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Diversity is our Strength. Us being whites
At the top of Marginal Revolution today: "How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation"
I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).
You don't have to read the whole study. The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.
1850 to 1940. Bruh.
This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!
The HBDers are going to love this one.
Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.
The causality here is tricky to figure out. Immigrants from ethnic backgrounds that are outside of the US mainstream have always, I think, tended to settle predominantly in urban areas, and urban areas are where most innovation happens.
This was my immediate thought.
Are more diverse areas innovating more due to their diversity?
Or do innovative areas rock in general (hard to be innovative if you're malnourished, etc) and that attracts immigrants and innovation simultaneously?
Cities are always more innovative than the countryside. Cities have lots of people. Institutions are in cities, education is to be found in cities. People who want education will come to the city to get it, they then stay there, jobs that require education are in cities. So the educated people are in cities, where they are in contact with the other educated people. Wealth concentrates in cities, so the capital you need is also in the city, probably generated by the previous innovators.
And all of this used to be even more so when travel and communication were a lot harder than they are nowadays. Nowadays you can learn from the Internet. A hundred years ago people in the countryside wouldn't have had access to libraries. You'd have to move to a city first.
Not all immigrants went to the cities. The Germans mostly settled the Midwest to become farmers, and didn't invent much of anything, except the ones who did go to the cities.
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Rather than HBD (which might be part of it but I think tends to be overhyped as an explanation around here), I wonder how much of this is based on integration. Which is partly downstream from HBD, but more from culture and perception.
That is, "white" people are more likely to integrate with and interact with white people and value stereotypical white people things like "get good grades", "get married", "get a job". While people who are visually distinctive and identify as "ethnic minorities" are more likely to learn things like "white people are powerful and steal from you, so steal back". Most of those European ethnicities used to be poor and underperforming, and weren't considered "white" until they gradually integrated into the melting pot culturally, which also brought them up economically. I wonder if having an obviously different skin-tone provides significant friction against this integration because it makes people perceive them (and more importantly, makes them perceive themselves) as distinct and special, and thus fail to integrate properly.
That is, if we took a million Polish people in 1900 and modified their genes to have blue hair or skin, without changing any of their other genes (so they have the same IQ and personalities), would that have caused them to become a permanent ethnic minority who doesn't get along with or act like all of the white people?
Chinese immigrants looked different, had a native language no one else knew, and were about as culturally alien to the US as anyone you were going to find in real life. They worked out fine.
They mostly died out in a generation.
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Is that satire? Nothing on that page makes any sense. Many surnames come from occupations, so of course there's a relationship to diversity of labour. The reason "diversity" used to correlate with innovation was that skilled migrants from many countries in the world would go to places with opportunities. The diversity was more of a result than a cause. The phrase "Diversity is our strength" is made to imply that diversity of races is good in itself, which is an entirely different topic. It also implies that there's no difference between races, which is trivially false. To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself. Also, people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality. Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself. Countries are more similar than they were in the past because of globalism, the only way to slow down the trend towards homogeneity is separation (borders for instance). I'd go as far as to disagree that innovation is necessarily good (it conflicts with stability).
And what's a patent? It's something which forbids others from using your ideas.
Lets look at the Abstract in the linked paper. What does it say? "Fostering the diverse social interactions that faciliate idea sharing"
Am I being too pedantic? Do these people even realize that they're being dishonest?
By the mid-19th century, occupational surnames had long been divorced from their associated professions. John Smith wasn't a smith, Geoffrey Chaucer didn't make pants, Benjamin Franklin was pretty much everything but an independent farmer, etc... Beyond which, the point of interest is national origin of surnames. Unless your thesis is the Germans and Poles were bringing in some special occupational knowledge that the various British peoples who initially colonized the Eastern seaboard lacked, but that begs for additional detail.
Shared identity and sharing all the particulars of culture are not the same thing. Leaving aside immigrants for the moment, the US has a fair amount cultural diversity within itself - there are marked cultural differences between North Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerns, West Coasters, as well as racial, religious, state, and rural/urban values divisions. None of that contradicts the existence of the US or of American culture.
That is an argument that they are hypocrites, not that they are wrong.
You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.
Occupational surnames may have happened sufficiently long ago that any correlation has been drowned in noise.
