Since white people suffer proportionately less from poverty than nonwhite people, they do tend to live longer, and in better health, which is conducive to political and other civic activism.
Apparently, Hispanic / Latino populations in the US consistently have comparable or even better health outcomes than non-Hispanic whites despite having lower income / education.
I mean, every hispanic person I know personally has a very large supportive community/family life. I'm sure that correlates with health outcomes. Nearly every wealthy white person I know is chronically lonely, also anti-correlated.
I remember reading it having to do with diet. But as trends such as "super foods" grow and the obesity epidemic expands into south america, these trends likely aren't going to last. As staple foods in latin american countries see the price of their foods increase. And the shifting diets towards unhealthy alternatives that are priced cheaper than said goods.
I'd hypotize that it's got to do with social networks (the real life one), Latin Americans seem to have closer-knit family and friends, and social bonds have been shown to be very helpful for longevity.
But it's just my hunch without concrete numbers (in regards to e.g. percentage of old people reporting being lonely, classified by race)
Assuming the average for white Hispanic is similar to the white population overall, aren't you then implying that the number for non-white Hispanic should be even higher since white Hispanic would be bringing down the average?
You are mostly wrong. The U.S. Census, which is the standard setter in this area, draws a clear distinction between race and ethnicity [1], where ethnicity is defined as Hispanic or Latino, or Not Hispanic or Latino. Any race may identify as either.
For example, the Wikipedia to which GP links sources the relevant data from the County Health Rankings (a project run by U of W and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). The technical documents describe the distinction between Race and Ethnicity, which matches the Census [2].
The Census' approach has apparently not been ideal for a lot of people, and it looks like it may be changing to just have a combined question for race and ethnicity. The problem is that the Census insists that Latino or Hispanic can only be an ethnicity, which doesn't really match up with a lot of people's experiences.
> If approved, the changes would address longstanding difficulties many Latinos have had in answering a question about race that does not include a response option for Hispanic or Latino, which the federal government recognizes only as an ethnicity that can be of any race.
There are white Mexicans, black Mexicans, and Indian/mixed Mexicans. I’m not sure if you would consider any of them to be Hispanic/Latino, but the ethnic groups exist in Mexico (and other Latin American countries surely), so isn’t it weird that they are collapsed into one ethnicity in the United States? Maybe some weird aspect of immigration physics I’m not considering? See:
> 20%+ of Hispanic/Latino people in the U.S. identify as white.
When asked a question that doesn't have Hispanic as an option. As another comment mentioned, the Biden administration has proposed changing that question (by including a Hispanic option) to better reflect people's identities.
Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
10 years ago if you'd told me articles like this were coming I'd have laughed. How did misconstruing the truth to further the "white people bad" notion become not just acceptable but popular? And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
Is it really? This is definitely not the point of the article, which talk about the bias that people grow more conservative when that is at least partially explained by a survivor bias.
You decide to read this as "white people bad", when the article simply highlights some democratic bias that isn't talked about that often, and I think your reaction says more about your own obsidional way of thinking than the author's.
> And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?
Can you please for the love of god point to me where in this article it's said that more diversity is an ontological good? Are we reading a different article altogether?
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
I don't really see this framing. I see an examination of "are older voters more conservative" "is that a change or is it other factors" that then briefly veers into predominant political leanings by race (in a sloppy, only-looking-at-two-races way), but not a lot of harsh judgemental terms there. More descriptive.
If indeed "some races have less political influence because they die earlier because they're poor" is true, though, and then you factor in "why are they poor" for some of those races and find some nasty answers... why wouldn't that be bad?
There's also a gender lifespan gap that's even bigger than the black-white racial lifespan gap. E.g. black women live longer than white men on average.
Consequently, more than half of elderly voters are women.
Probably, if you make the comparison the authors make, you get the numbers they got. If you compare five different groups instead of the two groups they used, then what a shock, the order of the five doesn’t match the order of the original 2.
Why would the commenter have made the comparison they do, if they wanted to consider the matter in good faith?
I think we agree here and I misunderstood your original comment. I think the comment listing life expcetancies for various ethnic groups is disingenuous.
