‘Please Stop Helping Us’

[Adam]

‘Please Stop Helping Us’

Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a man from one of the colonies addressed a London audience.

“Please do not do any more good in my country,” he said. “We have suffered too much already from all the good that you have done.”

That is essentially the message of an outstanding new book by Jason Riley about blacks in America. Its title is Please Stop Helping Us. Its theme is that many policies designed to help blacks are in fact harmful, sometimes devastatingly so. These counterproductive policies range from minimum-wage laws to “affirmative action” quotas.

This book untangles the controversies, the confusions, and the irresponsible rhetoric in which issues involving minimum-wage laws are usually discussed. As someone who has followed minimum-wage controversies for decades, I must say that I have never seen the subject explained more clearly or more convincingly.

Black teenage-unemployment rates ranging from 20 to 50 percent have been so common over the past 60 years that many people are unaware that this was not true before there were minimum-wage laws, or even during years when inflation rendered minimum-wage laws ineffective, as in the late 1940s.

Pricing young people out of work deprives them not only of income but also of work experience, which can be even more valuable. Pricing young people out of legal work, when illegal work is always available, is just asking for trouble. So is having large numbers of idle young males hanging out together on the streets.

When it comes to affirmative action, Jason Riley asks the key question: “Do racial preferences work? What is the track record?” Like many other well-meaning and nice-sounding policies, affirmative action cannot survive factual scrutiny.

Some individuals may get jobs they would not get otherwise, but many black students who are quite capable of getting a good college education are admitted, under racial quotas, to institutions whose pace alone is enough to make it unlikely that they will graduate.

Studies that show how many artificial failures are created by affirmative-action admissions policies are summarized in Please Stop Helping Us, in language much easier to understand than in the original studies.

I heard a radio interview with the author a few days ago. Pretty interesting-sounding guy. I'm going to look forward to reading this one.

[Gingersnap]

I know that working as a teen profoundly affected me in a positive way. At the time, I was envious of kids who were too "rich" or too lazy to work. This is the first non-working summer I have ever had since the age of 13. I really appreciate it.

But working helped me mentally in ways that rippled through my entire career and I expect the experience will continue to help with Career II.

Working as teen taught me:

Life is not fair.

My issues aren't more important than the job requirements in terms of time off, coming in late, taking off early, etc.

You have to talk yourself up and take more responsibility to get a raise or a better shift.

You don't have to like somebody to work effectively with them.

You can work with bullies, psychos, and bigots. The experience will make it easier to detect them later when counts for more and it will motivate you to get a much better job somewhere else.

People who didn't have those experiences as teens were in a perpetual state of shock, anger, and denial for years until they finally got with the program. They lost valuable career steps because they got fired, walked off jobs, or got an ugly reputation on the job.

[scott]

Compassion is too often defined as efforts one makes to help those in need by using someone else's resources.