For most of these topics, if you think the solution is simple, you almost certainly don't understand the problem. The worst part is that most people have no interest in increasing their understanding, they just care whether they're scoring points for their team. And of course they do, because they've made their membership on this team a huge part of their identity.
I have had far too many acrimonious arguments with people I love because one or both of us have only been interested in strengthening our position. It is a tough habit to break - believe me. At this point, if somebody is not interested in exploring the possibility that either of us could be way off base, then I have no interest in talking with them.
Exactly. Amy Chau wrote a great book called The Triple Package that points this out and the fact that its not just Asians (which broadly lumps Indians and all other Asian cultures together): Nigerian immigrants, Cuban exiles, Lebonese, Mormons, Iranians, Jews, all see roughly the same phenomena of surpassing average American household income. Its considered taboo to point out that income inequality is largely cultural.
I wouldn't say "cultural" because that's pretty loaded. My point is more that if there were something structural about the economy that kept people in their class (big banks, bad public education, etc.) you wouldn't see high mobility in certain sub-groups. There has to be other factors in play--who knows what they are. But I wouldn't assume they're necessarily "cultural."
It may be loaded, but our cultural differences need to be considered. On average Asian and Indian cultures place a stronger emphasis on grades. This plays a large role in why they have been very successful by some metrics. If certain questions are taboo, then we might overlook factors that are setting them back. That doesn't mean that external factors aren't relevant, but we need to consider everything.
We need to ask uncomfortable questions. That's not bigoted in itself. Look at the gay community. A lot of gay men engage in very risky behaviour that can lead to the spread of STIs. As an LGBT person myself, I can tell you that it is still quite common. We need to be able to ask if they are doing self harm. In fact, we have asked these questions, which has led to measurable progress (STI prevention strategies have helped significantly).
It's very difficult to actually get to ground truth, especially with the rate at which social media and the news cycle moves. It's a constant onslaught of (mis)information and we don't have reliable institutions to make sense of it. Worse, it turns out facts don't really matter as far as this game is concerned. Each side is able to live in their own reality, able to look at the same thing yet come to opposite conclusions. It's highly predictable. Whatever Team A is for, Team B easily finds a way to be against. And vice versa. Sometimes the teams even switch positions in unison, since consistency doesn't matter either.
It's full on Kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
Or, take the fact that the US lags Denmark in inter generational income mobility. Which is true, but it’s also true that the difference is due mainly to taxes and transfers flattening the whole distribution instead of fundamental structural differences that enable more movement: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09.... Put differently, it’s not that the welfare system allows the son of a gardener to become an engineer, but that massive income redistribution reduces the disparity between gardeners and engineers. (For many Americans, that distinction could be dispositive in whether you support an expanded welfare system.)
So take these facts the next step. The authors studied these things in the context of support for reducing income inequality. Isn’t there a very plausible argument here that the experience of poor Asians shows that there isn’t a systemic structural problem keeping people in the bottom 20%? Or, isn’t it plausible that the generous welfare state doesn’t really fundamentally change people’s’ trajectories, but just reduces the divergence between those trajectories? And if you teach people the first set of statistics but not the second, are you educating them to make up their own minds, or feeding them facts to support a preconceived notion?
Stepping back: experts should certainly understand these facts. But what do we expect ordinary people to take away from them? Consider the work done by Piketty and Saez on income inequality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/i.... Defining "income equality" actually is quite a quagmire. For example, in their 2003 work, P&S excluded the effect of tax transfers (such as the earned income tax credit) which significantly overstated the degree of inequality. Or, they mention that marginal tax rates were higher in the 1960s, but exclude the fact that the tax bases were narrower, such that the actual average tax rate on the top 1% hasn't changed dramatically over the decades: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high. And there are so many other confounding variables to account for. The immigrant population today is almost triple what it was in 1960. Because immigrants often start at the bottom of the ladder, an increasing immigrant share could make incomes seem stagnant even though they’re growing within each different demographic. You also need to account for household sizes, major differences in marriage rates, etc. There are an enormous number of variables.
I'm not trying to take a side on this issue, I'm just using it as an example. These are issues of vast complexity. The facts are things experts can fight over. But do we really expect people to make political choices based on this information? Invocation of "facts" and "experts" have an intuitive appeal, but the "fact" is that for almost any disputed political issue, the facts are far from clear. So people use heuristics: ideologies, knee-jerk reactions, general principles, values. It's not clear to me that's wrong.