Links for 2012-02-19 [del.icio.us]

• Interracial Couples Who Make the Most Money – NYTimes.com
  Interracial marriages by income.
• Places To Visit, Trip Planner, Travel & Vacation Ideas | Wanderfly
  Place to put your base airport, budget, and interests…
• When to Be Meek, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  A major difference between the professional and working classes is that professionals appreciate the wages of meekness.  They realize that if you want to move from high school to college, from college to an entry-level job, from an entry-level job to a promotion, you must get in the habit of saying, “Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”  Even if you’re elite in absolute terms, you ascend the hierarchy by showing deference to people who are even more elite than you are.  The working class, in contrast, is dysfunctionally assertive.  Maybe they put pride and machismo above success; maybe they falsely believe that pride and machismo are a shortcut to success.  In either case, as Murray emphasizes, one of the best ways for elites to help is to preach the meekness they’ve so often and so fruitfully practiced.
• Culture and Responsibility
  When you’re talking about variations in outcomes within a socioeconomic group—about why some individuals seem to have done exceptionally better or worse than others similarly situated—it may make sense to talk about individual choice and responsibility. But when you’re talking about population level trends, this won’t do: If you want to know why an entire group of people are choosing to behave in a certain way, and especially why they’re collectively behaving conspicuously differently than they used to, the explanation is necessarily going to be something exogenous to any individual’s idiosyncratic choice. Whatever you think of 21st century American bourgeois mores, there aren’t many reports of Aztec royalty or !Kung bushmen spontaneously adopting them; people read from the locally available scripts. At the group level, “choice” isn’t an adequate explanation for anything, because it’s the pattern of choices that stands in need of explanation.

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