Except in this case adding the other races as additional data points changes how you view the black-white comparison. For example, native Americans live almost as long as whites, but are as poor as blacks. And Hispanics are closer to blacks than whites in income, but live much longer than whites.
I don't fully understand why this happens, but it's pretty common to see people say "nonwhite" when they clearly mean "black". The author goes on to quote statistics for black people age 18-64, so that has to be what he had in mind.
> I don't fully understand why this happens, but it's pretty common to see people say "nonwhite" when they clearly mean "black".
Americans’ conception of race really only has white and black. They don’t know much about other races, so they project their mental conceptions about black people onto other races.
This is obvious when you see “people of color” applied in ways that really only make sense if you’re talking about black people. But also consider affirmative action. Hispanics as a group have similar economic status to blacks as a group, because many are recent migrants from poor countries. But while blacks have much lower economic mobility than whites in the same income level, Hispanics have similar economic mobility to similarly situated whites. So the logic for preferring a black person over a white person with similar economic level doesn’t apply to Hispanics. But people never think about that, because they conceptualize Hispanics as a “kind of black person.”
1. more diversity doesn't equal "less white people." It means less white people proportionally, of course. But if your view is really "all people are the same" than it doesn't even matter whether there or more or less white people. Reading between the lines you seem to be suggesting that you, at least, think "more white people" is good. Just come out and say it, if that is your belief. No need to beat around the bush.
2. You don't have to be a genius to get the idea here: even if you imagine that white people are 100% not racist, wealthier white people may simply not have similar political priorities to poorer black people (your parent comment is also disingenuous to indicate asians and hispanics have longer lifespans, since this article is primarily about poorer black people). If it is the case that poorer black people die earlier then it stands to reason that their political interests are less served. No one has to be racist or "bad" for this to be the case. And, in a society which purports to want equal representation for all people, a systematic difference in literal years of life is a reasonable barrier to wish to overcome insofar as it affects voting.
3. this "stuff" gets published because differences (in for example, health outcomes) between black and white americans are profound and are directly correlated with segregation and political disenfranchisement. You might be some kind of weirdo who somehow believes society is 100% equal and everything black americans suffer is "their fault" but that view is, at the very least insufficiently universal that its pure and disingenuous rhetoric to assert it as if it is obvious and true. There is a shit-ton of research on this in public health: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/report/k...
As to the fact (indicated by the parent comment) that one's ethnic identity affects different ethnicities differently, well "no shit Sherlock." It is asinine to collapse the discussion about how race operates in our society to "white people" and "non-white people" and this article does not do that and does not even gesture in that direction.
Regards to the last paragraph, did you miss the part where the quote parent opens with is directly from the article, and explicitly makes that distinction? If your going to write an essay for everyone to read, at least try not to end it with evidence you didn't process the original post...
Sorry, this isn't "critical race theory." Like how is making observations about the demographics associated with old age and voting "critical race theory?"
> this isn't "critical race theory." Like how is making observations about the demographics associated with old age and voting "critical race theory?
You're correct, it's not. But there's a trend of shoehorning race into everything, and I think that's what the comment to which you're responding refers. The underlying study never mentioned race. By proxying SES with race, the article recapitulates the racial determinism that is, if not at the core, then a necessary consequence of CRT.
Solution is simple, Black people will have to vote at 16, Asians will have to wait until they are 24.3, Natives 18.4, Hispanics 23 and last but not least White people at 19.6. Unless they are woman of course, then they have to wait an extra 6 years. Religious people an extra 6.48 years. When they get married people don't get to vote for 2.4 years.
For example, a married Asian Buddist woman 24.3+6+6.48+2.4 = 39.18 is the corrected for inflation voting age.
We can further refine the formula to account for the expectancy per region, get some of that creative gerrymandering going on. Should be fun!
I had to remind my kid about this Asian privilege the other day when she was complaining about someone being a “white man.” Note that the white life expectancy is close to that of native Americans.
That’s more theoretical than directly relevant here.
Asian’s are projected to live longer, but currently under represented in elderly populations in the US due to high levels of immigration over the last few decades.
> Asian’s are projected to live longer, but currently under represented in elderly populations in the US due to high levels of immigration over the last few decades.
