Well I am honored to be your sounding board! Culture is indeed a transformed version of the past, this I have long believed. Until pretty recently I believed the biggest components of that culture flowed directly thru the beliefs and attitudes of the parents themselves. I still believe that, but I have an increased appreciation of the cumulative consequences of external beliefs and attitudes when pervasively applied. Essentially one cannot not be black in the eyes of others (if you are black).

I think it would be a great value to society to understand the relative impact of these many factors. You are a sociologist, so I wonder your opinion on this. It seems one could perform a (non-causal) correlational factor analysis to understand which factors most closely correlate with objective measure of social success (e.g. income, etc.) My idea is to use interviews, and detailed questionnaires, and actions (like joining the church choiror etc.) in order to get a full sense of a family, and their social context. (racial beliefs in their nation, etc.) Of course since many confounding factors exist, this first cut analysis will be of limited value since one cannot tease apart causation. Second we perform some kind of “match pairs” analysis or such. where we try to identify unusual cases where a given individual differs on a single dimension from their typical demographic in order to assess the CAUSAL impact of that one feature. Perhaps one looks at folks that move to America with a culture developed elsewhere, this would allow us to contrast the consequences of internal family culture from external societal culture. Then we can see how outcomes are affected. Or find examples where a person is randomly made much richer or poorer than expected, and again see the consequences. or examples of a family randomly ending up in a much wealthier or much poorer neighborhood.

This would not be just one study. But it would be pairwise studies that could be integrated in order to build a causal model of societal outcomes. This seems such a pressing problem, it would be worthy of many such studies. The result of this would be long list of contributing factors ranked by their CAUSAL impact on outcomes.

My idea is that such a list is understood in a non-blaming kind of way. Regardless of the list ordering the responsibly for fixing things rests will society at large. (at least this is my personal view).

I feel that academics in 2021 shrink away from such a neutral analysis since it at least contemplates some politically incorrect causal factors… and no doubt if the studies were done, regardless of outcome there would be folks on one side (or more likely both sides) that would try to use the results to say: ``see this is not our problem… THEY are the problem, and THEY must change if this is to be fixed.’’ I am sure that is true. Still I am in favor of such studies since I think that is what is already said today. It is just done without proper evidence.

I just think if we have a clear model of what affects outcomes, AND it is researched so strongly it is believed (dreaming I know). THAT is the first steps towards really correcting whatever the most pivotal issues turn out to be.

(ok, that is wayyy too much for a reply to a reply. But your opinion on the idea is welcome)

Cheers,

Dan