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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.
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.
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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