CULTURE CAUSES POVERTY? ASIANS VS BLACK / HISPANIC \doc\web\99\10\cultpov.txt Date sent: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 07:36:47 -0400 To: h-bd@egroups.com From: harrison@vineyard.net (Lawrence Harrison & Patricia Crane) Subject: [h-bd] Culture, immigration >From Larry Harrison As part of my sporadic campaign to present the culturalist point of view, and also because of its address to the immigration issue, I immodestly forward the following, which appeared in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. (The title I had proposed was, "It's the Culture, Stupid!") The Cultural Roots of Poverty President Clinton's four-day tour of poverty last week brought him to Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Black Hills, and the Los Angeles ghetto, evoking similar trips more than thirty years ago by President Johnson and Robert Kennedy. References to President Reagan's comment, "We fought a war against poverty, and poverty won" notwithstanding, some progress has been made. The proportion of blacks below the poverty line, which was well above 30 percent as recently as 1990, has fallen to 27 percent, and black unemployment has dropped from 15 percent in 1985 to 9 percent. But substantial poverty is still with us. Hispanics, with 30 percent below the poverty line, have displaced blacks as the poorest large minority, and on some Indian reservations, the unemployment rate is above 70 percent. As we approach the end of the century, poverty lingers in the United States, as it does on vastly greater scale in the Third World. The optimism of those who fought the war on poverty at home and abroad has been replaced by fatigue and even pessimism. What explains the persistence of poverty? Why has it proved so intractable? The conventional diagnosis--education and know-how shortfalls, lack of opportunity, lack of capital, discrimination, and, in the Third World, imperialism--is now demonstrably inadequate. The crucial element that has been ignored is cultural values and attitudes that stand in the way of progress. Many people are made uncomfortable by the evidence that some cultures produce greater well-being than others. Cultural relativism--the view that cultures can be evaluated only on their own terms and are therefore essentially equal--is dominant in universities, and many economists believe that people will respond to economic signals in the same way, no matter their culture . East Asians and Hispanics The extraordinary achievements of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants in the United States--and elsewhere--belie these views. The recent RAND Corporation study, Immigration in a Changing Economy, documents the rapid upward mobility of East Asian immigrants, in sharp contrast with immigrants from Mexico and Central America. For example, East Asians substantially exceed national averages for years of education, while the Hispanic high school dropout rate hovers around 30 percent. In her 1970 book, Mexican Americans, Joan Moore remarked, "Jewish and Japanese children...march off to school with enthusiasm. Mexican and Negro children are much less interested. Some sort of cultural factor works here." The troubling Hispanic dropout rate reflects a culture that does not attach a high priority to education, witness the persistence of illiteracy in Latin America (10 percent in Mexico, more than 40 percent in Guatemala). The high school dropout rate in most Latin American countries exceeds 50 percent. Progress-prone cultures cross religious and racial lines. In addition to the Confucian cultures of East Asia, they include, among others, Basques, Sikhs, Jews, Mormons, and Armenians, not to mention the mainstream culture of the West. Such cultures share the belief that one's destiny can be influenced through considered action, and they attach high value to entrepreneurship, education, merit, and saving. Progress-resistant cultures tend to be passive and fatalistic, less entrepreneurial, less committed to education. A growing number of Latin Americans, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa among them, have come to the conclusion that the traditional culture is at the root of the region's underdevelopment. Mexican-American Lionel Sosa has come to the same conclusion about Latino underachievement in the United States. In The Americano Dream, he points to fatalism, the resignation of the poor, and the low priority of education as major obstacles to upward mobility. Afro-Americans, Indians, and Appalachia Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has concluded that culture is the key to understanding the underachievement of Afro-Americans. In Rituals of Blood, he documents the destructive consequences of slavery and Jim Crow for black attitudes about gender relationships. Many other writers have pointed to the destructive impact of slavery on work ethic values, the value of education, and the sense of social responsibility. Moreover, the cultural values the slaves brought with them from Africa have proven resistant to progress. Some contemporary Africans have come to the same conclusion about the cultural obstacles to progress in their region that Vargas Llosa and others have come to with respect to Latin America. Among them is Daniel Etounga Manguelle, a Camerounian whose book Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program? identifies fatalism and sorcery; distaste for work; suppression of initiative, achievement, and saving; and centralized traditions of authority as chiefly responsible for Africa's poverty, authoritarianism, and social injustice. I believe that the cultural legacy of slavery, perpetuated by the isolation of Jim Crow and the ghetto, has a lot to do not only with the persistence of poverty among blacks but also such recently highlighted phenomena as the gap in black-white test scores and the gap in computer usage by blacks and Hispanics relative to whites and Asians. Culture is not necessarily destiny, a conclusion underscored by the striking gains made by blacks in the last several decades: sharply rising educational attainment, declining poverty and unemployment, declining crime, the rapid increase in the numbers of African-Americans in the middle and upper-middle class. These encouraging trends reflect the escape from the traditional culture to the progressive national cultural mainstream. Isolation from that mainstream largely explains the disproportionate poverty of American Indians, particularly those 1.2 million (of a total of two million) who live on or near reservations. As with Hispanics, about 30 percent of all Indians are below the poverty line. The traditional culture, based on man's partnership with nature, inculcates both fatalism and an egalitarianism that discourages initiative and upward mobility. We are reminded that poverty cuts across racial lines by its persistence in isolated white Appalachia. The cultural roots of Appalachian poverty are traced back to the British borderlands by Brandeis historian David Hackett Fisher in his remarkable book, Albion's Seed. Most of the Appalachia settlers came from that poverty-stricken Scottish-Irish-English region and its culture of violence, distaste for work, disdain of education, and sorcery--in stark contrast with the literate, pacific, communitarian settlers from East Anglia who peopled Massachusetts. Doing something about culture To repeat, culture is not necessarily destiny. The transformations in this century of Spain, Turkey, the Province of Quebec, and Ireland, among others, remind us that culture changes. Nor is culture the only factor that explains poverty. It is obviously easier to reduce poverty in a vibrant economy than it is in a recession. The role of government policy is important, particularly with respect to the economy and labor, education, and immigration. Our immigration policy, which has facilitated substantial inflows of people with little education and few skills, particularly from Latin America, has aggravated the poverty problem. The creativity and diligence of East Asian immigrants, and their rapid absorption in the melting pot, are clearly a national asset. But with 30 percent of Hispanics--soon to become our largest minority--below the poverty line, it can be argued that we have imported a poverty problem as well as a cultural problem. Moreover, the unskilled immigrants accept lower salaries and fewer benefits, and they place downward pressure on wages at the lower end that makes it more difficult for citizens, many of whom are black and Hispanic, to escape poverty. Barbara Jordan, who before her death chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, was particularly concerned about this problem, which was among the considerations that led the Commission to recommend lower levels of legal immigration, redoubled efforts to stem illegal immigration, and more emphasis on skills. Dallas Morning News columnist Richard Estrada worries that the high immigration volume impedes acculturation to the American mainstream. The course of human progress demonstrates that some cultures produce greater good for greater numbers than others. Multiculturalism, which presumes that all cultures are equal, is not only wrong in this regard but also poses an obstacle to minority acculturation to the progressive mainstream--to say nothing of its erosive effect on national unity. Both at home and in the Third World, the anti-poverty agenda must address value and attitude change, as difficult and as painful as it may be. The process will be slow, but it offers renewed hope that the War on Poverty can, in due course, be won.