And specifically: disproportionately likely to have immigrated to the US when already over the age of 65, to join a family member who is already a US citizen and employed at a well-paying job due to explicit visa requirements.
Raw life expectancy doesn't mean a whole lot when you're drawing samples from dramatically different populations that have already been subject to heavily confounding filters.
Average wouldn't be the relevant calculation here. The study linked in this article is paywalled, but from the the excerpted paragraphs, seems much more grounded and compelling than the quote you pull, and doesn't make a poor -> racial jump.
The article features no actual math to calculate the magnitude of the effect, even though such data are available. I would guess it would be a couple of percentage points shift at best.
The way our first past the post system works, a few percentage points is enormously impactful. A few percentage point swing in Florida could change presidential elections permanently.
> We analyze this mechanism applying propensity scores matching and multivariate regressions on data from MIDUS I (Midlife in the United States: A National Study of Health and Well-being) and its 10-year mortality follow-up. Results show that health differences between 10-year survivors and non-survivors explain 56% of their differences in socio-political participation.
Are poor people likely to be liberals? There had always been a trope about poor conservatives that probably has some truth to it. And now that liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite, I'm not sure why anyone would think that the poor would lean liberal. While I imagine that there are lots of rich old people who are Democrats that perpetuate and exacerbate inequality. The article is a bit Orwellian.
First, liberal doesn't really mean much in America. Liberal for a lot of people just means "those people I disagree with". For others it means people who uphold property rights and American global dominance to be sacred.
In the north and midwest you have a lot of poor people who are still voting Democrat because their state legislatures have vestiges of union-affiliated Democrat traditions. We see the Democrats in Minnesota being much more pro-worker than in New York or California, places we traditionally think of a "liberal". These people are probably registered democrats for this reason, even though at the national level the democrats are almost as hostile towards labor as the republicans.
In the south you had southern Democrat politicians or Dixiecrats, whose constituents got pulled into the Republican party under Nixon. He used blue collar aesthetics to bring them in under the same umbrella as the wealthy. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that in the south, race and culture is a greater source of identity than class for many people, especially the poor. People will see Joel Osteen as being cut from the same cloth as them because they think that they share the same values.
Lastly, there are a lot of single issue votes in the Republican party on guns and abortion. I don't think that there are as many single-issue Democrats.
The "latinos" who live in the USA, it seems so. At our own countries it seems the tendency has shifted to the left side of the spectrum - Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil had recently elected left-wing governments.
The US conception of "left" and "right" doesn't map neatly onto other countries to begin with, but there's still some clarification needed.
Latino Americans are still overwhelmingly left-of-center (though perhaps not likely to be left enough to be "leftist").
The shift to the right has been relatively small (though consequential due to geography) and limited to certain groups. For example, Cuban Americans in Miami are much more likely to have moved to the right.
It always amuses me to see how left and right differ between nations.
US conservatives are protesting and restricting immigration when in New Zealand, the conservatives are wildly pro immigration. Their argument is that it drives house prices up and wages down when you've got more people flooding in. If you're a land and/or business owner, that's what you vote for. The left wants less immigration so workers and renters have more negotiating power.
In Canada I think it's pretty even split; as much as we have a "left" and "right", I don't think the left or the right have strongly different views on immigration. We are bringing in immigrants at a massive clip though, and progressives are noting that the cost of living keeps increasing while wages stay the same, leading to a lot of hardship for people who haven't already accumulated wealth.
There may be conservatives who oppose immigration out of xenophobia, but there are many conservative business owners who see immigration as a way to keep paying a less than living wage, and landlords who see it as a way to keep the demand for rentals (much) higher than the supply
There is still some of that alignment in the U.S., but it’s not the dominant one currently. Wealthier & business-oriented conservatives tend to be pro-immigration, e.g. the influential conservative think-tank Cato Institute is solidly pro-immigration [1,2]. But the more nativist Trump-style conservatives clearly have more power than them post-2016. On the left, the AFL-CIO labor federation has historically been skeptical of immigration (and free trade) for basically the same reasons the businesspeople support them (belief that it will push down wages). Though the labor movement is somewhat more supportive of immigration in recent years.
