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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.
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 some 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.
That the more homogeneous a society the more small differences stand out.
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