Quote:
Originally Posted by BoredSocial
From what I've seen most of the poor Asians who don't have highly marketable skills are still in Asia. It's just not where anybody but Chinese restaurants source their cheap labor.
When you isolate for social class Asians earn less than whites. Comparing an Asian software engineers earnings with a random white dude from Alabama with 'some college' isn't apples to apples in any way shape or form.
EDIT: Talent level matters. My parents were borderline homeless for most of my childhood and we lived how people picture stereotypical Gypsies living. The only place we lived for longer than 3 years was a little house in Maine that we heated with a wood stove. This was in the 90's lol. So why is this paragraph about talent mattering? I have two brothers. I am a successful freight broker who makes low six figures (hopefully mid six figures this year if the freight market stays hot), the middle brother is a software engineer, and my youngest broker is a 'quantitative analyst' for an insurance company. The third brother will probably have the highest lifetime earnings as he's a legit math genius (Like he was doing algebra in 1st grade, linear algebra in 9th).
The Asians who come here are high quality hard working people. Comparing any low motivation or low ability person to these people is going to result in them doing very very well comparatively. To be fair you absolutely have to compare them against people like me and my siblings at the very least. We're all doing fine for our talent level vs equivalent Asians.
One way to think about this is that top software firms effectively hire from the global talent pool and while Asians are overrepresented in these firms relative to the US population, they are underrepresented relative to the world population. 60+% of the world population are Asian. Not that US tech firms should match this, but in a neutral world, it should be somewhere between those two, with larger firms in coastal areas (SV, NYC, LA) more skewed towards the global population and others more skewed towards the US population. Some of these metrics also miss the fact that 1) Asians are overrepresented in the age cohorts that are overrepresented at these companies and 2) Asians disproportionately live in tech hubs and high-cost metro areas, which both boost their absolute income level and representation in tech.
My takeaway is that it's a bit dishonest to use the Asian "overrepresentation" in tech (or other metrics that have to do with Asian-Americans in the US) to advance the argument that prejudice doesn't play a big role in underrepresentation or income disparity.
