissatisfied, but without the same leverage. I, through luck rather than through any particular virtue of my own, have my kids in a very integrated inner-city school in NY that has decent resources and conditions. Part of the reason that it has decent resources and conditions is that the neighborhood is friendly to low-income professional types -- Legal Aid lawyers, academics, schoolteachers, actors and other performing artists -- who don't have the money to flee, but do have the connections within city gov't, or with other powerful people to protect the school and get resources for it. The poorer, less-middle-class parents aren't any less concerned, and aren't putting any less effort into the school, but they do have less power to direct resources to it. (Poorer and less poor, of course, doesn't break down perfecly along racial lines, but there's an obvious relationship.)
LizardBreath | 05.27.05 - 7:34 am | #

Anon is right--and if I wasn't clearer about that, I apologize; what I meant by saying "poor brown parents also want their kids to go to good schools" was that yes, the parents of kids at "bad" schools are often fighting for those schools to get better. But the cold hard fact is that often, when poor parents of color advocate for their children, they are seen as being "bad parents." Head on over to Hungry Blues and look at his fantastic coverage of the handcuffing of a five-year old girl, Ja'eisha Scott, and what people were saying about her mother, for instance. One reason white flight--which has taken place for the last 30+ years, by the way--has been so damaging is that it works with a lot of other manifestations of racism. The browner the school, the likelier the public, including legislators, are to view advocacy by the school's parents as "troublemaking," as "us" vs. "them."

But it is true--and this has been shown in tons of lefty-type organizations--that when men advocate "for" women or whites "for" people of color, they end up screwing shit up. Work together, or join and follow, is a good strategy. Much like being a man in a woman's organization, whites in organizations led by people of color really have to work to learn how to listen and serve, rather than assume that it's their job to lead and instruct. There are a lot of good books out there written for anti-racist whites about how to become more active while avoiding the counter-productive problems of trying to assuage guilt or carry the white man's burden of "helping" those who it is presumed are unable to help themselves or understand their own situation.
bitchphd | Homepage | 05.27.05 - 8:42 am | #

I didn't mean to imply, in my comments at least, that the parents of children in lower-funded schools didn't want to improve their schools. In my own experience as a kid in one of those schools and from my limited experience in our current, not-so-integrated school, many parents who are trying to make ends meet don't have the time and very often don't have the financial resources to improve the school. It takes going to school board meetings, pta meetings, keeping up with local and state legislation and budgets to really have an effect. And that's hard to do when you're working two jobs (or even one job).

This is a fascinating discussion.
Laura | Homepage | 05.28.05 - 1:17 pm | #

Steve Sailer here ...

Thanks for the interesting discussion of my article on "Affordable Family Formation" as the key to why red states are red and blue states are blue.

As several readers mentioned, a key question is which way the arrow of causality points in these extraordinarily high correlations between voting by state and measures of family formation.

I mentioned briefly in this article (and have gone into more detail in previous articles) that I'm sure that it points in both directions -- more conservative people move to more conservative states to be able to afford more children. But it also works in the opposite directions: people take on some of the red or blue partisan coloration of the place where they happen to live, both from the other people around them, and from the financial facts of life. If family formation is expensive, they are less likely to form families, and thus less likely to vote for "family values" candidates. And vice-versa.

My default assumption is that both effects are about equally powerful, but if anybody has any suggestions for how to explore this important issue further, such as quantitatively measuring the breakdown between the two effects, please let me know at my email address below.
Steve Sailer | Homepage | 05.28.05 - 5:05 pm | #

And anecdotally the childless single/couple advantage seems real, as I see gentrification in DC and NoVA expanding, with more dense housing structures (condos) which generate less property tax and increase the resident population of people who could care less about schools because it doesn't affect them.

People who live in dense housing which allegedly generates less property tax -- and I'd have to look at the assesses value of each unit before deciding about that -- still pay property taxes, which, whether they "care" about them or not, go to finance schools upon which the childless place no further burden.

(The allegation that They "could care less," however construed, is just that, an allegation. Where it is true, you might ask Them personally about how often they were shoved aside because only those with children could possibly have a valid opinion about schools or deserve hearing. Why yes, I do speak from experience.)

People who contribute financially to things without also demanding to run them are, in some circles, called nice things like "angels" or "benefactors" or at least neutral things like "silent partners." In that sentence they seem to be getting slammed for merely existing. The only difference between this and the comments about low-income housing lowering property values is that the medium in question isn't cash.
Ron Sullivan | Homepage | 05.29.05 - 9:46 am | #

My default assumption is that both effects are about equally powerful, but if anybody has any suggestions for how to explore this important issue further, such as quantitatively measuring the breakdown between the two effects, please let me know at my email address below.

I think you give your detractors too much credit. Intellectual honesty requires people to give priority to explanations that first predict the strongest correlations. That's not philosophy of science so much as its simply civil behavior. The violation of that code of civility is to basically claim that you're dishonestly reporting the way you came up with the correlation. If you came up with the correlation by predicting that people were molded into conservative values by the developmental processes of family formation, then stick to your guns.

As for techniques for achieving a degree of rigor never even dreamed of by the likes of Karl Rove et al for their own policies (although they will demand it of others' policies) sure you can go to standards of statistical inference of causality like CMU's TETRAD and run the numbers. However, the fact of the matter is no one will really care except the intellectually honest and none of the intellectually honest are challenging your achievement with the ye old "Correlation doesn't imply causation." bromide. The intellectually honest know that nothing is "implied" in the natural sciences -- that all is modeling (having the right world view) leading to predictions of observations. That's what you did and your detractors should either do you better or accept the fact that it is time to pursue experiments within the laboratory of the States.
James Bowery | Homepage | 05.29.05 - 11:02 am | #

Steve Sailer here...

No, in the five years I've been writing about red and blue states, I've always argued that the difference is caused both by self-selection (some people move to states that are more right for their needs and wants) and by environmental molding (all else being equal, a person who grows up in San Francisco is less likely to become a family values voter than somebody who grows up in Dallas).

Figuring out which one is more important is the next step, but it won't be easy.
Steve Sailer | Homepage | 05.29.05 - 7:16 pm | #

"Well, the black kids who integrated schools back in the day took enormous risks and put up with threats and abuse that no one would want for their children--they and their parents. On principle."

They did so in order to get their kids into "better" schools, which is the same goal the white-flight parents are aiming for. There are 2 differences:

It costs the white-flight parents and kids less psychically and more financially.

The white-flight actions hurt the system as a whole, while the integrationists' actions help the system as a whole.

But from a purely selfish individual point of view, the integrationists and the white-flightists are both trying to get their kids out of "bad" schools and into "good" ones.
Jeremy Leader | 05.31.05 - 4:30 pm | #

"Ken, not all the people who live in "bad" neighborhoods are criminals"

No, most of them have to put up with criminals. Interestingly enough, those who advocate that poor people and minorities shouldn't have to have their neighborhoods infested with thugs any more than wealthy white people should have sometimes been accused of racism.

"Part of the reason that it has decent resources and conditions is that the neighborhood is friendly to low-income professional types -- Legal Aid lawyers, academics, schoolteachers, actors and other performing artists -- who don't have the money to flee, but do have the connections within city gov't, or with other powerful people to protect the school and get resources for it."

I'd much rather see an aristocracy of money than an aristocracy of pull. You shouldn't have to have connections to properly protect a school, a neighborhood, or anything else.

And when you get right down to it, if a school cannot teach the children of bad parents, and cannot teach anyone or even maintain order unless there are enough good parents sending their kids there, then just what value does the school add in the first place?
Ken | Homepage | 06.01.05 - 12:05 pm | #