I am feeling grumpy. But here are two NYT stories for y’all. The first is on the gentrification of my neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen. “Call it Hell’s Renovated Kitchen,” the article says.
Then there’s a sobering article on the plight of black men in America. Things are getting worse, not better:
Especially in the country’s inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.
The article blames higher incarceration rates (but doesn’t mention the drug war) and stricter enforcement of child support llaws. As many as half (!) of all black men in their late 20s and early 30s who didn’t attend college are noncustodial fathers, and “the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.”
“We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women,” Columbia University Prof. Ronald B. Mincy is quoted as saying. “We are not even beginning to think about the men’s problem on similar orders of magnitude.”
I’m grumpy, too. Meh.
I read that article yesterday, and it was both shocking and alarming. I don’t know what the answer is (and I suspect there *is* no single answer to address this issue, but rather a whole host of contributing causes).
[…] Okay, this title is a bit rhetorical: obviously around the world women haven’t achieved equality with men. But in the United States? I left this as a comment, but decided could be its own post: I think if you compare the highest-achieving men to the highest-achieving women, obv. the men are doing much better. But I’d argue that by almost anymany measures the average woman is doing better with the average guy. You see this most starkly in the African-American community but I’d say it’s true overall as well. Men are more likely to not to attend college, don’t do as well when we’re there and are more likely to drop out once we get there. Boys do much worse than girls in primary and secondary school. Men are four to 10 times more likely to commit suicide, much more likely to be homeless, and far more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Men are more likely to be victims of murder and violent crime and 10 times more likely to be in prison. Men have higher mortality rates starting at birth and die an average of seven years younger than women. “From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women,” writes Marianne Legato in the NYT. Men still make more money but have less buying power than women. And this is more opinion than fact, but I think men engage in far more self-destructive activities than women. […]
The situation for unemployed black men would improve considerably if we got serious about enforcing our immigration laws. Illegal immigrants are depressing the wages of low-skill jobs below what an American needs to live on, frequently employers of immigrants pay below minimum wage.
I really don’t think the gang-bangers in Brooklyn and the South Side are itching to go to California and pick avocados or pluck chickens in Oklahoma.
Matt — why do you think Americans need more to live on than immigrants?
Because it costs more to live in the United States, particularly the Northeast, than it does to live in the countries that immigrants come from. Illegal immigrants typically live here in apalling, overcrowded conditions while remitting much of their pay to relatives in countries where it goes a lot further. We have a minimum wage, mandatory worker’s compensation, OSHA rules and a lot of other protections for workers that are often ignored by the employers of illegal immigrants. The people who lose are low-skill American workers, including legal immigrants and some of the minority workers who we all want to see succeed.
I agree that we all want to see minority workers succeed, but how much do we owe them, exactly? All native-born Americans have a ton of advantages available to them in the form of free education, loans for college or a vocational school, etc. If they don’t want to take advantage of that and learn a trade, should we really deport people so they don’t face competition on the labor market?