It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist. When things interact, they tend towards the average of the two. If you mix cold and hot water, you get lukewarm water. If you mix eastern philosophy and western philosophy, you get something which borrows ideas from both (and the mixture is not necessarily better than either of its components)
The reason Easterns and southerns are different is because there's distance between them. Higher distances means fewer interactions. Long physical distances are similar to physical borders. Any other kind of mechanism which prevent interactions will protect differences - including age gaps and language barriers. But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long. To make matters worse, there will be conflict until people are in alignment, and the definition of alignment is establishing something which is common to all (and therefore not diverse)
In America, some aspects are local, and some aspects are global. A global aspect (e.g. the tendency to have guns) lacks diversity, and local aspects (something which is specific to a single area) does not mix with the rest. Of course, different areas can benefit from trade with eachother, but the more they trade the less they benefit (an equilibrium will be reached).
There's a natural tendency for people to create bubbles of similar-minded people (friend groups, echo-chambers, religious gatherings, ghettos, etc), but the lobal political concensus is (increasingly - as America is exporting this value system) that all people are equal and that all things must be openly accessible to everyone (no gatekeeping, no mens-only spaces, no right-wing spaces, no privacy, no elitism, etc) so the world will rapidly tend towards homogeneity
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I see and grant your point. However, what I think this actually shows is a remarkable social technology for taking small cultural differences which, in many other contexts would actively hinder cooperation and productivity, and sanding down the sharp edges enough to allow the positive aspects of cream-skimming and viewpoint diversity to take hold.
Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosniaks are extremely closely related from an HBD perspective. But you can't just shove them all together in a lab in Belgrade and expect them to get along - interethnic/intercommunal rivalries would instantly doom that. You can tell the same story with closely-related-but-highly-rivalrous subgroups in many other regions of the world as well.
The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.
The reason for this is quite obvious. Some cultures share more in common with each other than others do. The early French and English inhabitants of the US were very culturally digestible into each other, with one another and when coupled with the geographic distance and detachment with their country of origin, there’s great opportunity for your differences to erode and dissolve over time.
The other question is to what degree already being homogeneous raises your standards.
The common argument is that nativism is just a standard reflexive response that you have to power through and people react the same way to visible Muslims and visible Irishmen.
You have to wonder if what are now considered irrelevant differences mattered more because people were more similar. Which would mean that you can't really safely assume it'd apply to Pakistani Muslims.
(That said, America is doing much better than, for example, Britain here anyway because the filter for such groups that were barred from immigrating before is still relatively strong)
Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate. It’s widely known that homogeneity enables large scale cooperation and fosters a high trust society between individuals.
But there are multiple ways in which the US has benefitted in certain areas through diversity. One obvious example was the massive brain drain that took place due to the Nazis persecution of Jews in Europe. It was one thing that actually weakened Germany during the war and later played into the US hands in the development of the atomic bomb. Or take another example. One major reason the computer hacker culture took root in the US and not Scandinavia for instance wasn’t just because the digital revolution happened here. It specifically happened because the US was a low trust society coupled with an increasingly individualist culture. If I think you’re not going to pay your fair share of taxes for instance, I’m more inclined to go and look for loopholes for myself.
The important thing to keep in mind with all these arguments is that the cases go in both direction. You can find relevant empirical examples on both sides. The local culture I grew up in was socially and racially exogamous. We were a very colorblind community and really didn’t care about each others race. We could say “the black dude that lives over there,” or, “the white kid across the street” casually without it even dawning on any of us that we had to worry about offending someone. We never even thought twice about it. We were ‘very’ culturally homogenous though. Strict and rigid though as far as norms and standards of behavior went. This cut all across ethnic lines. I grew up in an ethnic composition largely of whites and Hispanics with a minority of Cambodians, Assyrians and blacks. We had a common culture. Played outside with each other. Went to the same schools. Engaged in church functions. You name it. Many of them are still good friends to this day. So it’s ‘possible’ for people to do more than just tolerate each other and live in largely parallel societies like they do in the UK and Sweden, although both of them shouldn’t have adopted the immigration policies they have in the first place.
You can get innovation out of both collaboration and competition. Sometimes you get it through a mix and balance of both. But it’s not an either/or with one winning out to the exclusion of the other.
