Max wrote:
>You can't have it both ways, folks. If you want to rant about the wealth
gap, you have to measure it. If you measure it, you must engage the
"mysticism of numbers."<
Who said anything about the wealth gap not needing to be measured, Max? As for the charge of "uninformed vociferousness", I plead guilty to being vociferous, but not to being uninformed on this one. First, neither of us have read the study Brett cited; but nor was I referring to that study but rather to demographics. I shouted about demographics, and sad as it may be, that's pretty much what I've spent much of the last ten years researching: specifically, the practices and policies of demographics in australian history. I feel rather more informed than I can stomach.
Brett wrote:
> I think the burden of proof is on you to prove why demography is
bullshite.
I haven't tried to prove anything. I made a loud noise about why the presumptions of demographics can't be separated from eugenicist 'solutions'.
> In one sense it is arbitrary to talk about populations - men/women,
> americans/foreigners, christians/muslims, whatever. We're all
individuals.
That's not the argument I was making. But more below...
> But it is also possible to believe demography can help answer certain
> social questions.
Like what 'social problems'? See, here's where I think demography shifts from being some vague sense of 'stats are good' to being a set of questions and answers posing as neutral techniques: ie., where it takes 'populations' to be _the_ significant and explanatory variable in the first place and so both asks and answers _social questions_ according to that predefined terrain.
> But this doesn't mean you have to buy into the all the
> stuff you seem to attribute to me which I happen to find repulsive.
What did I attribute to you that you find repulsive? What I wrote mentioning you was "the presumption of 'different populations' is a premise that requires more than repetition. Without that premise, nothing of what Brett insists on 'asking' makes any sense." You want to talk about some difference between "original" and 'incoming' populations in such a way that those categories might have some explanatory value in determing the reasons for the distribution of wealth in the US economy and labour market. I happen to find that repulsive, for reasons that have to do with the kind of inexorable 'solutions' that this poses: if the presence of X numbers of people is granted as the explanation of Y social problem, then it makes perfect sense to remove those people or at the very least restrict their numbers. So, social problems conceived as problems of populations amounts to an answer drafted in terms of population controls. What I also said was that this kind of reduction to the sheer numbers of populations cannot readily admit grant explanatory power to something like the boujwahzee, since by virtue of being so small a number, they more often than not disappear on the explanatory radar of demographics.
The
> word immigrant can simply stand for people who were not natural born
> citizens, it doesn't have to be symptomatic of an "us" vs. "them"
> mentality, or a belief that immigrants are insignificant.
I never said you thought that migrants were insignificant. On the contrary, my problem is that you assign them attributes which are *rendered as external* to the conditions in which they exist (ie., the US labour market, the US economy, the US migration system and organisation, etc) as if 'they' come to the US carrying *US income disparities* with them like Max's Moe, Larry and Curly.
Btw, I can't imagine anything more arbitrary than "natural born citizen".
Angela