Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

From the comments section of Unemployment: The All-but-Certain Fate of Too Many Poor Black Boys by Gillian B. White.

Regrettably the article itself is anodyne post-modernist social justice virtue signalling clap-trap. The author starts by asserting the well refuted Marxian deterministic liturgy that individuals' futures are predetermined by their poverty, race, etc. rather than by the much more demonstrable causal explanation of capabilities, values and behaviors.

Study after study has proven that when children are sequestered in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, their educational and economic opportunities are stunted, creating enduring cycles of poverty.

But a new paper, written by a team of researchers led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty, indicates that these findings have yet another critical element: Concentrated poverty can be significantly more detrimental to young boys than to young girls.

In America it’s generally been true that men are more likely to be employed than women. According to the most current data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even as women have entered the workforce in greater numbers, men’s labor-force participation rate is around 69 percent, while women’s is around 57 percent. This division in the labor force holds among middle- and upper-income families, but Chetty and his fellow researchers find that when poor kids become adults, a reverse gender-employment gap appears, with poor boys more likely than poor girls to become unemployed adults.

The fact of the gender reversal is well known already but it is useful to have it quantified.

The intellectual crime committed by these ideology motivated research papers is that they take us down the wrong policy roads. In this case, the researchers are pre-committed (as evidenced in their past research) to believe that segregation is the root cause of all these poor life outcomes when in fact the causal mechanisms are abilities, values and behaviors.

And for another, it’s a paper that, like a lot of Chetty’s previous research, strongly suggests that as long as residential segregation continues, poor black children have little hope of having a life better than their parents.

The solution for the postmodernist totalitarians is to strip away rights of association from the population and impose choices made by the unelected enlightened. It is a pathway to misery trodden many times in many countries and has never, not once, led to the imagined desirable outcomes that the intellectual totalitarians imagine. Human nature and reality always get in the way.

But I have gotten distracted by the nonsense. What interested me was a quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer in the comments that I found interesting.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

UPDATE: I blog primarily to keep track of items that I find interesting, to think through issues out loud (as it were), and to make connections between ideas I might not have seen as connected. In doing so, I have found over the years that it has been a good mechanism for also seeing patterns of communication in my own expression.

This is one of those instances. This post is too harsh. It isn't wrong. Totalitarian utopianism and neo-marxian determinism are some of the most insidious habits of mind among some of our contemporary journalists. Though perhaps well intended, their sloppy thinking, both in terms of failing to use logic and in terms of failing to research that about which they are opining, can lead to disastrously bad policy recommendations. As bad, it delays focusing on actual real causes of undesirable conditions. White fully deserves castigation for propagating a naive and long discredited idea (taking people out of poor neighborhoods will make them no longer poor). Frustration, though, is no justification for harshness.