There are differences between the two parties in terms of how (and how much) they care about the poor and the working class. But both parties have priorities they hold more dear.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans are champions of the poor and working class, but they are also not equally neglectful of them.
The Democratic Party is neoliberal by every imaginable definition of the term, and so-called "classical liberalism" was abandoned with the onset of WW2. Which liberalism are you referring to?
In the conservative/liberal spectrum of the US, the Democratic party is left-leaning centrist. There is no mainstream "liberal" party in the US.
But aside from that, what I also mean is that the Democratic party has members from all across the political spectrum. There are even extremely conservative Democrats. So, however you define "liberal", it is not accurate to consider "democrat" and "liberal" as being essentially synonymous.
People seem to falsely equate liberal with leftwing. They are very different. In fact no one hates liberals quite like left wingers. Democrats are liberal, not leftist (though they have adopted some leftist bits)
Liberals (and neoliberals) want everything controlled by markets. The government should butt out and collect no more taxes than is reasonably needed to set and enforce the market rules. Everything else should be private. Not too different from libertarians except that they have more common sense.
Leftists want the government to have an opinion and directly act and spend money in order to achieve specific outcomes. If there are many homeless, don't try to influence the market to increase supply or drop price, just directly go and build houses. If we need clean energy, don't dick about with carbon credits and incentives, just go and hire some engineers and build wind turbines.
I think it matters more on local-level elections. Some candidates will propose shelters and affordable housing policies, the other wants to ban them and plow highways. This is where voters demography and their representation matters.
Democrats (and liberals in general) are overwhelmingly urban (red/blue county maps are basically population density maps), especially living in major cities.
But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0]. I wonder which is the larger contributor there: is it income or geography that most drives the poor towards liberalism?
I don't really want to engage with your claim re: abandoning the working class, as I fully endorse the mindset that breaking the rail worker strike was anti-worker. But concurrently, the change of regulation that eventually led to the rail worker strike was a Republican/conservative policy. I will say that very few on the Democrat/liberal side talk openly about e.g. falling birth rates as an economic problem for the adoption industry, so I'm inclined to say that the condescending liberal elites are still better at pretending the poors are actual people who can hear what's said about them.
> But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0]
That graph defines "low income" as less than $20,000/year, but 75% of the people who make less than $20,000 also make less than $15,000, i.e. less than minimum wage. This implies that it's less people who make low wages and more people who don't have full-time employment. Moreover, one of the largest populations of people who typically don't have full-time employment are... college students.
This is also affected by the age distribution between the parties (older people tend to be Republicans and to make more money than they did when younger). It would be much more interesting to see the graph organized by lifetime earnings at a given age.
I'm not sure such data even exists. I think it would certainly explore it though.
My experience working minimum wage was that it was impressively difficult to break $15k, because the employers were hostile to the concept of consistent enough scheduling to allow a second job. I was doing 25 hours a week retail (any higher and they owed me benefits), and when I tried to adjust my availabilty to support a 2nd job, my first job cut my hours, so I was still only working 25 total hours a week (but I was spending twice as much time commuting). Anecdotally, that's pretty common.
Incidentally, if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, your pre-tax income at federal minimum wage is $15,080. 31 of the 50 states have higher (frequently considerably higher) minimum wages. So its worth wondering what fraction of the population is in that "low income" group?
Perhaps a better question would be "how does party affiliation relate to the federal 'very low income' status?" There's a strong geographic element to 'very low income', and the local minimum wage factors into that. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay area (where many hackernews readers live and work), there's a more than $20k difference between what's 'very low income' in Solano ($47.7k) county and Marin ($71.6k). You'll notice that both of those are well outside what the graph says is low income. But in terms of buying power, they're poorer than folks in rural Alabama.
> My experience working minimum wage was that it was impressively difficult to break $15k, because the employers were hostile to the concept of consistent enough scheduling to allow a second job. I was doing 25 hours a week retail (any higher and they owed me benefits), and when I tried to adjust my availabilty to support a 2nd job, my first job cut my hours, so I was still only working 25 total hours a week (but I was spending twice as much time commuting). Anecdotally, that's pretty common.
