https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ElKALF6XmaE
if we could extirpate the dysfunctional underclass culture. And that is something that is tearing down Black’s potential to succeed by embracing this anti-oppositional culture that says that academic effort and achievement is anti- is acting white. It glorifies criminality, glorifies conspicuous consumption, misogyny, maximal procreation, you know, having as many children as you can by different baby mamas. If we could get, I would say, an intervention that was maybe focused less on the cognitive matters and more on simply deferring gratification, self-control, the types of issues that Edward Banfield wrote about in The Unheavenly City, that that would be the most important thing to focus on because I’m not sure that efforts to change the cognitive skills gap will be that successful over time. But really, all we ask is people to respect the law and to restrain their impulses. And as you pointed out, the data for, let’s say, the Head Start enterprise does indicate very clearly that these wide-scale attempts to increase general cognitive ability did not succeed. What you saw with Head Start was that the children who went through Head Start were more likely to be in the proper grade for their age, and they were more likely to graduate from high school, and they were less likely to become pregnant in teenagehood. But that hope for expanding boost of cognitive ability as a consequence of early childhood intervention, it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Head Start experience but was obliterated as a general rule by grade six, all the other kids caught up. And so then there’s only two places to go from there, and one is to go even earlier into the intervention, which means you start taking kids away from their family in some real sense at the age of, let’s say, two or even earlier, and that’s a rat’s nest and a nightmare of its own accord. Or to understand that, as you pointed out, that there are other socioeconomic variables that might be focused on. I think one of the most interesting ones biologically is likely fatherlessness. Like we do know, for example, that girls who don’t have a father will hit puberty on average at least a year earlier, which is substantially earlier, and that indicates a real biological impact of the lack of a masculine figure in the household because that’s a walloping physiological difference. We know that boys who have lack of father at the age of 12 have telomeres, so this is a genetic difference, that are on average something approximating 15% shorter, which means that all other things being equal, they’re already doomed to a much shorter life. And so we don’t know what the pervasive multi-generational consequences of the breakdown in familial structure in the final analysis are. It does appear that the black population has fallen behind on the family integration and stability front since the early 1960s rather than making advances, and it doesn’t look like that’s good for anyone concerned given the absolute wealth of data showing how pervasive a problem at every level fatherlessness happens to be. We also have no idea what the consequence of fatherlessness is on the development of general cognitive ability across time. There might be a literature on that that I don’t happen to be familiar with, but it is certainly the case that that’s another place we might look if we were trying to bolster social stability and eradicate some of the pervasive differences in, what would you say, general psychological well-being that seem to be associated with race? Well, yeah, I mean, I think you’re underplaying this as how bad it is. You know, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his astoundingly present report in the 1960s warning that the country was about to screech to a dead halt with regards to further civil rights progress, his reason was not a resurgence of white racism or changing economic positions in the country, opportunities in the country. His reason was what he saw at the time as a catastrophic breakdown in the black family. At that point, when Moynihan wrote this report, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 23 percent, and Moynihan said that with that number of young black males growing up in single-family homes without fathers to socialize them, to civilize them, growing up without the expectation of a marriage culture, this population is doomed. You will not get out of underclass poverty culture, gang culture. Well, what are we at today? We’re at 71 percent of what Moynihan was raising an alarm about. So, three times higher about. And so, it is absolutely at civilization destroying levels, and what is as bad, and we know, you say we don’t know the cognitive consequences of that, that’s probably true, but we certainly have ample data on the fact that kids growing up in single-parent family homes are four or five times as likely to be poor. You know, you say you’d be better off being born with a smart parent than a rich parent. I would say you’re better off being born with two parents than one welfare-supported single mother who happens to have a larger government income than two working-class married parents that are maybe pulling in $25,000 a year. You still, if you’re in a Rawlsian position of choosing where you want to end up, you choose the two-parent family over the wealthy single mother. So, things are really bad, but the problem is how do you fix it? And people like you and I have been going around talking about the problem of single parenting, and I was just going to add the problem is not just for the individual child and growing up without a father, but when boys are raised in a culture, that does not expect them to get married before they have children, they are absolved of the types of expectations that can help them become functioning males. And I know I’m in your territory here, Jordan, talking about how do you civilize the savage male libido, but one way you do so is say if you want to make yourself a plausible mate, you have to learn to defer gratification. You have to learn to have future orientation. And when you’re growing up in an inner city, and it is absolutely the norm that you can start having sex with girls at age 12, they may or may not get pregnant, but you will have no further responsibilities. There is no reason to develop those skills of self-control that make you a plausible worker, a plausible husband, a plausible colleague in any kind of voluntary association. So that’s the problem. The solution, though, is extremely difficult because as I’ve been reprimanded in the past by Deborah Dickerson, the relationship between the sexes in the black community is very, very troubled.