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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?
By the mid-19th century, occupational surnames had long been divorced from their associated professions. John Smith wasn't a smith, Geoffrey Chaucer didn't make pants, Benjamin Franklin was pretty much everything but an independent farmer, etc... Beyond which, the point of interest is national origin of surnames. Unless your thesis is the Germans and Poles were bringing in some special occupational knowledge that the various British peoples who initially colonized the Eastern seaboard lacked, but that begs for additional detail.
Shared identity and sharing all the particulars of culture are not the same thing. Leaving aside immigrants for the moment, the US has a fair amount cultural diversity within itself - there are marked cultural differences between North Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerns, West Coasters, as well as racial, religious, state, and rural/urban values divisions. None of that contradicts the existence of the US or of American culture.
That is an argument that they are hypocrites, not that they are wrong.
You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.
Occupational surnames may have happened sufficiently long ago that any correlation has been drowned in noise.
It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist. When things interact, they tend towards the average of the two. If you mix cold and hot water, you get lukewarm water. If you mix eastern philosophy and western philosophy, you get something which borrows ideas from both (and the mixture is not necessarily better than either of its components)
The reason Easterns and southerns are different is because there's distance between them. Higher distances means fewer interactions. Long physical distances are similar to physical borders. Any other kind of mechanism which prevent interactions will protect differences - including age gaps and language barriers. But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long. To make matters worse, there will be conflict until people are in alignment, and the definition of alignment is establishing something which is common to all (and therefore not diverse)
In America, some aspects are local, and some aspects are global. A global aspect (e.g. the tendency to have guns) lacks diversity, and local aspects (something which is specific to a single area) does not mix with the rest. Of course, different areas can benefit from trade with eachother, but the more they trade the less they benefit (an equilibrium will be reached).
There's a natural tendency for people to create bubbles of similar-minded people (friend groups, echo-chambers, religious gatherings, ghettos, etc), but the lobal political concensus is (increasingly - as America is exporting this value system) that all people are equal and that all things must be openly accessible to everyone (no gatekeeping, no mens-only spaces, no right-wing spaces, no privacy, no elitism, etc) so the world will rapidly tend towards homogeneity
The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing, it even matches the metaphor. It's unpopular enough that it doesn't happen practically ever, but it's not a hard physical law like entropy.
Stepping away from race, it isn't irreversible for culture either. Spend a few generations sending all the nerds to the Bay Area, the creatives to Hollywood, and the performers to Broadway, and you can create local concentrations of cultural traits that are far outside the national average. It may not be ethnogenesis, but it's certainly the creation of something.
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