There is a popular new essay by Christine Emba on men’s tortured masculinity, titled “Men are lost.” It paces the perimeter of race questions in interesting (not in a good way) ways, like this:
The weirdness [of young men] manifested in the national political scene, too: in the 4chan-fueled 2016 campaign for Donald Trump, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong.
Can you spot the men of color in this paragraph? They’re in there!, but invisible: participating in (not against) the Black Lives Matter protests. How’s their masculinity? Anyways, that’s not my point.
My question is about the now totemic citation to Raj Chetty et al’s “groundbreaking study” on race, class, and social mobility. The finding oft repeated by the masculinity crisis industrial complex is this. She writes:
Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys. However, those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility. (emphasis added)
This study, eventually published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, has been cited more than a thousand times. It reported, in the abstract:
Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The few areas with small black-white gaps tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood have significantly better outcomes. However, less than 5% of black children grow up in such areas.
The finding is tricky, and you have to keep your eye on the actual data. It’s from IRS tax records and Census data. IRS records do not include race. Here’s Figure 12, showing the relationship between low-income father present rates in childhood (from IRS data) and adult outcomes (from Census data). Please note that the binned scatter plots they use make relationships look stronger by definition.
Specifically, describing Table 2, in the coup de grace, they write:
Finally, we test the hypothesis that black boys’ outcomes are associated with black father presence because they may both be affected by the same set of policies or shocks that persist over time in an area (such as high rates of arrests or incarceration). To do so, we include fixed effects for the tract in which the child lives as an adult (in 2015), thereby comparing children who grew up in different areas but currently live in the same place. To maximize precision, we use the full sample rather than the subset of low-poverty tracts for this analysis. The association between black father presence and black boys’ earnings outcomes is strong whether or not we include adulthood tract fixed effects (column (8) versus (9)). Hence, what matters is the fraction of low-income fathers in the tract where the child grows up even holding fixed where they live as adults, ruling out the possibility that the same factors that affect black father presence directly affect black boys’ outcomes.
And they conclude:
Together, these results show that black father presence is associated with children’s outcomes in a highly race-by-gender specific manner. Although we cannot make strong causal claims based on this correlational evidence, the specificity of this set of correlations rules out broad mechanisms that would affect both genders and races (such as differences in the quality of schools). Instead, it points to channels that affect black boys in particular, such as mentoring by black male role models in the community or differences in the treatment of black boys in communities with high rates of black father presence.
Maybe someone else can explain why they use a fixed effect for the adult neighborhood rather than the childhood neighborhood. Anyway, if you appreciate their “we cannot make strong causal claims” language, you’ll love it when they say, “we use the same design to identify the causal effects of areas on racial disparities by showing that neighborhoods have race-specific causal effects,” or when they say, “we show that places have causal effects not just on the level of outcomes but also on the gap in outcomes across races,” or when they say, “We conclude that much of the observational variation in black-white intergenerational gaps documented here reflects the causal effects of childhood environment,” or when they conclude, “The analysis in this section has shown that childhood environment has significant causal effects on black-white intergenerational gaps,” and, “These findings show that environmental conditions during childhood have causal effects on racial disparities.”
Neighborhood “effects” are fickle and there are approximately a zillion ways to analyze them only a billion of which are covered in this paper. But let’s just stipulate that there is a robust correlation between the number of Black fathers present in a neighborhood and the odds of upward mobility, so that the extremely small percentage of Black boys in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and many Black fathers present are more likely to join the very small group of upward mobile Black men. And that it’s not their own fathers that “matter” here, and not the number of Black men in general, but the presence of other people’s Black fathers specifically — and that all this specifically, causally, affects Black boys but not girls.
Here’s my question: Do you really believe this? Describe for me in a scene not from a Hollywood movie how this actually happens on a large scale, robust to all these statistical controls. I love fathers and fathering, and men, and I believe in my heart of hearts that they “matter.” But explain this to me in social science, in light of real inequality. Or better yet, someone do a follow-up study that actually, I don’t know, replicates or confirms this with real (different) data, before we completely canonize it. Maybe there are genuine super small scale effects like this — seems highly plausible. But the way this meme has taken off is not about small-scale interpersonal effects. Here’s Richard Reeves:
What explains the limited upward mobility of black boys from certain neighborhoods? Perhaps the most striking finding of the whole report is the impact of “father presence” in census tracts on the mobility chances of black boys. Note that the researchers are not showing here the direct effect of a boy’s own father, or the marital status of his parents. This is about the broader presence of fathers in a given neighborhood. Note, too, that the finding relates specifically to fathers, not just men in general. This is a wholly new and important finding. It is a highly specific, race-by-gender effect that provides direction for further empirical research and theoretical development on the causal mechanisms underlying these findings.
And here are the mechanisms that Reeves proposes to be studied — how other people’s Black fathering:
- reduces disciplinary problems;
- provides supervision, as well as direct mentoring support;
- generates more pro-social behavior and norms that lead to positive aspirations; and
- leads to changes in the way black boys are perceived and treated by peers.
All cool speculation about individual-level interactions that might make a difference. Not, in my opinion, highly relevant to the massive scale of Black-White inequality, certainly not in proportion to the attention it gets. Which is my complaint.
Don’t let the big data hit you in the ass on the way to the behavioral psychology replication roast.
—
Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often | Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | ..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community. A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities. A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.—
Photo credit: iStock