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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.
Something I've always wondered about academic inquiry into immigration is how much of 'immigrants make economies more successful' could equally be influenced by 'ambitious immigrants will attempt to join successful societies' and the correlation could end up atleast somewhat cyclical. Argentina and Brazil used to pull in massive immigration from across the world, which very quickly petered out when the vibes changed.
I've been told, verbally, but don't totally know how to confirm this, that lots of the immigration to the new world from poorer Euro countries in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was more of a policy on the part of the authorities to empty the orphanages, with immigrants sent to essentially random destinations rather than making rational choices on the basis of economic health.
It used to be common for British minor nobility to send their extra sons / failsons to Australia to 'make their fortune'. Possibly also India, I'm not sure.
Very much India. The stereotypical nabob was upwardly-mobile from a middle-class background, but it was very much on the accepted career list for younger sons of the landed gentry (who I suspect are what you are referring to as "minor nobility" - the younger sons of the actual peerage had access to better options).
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