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Yes, Germans make good Americans when you keep them from speaking German, or giving their children German first names, or identifying as German at all. If only we could learn this lesson and apply it everywhere, like to Muslims, and Indians.
I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names. The Africans and Muslims and Indians are particularly offensive about this, and tend to keep trying to be African or Muslim or Indian instead of American.
T. Roosevelt spoke of this.
As did his arch-rival Woodrow Wilson, who famously said: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets the chance.”
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Actually they still give their children Chinese names, the western name is just an extra. It'd be like if a German immigrant named their child Fritz and then gave him an "American name" of Fred.
Oh, I know. Still, I like that "Tom" Nguyen puts his American name on the flyer he sends me for his landscaping service. It means something.
I'm thinking of all the asian classmates I had who were named Michelle or Emily or Christopher. It really matters, and if they went by their Chinese names, I would have considered them much more foreign, at a much younger age. But Christopher Wing and Emily Lee and Michelle Chan are acceptable in a way that the Mei Lee simply isn't.
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Modern society as a whole could never stand treating Indians and Muslims the way Germans were treated before and during WW1.
Then again, when you start looking at ancestry, there's a solid argument to be made that America is more German than English. (English comes in third, with Irish in second.) History is weird.
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The Germans were doing fine in the US even when they spoke German (common up to WWI, I believe).
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Teddy was wise in this. GK Chesterton wrote similarly...
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I tire of these posts often and the kind of comments they enjoin from others. The key word and phrase they’re often looking for is “individualism” and the importance of initial conditions.
I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned. When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind. Or the digitalization of the world for that matter. A lot of these ideas are germs and some get built on and others don’t. Of those that receive work on them some fail and some succeed due to timing effects, wrong approaches, lack of funding, all manner of different things. New developments to some extent always require the free play of ideas, but there’s no reason why it specifically ‘has’ to appear in one place or the other. China first cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans did and for centuries Europe was the technological underdeveloped backwater of the rest of the world. There’s no reason why it ‘had’ to be that way. The Soviets originally had their own competition to the ARPANET that ultimately went sideways to due to their own ideological commitments. You could argue there wasn’t enough independence of thought. Or perhaps they had the wrong ideological perspective.
Diversity isn’t a good for its own sake. It has both its upsides and downsides and whatever else your opinion of it, you still have to figure out a way to live with it.
Also as a side note to your side note(!) there was a book recently recommended to me by a friend who is eager to get me a copy and read it so I can give thoughts on it. In it, he said the author specifically mentions the patent system as one of the markers of a society’s relative decline in cultural and technological achievement. It’s an interesting barometer and one I hadn’t thought of originally. It probably does yield useful insights.
As an aside it's a bit inaccurate, or at least incomplete to say Shockley invented the first transistor. Probably more accurate to say "contributed to the invention of" or "developed the bipolar junction transistor."
From the 1956 Nobel citation:
Shockley's main contribution to the first transistor was suggesting using field-effect to control a junction, but this had already been proposed by Julius Lilienfeld. He probably does deserve much of the credit for the bipolar junction transistor.
This does emphasis the point that a given invention is confluence of a variety of circumstances such that, as you say:
It is quite a testament to Bell Labs that they not only were able to recruit such a large stable of geniuses, but were able to harness that power in a synthesis of cooperation and competition. It can't have been easy to manage so many (justifiably) huge egos.
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It's quite close to 0% planned and 100% spontaneous.
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is probably still the best framework for how human knowledge (science and so, downstream, technology) develops. The long and short of it is that lots of happy accidents often build upon each other. Planning innovation is almost an oxymoron.
The problem then becomes, how do we 'cultivate the garden', so to speak, to make happy accidents more commonplace? Or to shorten the distance between related but unknown nodes that are working on the same problems? The University System and the various Bell Labs / PARC / DARPA orgs of the mid 20th century seem to have done this well. Both had different failure modes which roughly follow red and blue tribe cleavages.
The University System lost to ideological capture but also, more generally, a total remove from practical problems. Instead of a bunch of really smart professors working with Corporations, the Navy, or whomever or an actual problem, "pure" research began to win out. You'd get esoteric improvements in something like photonics that was utterly untenable in a production setting because the supply chain for the super rare materials didn't exist or the apparatus involved couldn't function outside of a clean lab.
