Thanks for providing your insight, as per usual. That said, I do want to comment on it.
It's very common to see aggregate numbers for Asian Americans and see "Wow, Asians are doing better than whites." Then the more unscrupulous among us make the conclusion "There must be some form of Asian privilege!" Saying either statement uncritically neglects a few things:
1. Asians are concentrated in high-COL areas like California or the Northeast, which makes certain statistics (e.g. Asians' higher than average incomes) seem more impressive than they really are. So be careful with stats like HDI* if they don't take into account COL.True about cost of living (COL). In recent times the high COL places are the booming areas. Only during energy booms are places of low COL good places in which to live or start a small business. People doing well in places of low COL seem either (1) to own much energy-generating property like farmland or ranch land, (2) have the sort of work (like medicine) that practically ensure a high income, (3) have a (middle) income household as business owners (like a Chinese buffet restaurant in which the family owning it has an impressive income, but divide the the family income by four and the amount per family member isn't so impressive, or (4) have two family members with average or near-average incomes. Such would include two schoolteachers, a skilled tradesman and an accountant, an engineer and a nurse... such a family could have an impressive income. And this family is lucky.
In the study I did I looked at the average credit score in a state. Yes, it is possible for some big farmer owning properties from which his family makes a multi-million dollar income, but most of his employees are nearly destitute. You can imagine what the credit score is of the big farmer -- and what the credit scores of his workers are. The average statewide credit scores were still awful for most places with low COL, exceptions being Utah, Minnesota, and generally states in between.
Here is a surprise that I found about credit ratings as statewide averages: they correlated strongly negative -- to cancerweed*** use. Cancerweed use also correlates to poor educational performance as well as (more blatantly) medical distress that everyone knows about. Such was not in The Measure of America, but was in my analysis in a thread that derived from it.
A hint to Republicans -- they could have made Obamacare more effective by slapping high taxes on cancerweed use.
Obviously the category of 'Asian' includes people as disparate as Pakistani-Americans and Korean-Americans, people who have less in common than, for example, Portuguese-Americans (or even Jamaican-Americans or Mexican-Americans) and Finnish-Americans. But in general, one expects all Asian groups to cluster in urban areas. (In my case, I am about half from English-speaking and half from German-speaking peoples[ I do not consider Mexican-Americans exotic except in appearance, and most of the blacks from from British colonies often as very, very British.
Asian-Americans seem to do well in the not-so-American genre of classical music. Those who are good in pop music often go to the Far East, where their talents are more marketable. Asian-American news reporters are highly visible in television except for Filipinos with Spanish surnames who can easily be confused with members of another ethnic group. Film? Hispanics and blacks don;t seem to do well there, either -- at least in front of the cameras. Animation? I see lots of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese surnames.
Trouble dating? Have you ever heard of 'rice fever'? But the idea that Asian men having trouble getting white or Hispanic women to date them ignores that (1) Asian-American life is generally good life, and (2) the children can be spectacularly beautiful.
The glass ceilings in Corporate America that shut off practically anyone from advancing far in bureaucratic hierarchies in private industry unless one enters through the fast track (by being born into the 'right family' hurts people of all ethnic origins -- including white people. Jobs in Corporate America are simply places for earning bare survival, something very different from the reality of the 1960s when opportunity was more open. I'd suggest to any brilliant person -- it is far better to start a business, become part of the civil service, enter a profession, or latch onto a trade than get a BA degree and take a job as a clerk as a stopgap while you prove your integrity, competence, and loyalty. You can still be a clerk who shows much integrity, competence, and loyalty thirty years later if you are not cast off by then -- and you will still barely survive.
This, I believe, reflects that the executive elite of America has begun to function much like a
Soviet-style nomenklatura. Should there ever be an American revolution analogous to those of 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia, then this class will be the first led to the guillotine, the firing squad, or whatever means of mass death are then in place for people deemed exploiters.
Asian-Americans do worst (in states with an adequate number of them for statistical meaning) in Louisiana, which got a large contingent of Vietnamese refugees who felt that they would be more comfortable with the Francophile culture, the subtropical climate, and the opportunity to do commercial fishing that they would not find in... well, Minnesota. Their HDI in Louisiana (5.69) is still above the American average at 5.06 -- and much higher than the HDI of 4.12 in Louisiana for people as a whole, let alone the 2.73 for blacks in Louisiana.
But going beyond statistics can easily lead one into stereotypes, some of them exceedingly vile. But nonetheless one can figure that respect for formal learning correlates well to success in life. Contempt for learning portends a miserable life. Note well that some states do better than others in meeting basic human needs and some don't. Some states have grossly neglected some ethic groups.
Anyways, back on the thread topic...
On top of the usual deprivation found in the Delta, the community has also faced virulent racism; not terribly surprising, unfortunately, but it's interesting to see how racism from the Jim Crow era (and beyond) is experienced by people outside of the black-white dichotomy. That said, the whole article can be a read as a case study of the problems of rural America that have already been mentioned in this thread.
*The measure that you're quoting is
not the HDI that people usuall talk about, which is always reported with three digits or decimal places. What you're using is the American Human Development Index, which was developed by
Measure of America to be an index similar to the actual HDI.
**If anyone wants to read about extreme deprevation in America, I recommend reading
$2 a Day by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. It talks about Americans literally living on less than two dollars a day, usually with no cash income at all, using case studies from both urban and rural America (including the Mississippi Delta, where the poverty and inequities are described quite vividly).
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Poverty is real in America, a consequence of decisions that people have made (like refusing to move out of impoverished areas) and of historical legacies. Discussing such is unglamorous, and it may be that only when mass fear of poverty becomes the norm that people insist that their elected officials do something. There are plenty of blunders possible in life, from misguided loyalty to communities to such calamities as committing street crime, using drugs, becoming a heavy drinker early, siring or having an out-of-wedlock child, dropping out of school, getting a dishonorable discharge... But we can discuss the causes of poverty, both personal and structural, all we want.
***The tobacco industry will never like me.
