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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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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.

We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names

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.

Depends on the family. I know plenty of Chinese-Westerners who essentially only respond to their Chinese name from grandparents (and it's not like Westerners aren't prone to similar affectations or shortenings)

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.

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.

A lot of that is Americans downplaying British ancestry post 1776. Genetic analysis from 23 and me showed that the US is much more British and Irish than French and German. Scottish vs Irish is hard to tease apart over time.

The US is the only country on earth where iced tea is more popular than hot tea because drinking tea is seen as suspiciously British.

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Iced tea is actually widely popular in hot countries because it tastes pretty good when it's hot outside and is easy to make, including in countries that aren't known for their tea culture. You'll notice that iced tea is popular in the parts of the US that have truly sweltering hot summers.

Well English itself is German if you go far back enough in history. Many of the English kings and nobility were Germanics. Ironically that was one of the things Hitler also pointed out and why he considered the British to be people of “high class” and cultural achievement. It was probably just self-serving on his end. He didn’t consider everything about English culture to be held in high regard:

“It’s a great pity none of our great authors ever took his subjects from German imperial history. Our Schiller never thought of anything but to glorify a Swiss crossbowman. The English for their part had a Shakespeare. But the history of his country had supplied Shakespeare as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.”

The Germans were doing fine in the US even when they spoke German (common up to WWI, I believe).

Teddy was wise in this. GK Chesterton wrote similarly...

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