Retention Revisited

[Heq]

Ohhhh, other economists!

I admit to being lazy with a lot of this stuff, and just sheer off the top and bottom 10% when it comes to real world stuff.  For BM you could just sheer off Lords, then sheer off those who have no estates and those with a family member in the Lords (so cliques can't counterweight it), then get an average.

Averages tell you less, but they are easier for people to understand and with proper sheering, tell you the gist of what you need.

I'm used to working with crap datasets, so apologies for the lack of finesse generally used by my compatriots.

[Chenier]

But you speak French, so the standard of living drops significantly.

/nationalism

Bilingual people used to earn a lower average income than monolingual English speakers.

"Speaking white" ftw.  >:(

[songqu88@gmail.com]

o.O France still = White...?

[Anaris]

o.O France still = White...?

What do you think they are? Asian?

[Chenier]

o.O France still = White...?

No, that's what the anglophones would say to the francophones. Speaking English is "speaking white".

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Bilingual people used to earn a lower average income than monolingual English speakers.

"Speaking white" ftw.  >:(

My riposte was that French was as much speaking white. However, it appeared that I delivered an excellent feint that had you thinking it was a question of some sort.

Je ne suis pas un troll because I don't know how to write "troll" in French.

[Chenier]

My riposte was that French was as much speaking white. However, it appeared that I delivered an excellent feint that had you thinking it was a question of some sort.

Je ne suis pas un troll because I don't know how to write "troll" in French.

You gave me the impression that you misunderstood me into believing that french canadians were the ones who said to "speak white", which is not the case. What justified that expression, I don't know, that was before my time. In the time of the "white niggers of America" (Nègres blancs d'Amérique -> French canadians).

[songqu88@gmail.com]

The funny irony is that the British, from whom American English came about, were pretty much the latest European colonial power to colonize America, versus comparative nations like Spain, France, Holland, Portugal. And now just about everyone is apparently expected to speak English.  :o

[Vellos]

Bilingual people used to earn a lower average income than monolingual English speakers.

Truly? That is extremely weird.

[Heq]

It actually isn't that wierd.  While French is a valuable skill (and is over-represented in government jobs), it is actually much less useful then many of the other skillsets which are taught in its place.  A simple study of hours of mathematical or scientific training in schools highlights that descrepency, as does the fact that many bilinguals come from Eastern Canada, which is significantly poorer then the rest of Canada.

French Canadians often also suffer from a bunker mentality which causes them to have smaller, more homogeneous, reference circles.  Networking is actually the single most important cash-earning skill a person can have, so a Torontian English speaker from the right part of town has significant advantages as compared to a Quebec City English/French speaker.

I, being a douchebag, tend to blame the Catholic Church which fought tooth and nail to keep Quebec and Northern NB from modernizing.  At this point French is a dying language but no-one admits it and the upper class French Canadians want their kids speaking English without and accent.

[vonGenf]

It actually isn't that wierd.  While French is a valuable skill (and is over-represented in government jobs), it is actually much less useful then many of the other skillsets which are taught in its place.  A simple study of hours of mathematical or scientific training in schools highlights that descrepency, as does the fact that many bilinguals come from Eastern Canada, which is significantly poorer then the rest of Canada.

It was discrimination, plain and simple. This was a local effect.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

...I like the accent though.

[Chenier]

It actually isn't that wierd.  While French is a valuable skill (and is over-represented in government jobs), it is actually much less useful then many of the other skillsets which are taught in its place.  A simple study of hours of mathematical or scientific training in schools highlights that descrepency, as does the fact that many bilinguals come from Eastern Canada, which is significantly poorer then the rest of Canada.

French Canadians often also suffer from a bunker mentality which causes them to have smaller, more homogeneous, reference circles.  Networking is actually the single most important cash-earning skill a person can have, so a Torontian English speaker from the right part of town has significant advantages as compared to a Quebec City English/French speaker.

I, being a douchebag, tend to blame the Catholic Church which fought tooth and nail to keep Quebec and Northern NB from modernizing.  At this point French is a dying language but no-one admits it and the upper class French Canadians want their kids speaking English without and accent.

The average I speak of was for Québec only, not the rest of Canada.

One of the big reasons explaining these statistics is that the bilingual people were mostly native french speakers, as while they had something to gain from learning English (and indeed gained more than unilingual french speakers), English-speakers had nothing to gain by learning French basically. Those bilingual people therefore mostly stemmed from poor neighborhoods, prone to debt and bad living conditions, and despite knowing English were heavily discriminated against for their French and Catholic origins by the English and Protestant capitalists. And let's face it, since money is what makes money, those born in English families were invariably richer than those born in French family (American Dream is a lie!).

English speakers are still strongly favored, economically, than French speakers in Québec. Their hospitals, universities, and other public institutions receive a much greater amount of financing/capital than those from the French network. And they wonder why McGill rates itself so well...  >:(

The Church, heh... won't be getting any love from me!

As for French in the Rest of Canada (ROC), it is indeed dying off. When Gilles Duceppe said, on Radio-Canada, that if we did not separate soon we would face irreversible assimilation as is happening with the rest of the French Canadians, the Ontarian minister of French or the like wrote a public letter denouncing his words as false and fear-mongering, saying French is doing just fine in Ontario (http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/327655/franco-ontariens-notre-avenir-n-est-pas-menace-m-duceppe). Of course, she spewed her propaganda, such as the fact that the number of French speakers rose by 5% over the last 5 years or something like that... completely ignoring that it dropped by 50% in 50 years basically, and that the definition of a French speaker in Ontario is so completely absurd that all you need is a grand-parent speaking it to be considered as speaking it yourself.

Yay for rantings about Canada.

[Kai]

If we get rid of french people retention will increase.

[Perth]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_TfBbR6L0M