Ironically this is what you get from "labor protections" from politicians. The employer would be happy to give you more hours instead of paying the same amount to two people who each work half as many hours. That's lower training and hiring costs for them. But paying one person the same amount they're paying two is illegal, so they do the second one and you get screwed into two commutes.
Then if you're working part time twice, both employers want you to be there during the busiest part of the day but you can't be in two places at once. You can avoid this by working two different kinds of jobs so the busiest periods don't overlap, but now you're forced into another inconvenience (you may like one type of work better) solely because you can't even offer to work for one employer for the same hours and compensation you get from two.
> Incidentally, if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, your pre-tax income at federal minimum wage is $15,080. 31 of the 50 states have higher (frequently considerably higher) minimum wages.
Right, so the percentage of people in the under-$20,000 group who don't have full time employment is even higher than 75%.
> Perhaps a better question would be "how does party affiliation relate to the federal 'very low income' status?"
The interesting question is the party affiliation of people who actually work for low wages, so you need something that excludes the people who have low "income" only because they're students or are living off of daddy's money. Probably wants to be something like, party affiliation of people at exactly the 20th percentile income level for the region, or say the 15%-25% range, instead of "below 20%" which includes all the people who have low income because they don't have or need a full time job.
>Ironically this is what you get from "labor protections" from politicians. The employer would be happy to give you more hours instead of paying the same amount to two people who each work half as many hours. That's lower training and hiring costs for them. But paying one person the same amount they're paying two is illegal, so they do the second one and you get screwed into two commutes.
>Then if you're working part time twice, both employers want you to be there during the busiest part of the day but you can't be in two places at once. You can avoid this by working two different kinds of jobs so the busiest periods don't overlap, but now you're forced into another inconvenience (you may like one type of work better) solely because you can't even offer to work for one employer for the same hours and compensation you get from two.
And in the perfect workers' paradise, we'd all be free to sell our labor for the market rate, and work 120 hours a week at our base rate if we wanted, because there's no meddlesome government interfering with the moral perfection of the free market? </s>
My frustration was that it wasn't until I had full-time hours that they bothered to give me even approximately consistent hours, and even then, I had to prove myself to be valuable enough that they let me keep doing my 8-hour-a-week, practically volunteer second job (a job which I really preferred, but it was at a community rec center with very limited, fixed hours).
>Right, so the percentage of people in the under-$20,000 group who don't have full time employment is even higher than 75%.
The point I was trying to make is that the "poor" stretch upwards into the higher incomes, incomes that are noticeably absent from those plots. $20k - $39k is not depicted, and that's where e.g. full-time minimum wage earners in California, Washington, and 29 other states land.
Your argument seems to be that we can just dismiss college students, and trust-fund babies, but also e.g. the disabled, etc because they're spoiled or in a passing phase. In prior generations, it might've been true that leftist, liberal, or Democratic-party leanings tended to fade with age, but starting at least with millennials, that's less and less true. In any case, the actual trend is obscured, because a survivably poor income is not reflected in the link I shared.
I feel quite strongly that workers are still weakly affiliated with democrats because there is literally no other politically credible force in american politics that even pretends to care about workers.
Galaxy brain shit. The problem is that young people don't vote. Allowing old people to designate a proxy is unlikely to move the needle. This is particularly true in the US because voting is actually pretty hard if you are working class, since you cannot skip work to do it. But whether it is that or just apathy or ignorance, just allowing marginalized voters to pick a younger person to vote for them would probably not work and wouldn't accurately reflect their preferences anyway (since older people still tend to be more conservative all around).
We time-shift money all the time with finance, so the idea of time-shifting votes is interesting. Like, the whole millennial generation invests their whole lifetime of votes in one glorious year to fix the housing market. (Or, more likely, to achieve some stupid mimetic goal.) Mostly it's social-sci-fi, but it's not totally outside the realm of possibility.
If we want to get truly absurd, we could problematize the nonexistence of unborn voters (no, this isn't an abortion thing, though you could take it in that direction), and apply a correction factor for different fertility rates. After all, if you're compensating for death at the population level, why not also compensate for disparities of births?
"One person in some alternate universe, one vote here, that's what I say."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...
[2] https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.01.010