Does anybody on the Root follow Thomas Sowell? Thomas Sowell appreciation thread!
- Thread starter AJaRuleStan
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Free White & 21
AAGang
If the white supremacists are championing a black mans ideas, you should be very cautious of that brother 
Since this thread got upped, I'll bite.
Sowell and his ilk have continually tried to connect welfare benefits with a sort of "worsening" of black culture and outcomes. Specifically when it comes to out of wedlock births in the great society era.
A simple google search helps us to understand that out of wedlock births were an issue with black people well before welfare benefits were established, as it was many times the rate of the white community dating back to the 1940s a time when it was socially dishonorable to have a child out of marriage. The graph seems to suggest that external pressures placed on black households have exacerbated poorer outcomes. Seems reasonable, no? (Ever hear of the Moynihan report?)
Sowell knows this, so why does he continue to engineer a dishonest profile that problems within the black community materialized because of welfare benefits? Well, Ive already explained why he does it in earlier posts.
And those rates for other "races" have risen at the same rate as blacks. White out of wedlock birth rates were less than 5% and now sit at close to 30%, and yet Ive never seen Sowell try to connect an availability of welfare benefits to the statistic rising among whites.
I havent seen a compelling study that proves any sort of real relationship between providing welfare benefits and out of wedlock births. Especially when considering that our set of welfare benefits are the stingiest in the world among high performing GDP nations.
Responsible statistical inference, and connecting real theories to broader populations and locating them in their proper context is what separates intellectuals from ideologues. Sowell is the latter.
It is not possible to take today's social values and use them to explain behavior from 75-100 years ago. It used to be that when a white woman/girl got pregnant, the male had to marry her. That would explain less than 5% of white children being born out of wedlock. Of course nowadays, the woman wants to have the baby first and get back in shape before the wedding.
Before WWII blacks had a higher marriage rate than whites. I don't know, but perhaps blacks waited until after the baby was born to get married, then any subsequent children would be born in wedlock.
Nowadays, a white woman is twice as likely to be married as a black woman but both races have nearly the same fertility rate. Fertility rate is the expected number of children per woman during her lifetime: blacks 2.0, whites 1.8. So, if you take equal samples of black women and white women, the black women would have 10% more children but only half as many would be married as white women. It would result in a graph similar to the one you posted.
The economic problem for blacks is that they do not stay under the same roof and raise their children. Married/cohabitating couples are better off financially than single people.
http://www.cunapfi.org/download/198_Women_of_Color_Wealth_Future_Spring_2010.pdf
This Guy Mcwhorter is like the new Sowell to a degree.... Read his book losing the race yrs ago.
2:00 - 3:00 Black culture maybe dysfunctional but it is only so as a result of present and past racism, you can do little about past racism but you can do a lot about current racism. Contrary to what he said.....society is what must be address
3:40 - 5:16 What he does not seemed to realize is that racism is about suppression the group, individual success is possible or even allowed but not group action a la black panther party et al.
His "fear of standing on your two feet" the martyr syndrome is a repackaging of southern whites saying "blacks are not ready for freedom"
2:00 - 3:00 Black culture maybe dysfunctional but it is only so as a result of present and past racism, you can do little about past racism but you can do a lot about current racism. Contrary to what he said.....society is what must be address
3:40 - 5:16 What he does not seemed to realize is that racism is about suppression the group, individual success is possible or even allowed but not group action a la black panther party et al.
His "fear of standing on your two feet" the martyr syndrome is a repackaging of southern whites saying "blacks are not ready for freedom"