The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me. The better answer, though still not "a-ha!" level in my mind is that actually novel and meaningful research is getting harder and taking longer. So, while a corporation may not need its R&D department to come up with something new every quarter, it's harder to not want to cut their budget after 10 or 20 years of nothing new. Furthermore, there's a pretty good argument to be made that corporations shouldn't be trying to shoot-the-moon with totally novel ideas but, rather, really be solving the "last mile" problem of new technology - how to sustain it, scale it, and then make it by degrees cheaper and cheaper. The middle ground that's evolving is something like Focus Research Organizations.
The final players - DARPA and other FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development) kind of kept the spirit alive longer. DARPA has a very specific operating model that nowhere else in government replicates. But they fell victim to GWOT funding strategy - let's make everything about terrorists instead of focusing on, I don't know, time travel and teleportation. The FFRDCs became some of the most egregious leeches of Federal R&D welfare dollars. MITRE is quite literally make work jobs for PhDs. If you can endure living in a Kafka novel every day, you can make $200k per year and enjoy Tysons Corner traffic for your commute.
The real "oh, we fucking suck" moment was GPT-2 in late 2022. Almost every other major American technology development since WW2 could be traced back to some sort of federal, academic, or corporate R&D lab. That the Attention Is All You Need paper came out from a some ML engineers at google fucking around was, in my mind, kind of the tombstone on the "trad" R&D ecosystem.
In general "grrr greedy capitalists" is only ever a satisfying answer in the same sense that "grrr Schrodinger equation" is. Technically both ideas explain a whole lot, but if you're ever looking for an explanation for why something changed, say, between 1980 and 1990, you can't solely check in the laws of economics or physics.
In this case, ironically, "Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists"" might be the explanation. Ma Bell was an enormous company with a quasi-governmental monopoly, so they could expect to be able to capture most of the value of even relatively pure and fundamental research ... and then anti-trust action broke them up into a bunch of Baby Bell companies who could only capture the value of research that was sufficiently applied and peripheral to turn a profit before its patent(s) would expire. By what may have been a wacky coincidence, but of course wasn't, Bell Labs got a ton of funding before the breakup and not so much after.
Despite my snark, I believe it's possible that the loss to research was exceeded by the gains of breaking up the quasi-monopoly. I'm old enough to remember land lines, and adding a second phone to the same line by just adding a splitter and running one cable to another room; a little further back in time, this would have required a call to The phone company to get permission and a technician and an extra monthly surcharge. It's easy to imagine that an indefinite continuation of this state of affairs in the USA could have crippled the nascent internet, which for years was only accessible to most residences via modems piggy-backing data over phone lines.
Ideally, handling the collective action problems of research without a giant monopoly (or, at least, with a giant monopoly we all get to control on election day) is what University research is supposed to be for; we try to give University researchers the proper incentives to try to come up with ideas that will be useful decades down the road, not just years. If we did that right, we should have been able to cut up the fabled goose here without losing out on all the golden eggs. To a great extent, University research works, even! I agree with your suspicions that we didn't entirely do that right, and with your explanations for why it doesn't work as well as it should, but I wouldn't want to come to any strong conclusions without trying to quantify those magnitudes somehow.
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I don’t think it’s anywhere as lopsided as you might think. I don’t have access to my copy of the book at the moment, but the last I read indicated a more more complex picture than that. A ‘lot’ of innovation actually comes out of big business. The pharmaceutical industry alone is proof enough of that.
When I say “planned innovation” I don’t mean innovation by committee. What I’m saying is the idea may not have originated with them, but they were the ones who did something with it. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the transistor. He had a vision for the early uses of new technology. He had his plans for the tech that made him who he was.
If you want to remain focused on DARPA or Bell Labs for example, that used to be one of the favorite examples anarchists brought up in support of their philosophical aims. The boundary and restrictions were somewhat wide, but while it’s true that many of the pioneers and innovators within those organizations didn’t invent things through top down directive, they still had to meet certain qualifications that their free exchange of ideas had to be valuable serve the mission statement of the institution. Meaning your work still had to be found useful to the bureaucrats. Otherwise you were out.
Even very politically top heavy countries like China are producing an enormous amount of innovation.
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Can you point me towards the community you're referring to? Is this related to roots of progress? I've been a bit underwhelmed by them, but also haven't checked in for a while.
What do you think is a robust measure, then?
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