Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

Why do YOU think that's the case?

 

I don't know.

 

Is this about standing? I thought it was about success.

I bet you could name off the top of your head a heck of a lot more "successful" African-Americans than Asian-Americans.

Now, maybe they didn't go to Stanford to get that success (except for Tiger Woods, but he encompasses both groups) but they found success through a variety of means.

Asian-Americans seem to be known for choosing education as the primary means to success.

 

Third base!

 

I don't follow.

 

Only because we spend an inordinate amount of time in the playground of sports and etertainment.

We just don't happen to know the names of the thousands of successful Asian-American doctors, business owners and Silicon Valley computer whizzes.

 

Can we blame the business owners for Panda Express?

 

Here's a little hypothetical: Suppose we isolated, with a high degree of reliability, those behavioral traits that contribute powerfully to an inability to escape poverty. Further suppose that, in trying to help people climb out of poverty, we came up with a pill that ameliorated those behavioral traits and, in an effort to help the poor, we prescribed it to vast swaths of the "under-performing" population. Finally, let's suppose that this pill has unanticipated side effects: Among those who take it for extended periods of time, a substantial proportion will develop some seriously debilitating (but not fatal) condition (we'll call it flopitis).

Let's stipulate that a particular group (X), for reasons of history, is disproportionately represented among those who received this medication. It stands to reason, therefore, that X will have an exceptionally high flopitis rate.

DW et al. ask rhetorically why this is so, inferring that we need merely to look at X's history for an explanation. Others suggest, however, that we cannot overlook the medication that was given to X (and other groups, who also exhibit the medication-flopitis link).

Who has the better argument?

 

I think you have become committed to this idea that I think that slavery is the one and only reason that African-Americans lag behind. In literary terms, it is the inciting incident. I don't doubt that there have been intervening events since then. You and YF both have your radars going crazy here because a liberal is blaming policy for poverty, and you assume I mean conservative policies. I'm more than open to the idea that LBJ piloted American blacks into a mountainside in the Alps. Just make the case. I'll listen.

All I'm trying to do is make people understand that when they dismiss outside factors and history, they are essentially arguing that there is something inherent to African- and Asian-Americans, something biological, that is behind these differences in success level. This didn't spontaneously just happen.

 

Abbot & Costello - Who's on First.

 

Ah, OK. Now I chuckled.

 

It's a great story, but I weep for the last paragraph.

I understand it's not a newspaper, but it is CBS News. How fucking hard would it be to have someone who knows English read that paragraph and see it needs to be fixed?