[FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

Mon Aug 3 10:30:29 EDT 2020

As always, I'm incompetent to respond. But I will anyway, of course, because the Iron Front flag I've been flying has started 1 argument and received 3 compliments (one back-handed), as well as 10s of perplexed dog-walkers who stop, point, and flap their gums at each other. And I'd like to understand a little more about the recent encroachment of fascism and state-communism and the (more apparent lately) flaws in "late stage capitalism".

EricS's gesture toward a deeper conception of "caste" smacks of the flailing conversation I had with SteveS about "means of production". EricC's mobility data (and his inferences therefrom) seem to me to wash away the particularity of individuals, making an argument about replacability of workers, one with another [♩], worker-into-owner [♪], owner-into-worker [♫], etc.

It strikes me that the stickiness of income distributions and economic class mobility could suffer (or be, entirely) the *side-effects* of some deeper underlying dynamic. Lansing's kinship calculus might have been an interesting tack. But my intuition matches what EricS suggests Wilkerson might be looking for, that *our* system relies on an underclass of interchangeable units/workers. To this extent, it IS the economic mobility that allows it to persist even as the relative size of the pool of workers has shrunk [♭]. I.e. because we're mobile, because we can change roles so fluidly, as the pool of workers shrinks, the upperclass can get it's victims elsewhere. And this seems to beg for some model like Turchin's cliodynamics [♮].

The sense that I have, with technology understood as some sort of *extended phenotype*, is that our technological landscape co-evolves with our culture (and with our biology, but the biology might move more slowly [♯]). So, could the stickiness of the distribution(s) be a result of something like the technological landscape? The emergence of something like airplanes or supercomputers-in-one's-pocket might change the quality of the stickiness entirely, right? I.e. the derived stats abstract out any information about the underlying dynamic?

And, of course, this goes right back to the thread that Whiteness is not (merely) systemic racism. Perhaps it's more like "if you understand the game, you can play it well", i.e. Whiteness is a technology, a tactic for winning some near-zero-sum game. A black friend of mine is a master at it. When we get drunk together, his game eventually breaks down and he feels the need to *remind* me that he's black ... I think because sometimes he loses himself in the game. I'm always ashamed because we always play *my* game ... even though he's got more access to (and more facility with) the upperclass than I'll ever  have. That he's so much better at the game suggests maybe the *only* reason I'm allowed to play at all is because of the color of my skin. 

[♩] Thanks for the term "precariat"!
[♪] E.g. some of my programmer friends lucky enough to have excess income, buying a new house to live in, then renting out their old house ... becoming landlords. Or my psych prof friend who opened a brewery and hopes to graduate from running everything to some sort of passive income.
[♫] Anyone with a near-significant portfolio who suffers a health crisis and values life over assets, spends a huge sum to stay alive, then has to keep working until they die.
[♭] Albeit with competing dimensions of population growth, automation, more opportunity for the worker-to-owner path, more risk of the owner-to-worker path, etc.
[♮] Though I doubt cliodynamics in its particulars.
[♯] And it may not, maybe the fast-evolving microorganisms (in our gut, on our skin, in the soil, virii, etc.) actually dominate. It certainly seems like it under this pandemic.

