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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.
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?
The theory is that patents protect the people that figured out the ideas to share them and get compensation if people license them, which protects inventors from copycats and allows publishing patented ideas
In a world without patents: if i come up with a brilliant steam engine design, and go to a factory and ask them to make it for me, they could simply steal the design and claim they came up with it. And then the factory would have to carefully guard the secret techniques for making this new engine from rival factories that would steal the design.
A world without patents generally just looks like a world with industrial secrets. Ultimately what matters in business is having a "moat" that gives your competitors an obstacle to overcome. The bigger the obstacle the bigger your profits can be without inducing a competitor to enter the business.
Patents were an attempt to get people to share their secrets. Before patents if someone comes up with an industrial improvement the general approach is to just keep it secret and utilize it as best they can. If they die and the factory burns down that improvement is just gone forever.
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