Statistics about the worst-off can only explain their bad life outcomes if rules are reliably enforced. Otherwise, statistical descriptions of the behavior of the poor could just as easily be descriptions of the good behavior for which they are being punished, or lies.
Structural racism comes from the selective enforcement of rules on the basis of what feels like a normal outcome, so that existing power relations, not the rules, actually control behavior.
Once you know about structural racism, blaming African-Americans' plight on the prevalence of unwed black mothers goes from naive to comically racist. This is good - it creates an opportunity to correct one's political commitments - but only if we actually use the opportunity.
We should assign at least as much credence to these alternative hypotheses:
- Black mothers are effectively married as often as white mothers, but the law doesn't record their marriages.
- Having children out of wedlock is good behavior for which black people are being punished.
- Black mothers are effectively married as often as white mothers, but the law doesn't record their marriages.
- Having children out of wedlock is good behavior for which black people are being punished.
If you think that there might be some problems with patriarchy, and things might be somewhat better if the relations between men and women did not involve ownership, then the last hypothesis ought to be prima facie appealing.
And it ought to be unsurprising that this would be anticorrelated with ability to profit from establishment grift
https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1353473036683513857
I have some hope that @bryan_caplan, @robinhanson, and @JimDMiller might be interested in this information.
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