Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Noah Smith sends us to hard but very important truths about why American African-Americans are so poor relative to their fellow citizens: William Darity plus a team of six more: What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: "A narrative that places the onus of the racial wealth gap on black defectiveness is false in all of its permutations. We challenge the conventional set of claims that are made about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We contend that the cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the American economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy..."

This is not new, but it is true, and I take it as a sign of hope that this can now be said and attract a mass audience: George Yancy: The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America

Liz Hipple: New research on the relationship between race, place, and opportunity in the United States: "Raj Chetty and fellow researchers Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter released... “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective”...

Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that Röpke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Kevin Drum: The Republican Party Is in Full-On Panic Mode, and We Get to Watch: "Republicans are in panic mode over the possibility that Robert Mueller is about to start plowing relentlessly through the White House like a bulldozer leveling an old shack...

Jeffrey Friedman: Public Choice Theory and the Politics of Good and Evil: "So now we finally know. Libertarians aren’t the ditzy bumblers exemplified by 2016 presidential candidate Gary (“What is a leppo?”) Johnson...

Encyclopedia of Chicago (1899): Mr. Dooley Explains Our "Common Hurtage": "In the late 1890s, Finley Peter Dunne's newspaper columns in Irish dialect brought to life a fictional Bridgeport bartender, Mr. Dooley...

(Early) Monday Smackdown: New York Magazine Has a Huge Quality Control Problem with Andrew Sullivan. It Needs to Fix It...

Seems to me I can think of many reasons why his friends would have told him this would not be a good book to write: Joe Patrice: Law School Professor Has New Murder Mystery: "Law professor who quit Twitter in a temper tantrum is back with a new book.... Earlier this year, the conservative Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago advertised an event to discuss whether or not immigrants were 'toilet people'...

I have a question for Stanford's Michael @McFaul... We know that "If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation in mating, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ballpark estimates), and if the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation of lifetime incomes would be 0.01..." (see Bowles and Giants (2002)). That is only two percent the observed intergenerational correlation. Why, then, is it important to invite to your campus to speak someone whose big thing is the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, and racial differences thereof? And if one were going to invite to your campus to speak someone, etc., why would you pick somebody who likes to burn crosses? Wouldn't a healthier approach be to regard such a person—who focuses on the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, harps on genetic roots of differences between "races", and likes to burn crosses—as we regard those who know a little too much about the muzzle velocities of the main cannon of the various models of the Nazi Armored Battlewagon Version 4?: Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "The Bell Curve cited literature from Mankind Quarterly, which no mainstream scholar cites, because it is an unscholarly racist journal... http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2017/04/who-wants-charles-murray-to-speak-and.html

Dave Roberts: American white people really hate being called “white people”: "They want their America, the America where white dominance is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, back. They keep saying so.... Being judged and asked to justify itself, as so many subaltern groups are judged and asked to justify themselves, feels like an insult. If you doubt that, go read this Twitter thread."

There are two ways this could go—extending "whiteness" or permanent Republican minority status. In the past, "whiteness" has always been expanded so that it includes a vast majority of the American population—and so now we have people named Mark Krikorian denouncing the threat of a Hispanic wave that will pollute America: Kevin Drum: White Party, Brown Party: "I don’t think that our political system will literally become the White Party vs. the Brown Party, but it’s already closer to this than any of us would like to admit. What’s worse, it’s all but impossible to imagine how Republicans can turn things around in their party. They’re keenly aware of the need to address their demographic challenges, but the short-term pain of reaching out to non-whites is simply too great for them to ever take the plunge. Democrats aren’t in quite such a tough spot, but their issues with the white working class are pretty well known, and don’t look likely to turn around anytime soon either...