On 7/31/20 11:01 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> So, Eric, at risk of asking a question I am not willing to make the effort to follow up (for the reason that I really _should_ be working and am over deadlines, but also too half-hearted), 
> 
> But I sort of would like to explore this question a little on the list.
> 
> Here is the same woman who write the NYT piece.  This time in the Guardian; I haven’t read this one, but given her theme, I expect I will find similar content.
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india?utm_source=pocket-newtab
> 
> Here was the NYT piece that I did read:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html
> 
> I know why you say the US isn’t a caste system, and in the sense that it isn’t like India’s, yes, agreed.
> 
> But I also understand what Wilkerson wants from the term.  She wants to say the society is set up to need a permanent underclass, with limited and preferably little bargaining power, and preferably a relatively predictable group.  That if our system as currently set up doesn’t have those, if it has fairer bargaining and less predictability, it can’t operate because it needs too much on unfair terms to support the structural commitments to wealth concentration, certain wasteful or profligate expenses, etc.  
> 
> And if I come back to caste, I think: how essential is it that a caste system be as well developed and as rigid as India’s has been for a long time?
> 
> Nominally, Bali has the Hindu cast system copying the Indian form.  If you go to a wedding, it looks like it does too.  Husband can’t eat from the wife’s family’s table if it is a “marry up”, but the reverse is okay.  So they have to have two ceremonies.  And marrying up is allowed one for women, but not for met.  And so forth.
> 
> But I was in extended communication with Steve Lansing when he was doing Balinese genetic studies, having similars for India, and his result was that they are massively different.  You can see caste lines respected strongly in Indian genetics.  In Balinese, little, and if you didn’t constantly re-divide the population to keep track of short-term changes, you wouldn’t have a partition to track.  So when push comes to shove, the Balinese marry who they want to marry, and they keep the caste system to some degree and with context dependence.
> 
> For mobility data, I wish I had a record of the various talks I have attended or articles I have read claiming that social mobility has dropped severely over the past five decades.  I am glad to have your Brookings data below, and should have looked it up myself.  But what then is the data source for people making the claim that it has been dropping?  I don’t think they are nuts or liars.  Maybe ideological to some degree, but short of ideologues.  
> 
> I also tried to do some work with Duncan Foley a few years ago (like 15) on income distributions, and where the exponential x powerlaw form in the US and elsewhere comes from.  An easy explanation would be random mixing from an output stream (income-generating capacity)  with a constraint for wage earners, and some less obvious multiplicative process for the investor class (though that is not conceptually simple, despite hack approaches that treat it that way).  I was interested to not only match the distribution, but also track mobility figures, to make a “Green’s function” for the diffusion process that underlies that kind of mixing model.  Duncan put a student on it for maybe a year, and reported back that the diffusion model that would fit the stationary distribution was wildly inconsistent with the time-trajectories of family portfolios, because they were much too sticky.  We didn’t publish it, because it was never a thorough enough result, and we couldn’t get a model
> that _did_ account for both aspects of the data.  But again it was a claim that the apparent mixing by one signature was larger than what could be directly observed.
> 
> I have the impression — now admitting that I have no method to be careful — that there were a few decades from the mid-60s through the early 80s, when many programs created an escape hatch for a significant segment of the black population into the middle class.  This is Michelle Obama’s generation, and as I read her memoire I see the combination of the various programs I went through in all the same years, with various specific programs that made them available to her in Chicago where otherwise they would not have been.  I feel like that window has significantly closed.  The ones who got through it are today’s relatively comfortable, relatively safe middle class (such as it survives secondo E. Warren), and the ones who didn’t as it started to close are the growing precariat.  Am I completely wrong in having this impression?  The shouting is so loud from the shouters that I don’t know what a balanced reading is.
> 
> I thought I caught an echo of that in the McWhorter book review that Glen forwarded, which I liked, and I have read McWhorter on linguistics since probably 15 years ago and liked him.  Somewhere in there, and I forget on exactly which point, he objects to the arguments that are part of his larger claim of condescension, that they provide cover to those who want to claim affirmative action doesn’t work.  I think he came up through my generation too, and I wonder if his awareness of the detailed results of opportunity programs is one of the things we are hearing.
> 
> Anyway, one could stop and make this a career, and I won’t and can’t.  But it would be nice to resolve what seem to me like considerably contradictory claims around mobility.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jul 31, 2020, at 8:19 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Discussions of social mobility are odd. I understand that many countries have more than the U.S., but whenever I see actual numbers, the mobility seems pretty reasonable on average, and we are far from a caste system. If you scroll down here can see data from Pew data from 2015 (in the right part of the 2nd and 3rd graph). Of those in the bottom 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, 4% have made it all the way to the top 20%. The numbers are similar going in the opposite direction: Of those in the top 20% at the start, less than half are there in adulthood, with 8% having dropped all the way to the bottom 20%.  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/01/12/how-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want/
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fsocial-mobility-memos%2f2016%2f01%2f12%2fhow-much-social-mobility-do-people-really-want%2f&c=E,1,wARI_Rqqmjsngze-BCXF4KQDiF733j4KuqciluS8XPutBUIXdS_fVNj1wthNnK1s-k6yHVmIh8LbT_IDtcBGQ84ea9OolTDdjXs-Zuddzjc,&typo=1> 
>>
>> As I understand actual caste systems, the number who go from the bottom rung to the top rung in a generation should be easily roundable to 0%.
>>
>> There are definitely racial differences not captured in that data, and I have seen some studies showing outcomes for African Americans at about half the national averages (so we could infer that in the above data set only 2% of Afircan Americans would make it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile).  This presentation shows the differences between races better:  https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.brookings.edu%2fblog%2fup-front%2f2019%2f02%2f14%2fno-room-at-the-top-the-stark-divide-in-black-and-white-economic-mobility%2f&c=E,1,jgCmupDNPtblowoirtdwRknBZ-uxnjh2mXu2LQunKxCCbTmGtRZ9jGsjBpITdXYcccmbqzpMz6abD05eVhuJ1clDpPGDRMQhJzvUB-l_NckM99o,&typo=1>   It shows that white children from the bottom quintile are 45% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. In contrast, African
>> American children from the bottom quintile are 85% less likely to end up in the top quintile than would be expected at totally random chance. 
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:50 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>     Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.
>>
>>     One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.
>>
>>     The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.
>>
>>     There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist. 
>>
>>     However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.
>>
>>     Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.
>>
>>     Eric

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