Is Diversity Really Our Strength? By Celina 101.
Social trust:
Social trust is the expectation that strangers will generally behave decently. That the person you have never met will return your wallet, honour the queue, pay their taxes and not vandalise your beautiful city.
Sociologists distinguish it from particularised trust in family and friends, and from confidence in institutions like courts or parliaments.
The related concept of social capital, popularised by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, refers to the networks, norms and reciprocity that make collective life possible, for example the neighbourhood watch, the volunteer fire brigade and the school fete.
High-trust societies can enforce their contracts more cheaply, sustain generous welfare states with a lot less fraud, run governments with less corruption and cronyism, and endure crises with less panic. Economists Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer showed in the 1990s that trust predicts economic growth across countries.
Trust is also simply what a good life in a good neighbourhood feels like from the inside: children playing outside, doors left unlocked, favours asked and returned. When it erodes, people start to withdraw from society.
Diversity, not inequality, reduces trust — as shown by Australia:
The standard leftist/progressive response to declining community life is that inequality, not diversity, is the main culprit. I can understand why this sounds believable, especially in America as racial divisions and American income gaps map onto each other so closely that statistical models struggle to tell them apart.
Australia is a less muddied example, which is what makes the economist (now federal minister) Andrew Leigh’s 2006 study very valuable. … He found things like education raising trust, long commutes lowering it and affluent neighbourhoods being more trusting. But two of his finding really stand out. First, … Leigh found no apparent relationship between neighbourhood income inequality and trust in Australia. Second, both ethnic and linguistic diversity were associated with lower trust.
Linguistic diversity depressed localised trust for the native-born and immigrants alike, and depressed generalised trust among immigrants. … Both linguistic and ethnic diversity were associated with substantially lower levels of social trust. …
And Denmark:
Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov … showed that ethnic diversity in the micro-context was negatively associated with social trust, and the association weakened and then vanished as the geographical unit grew. The people most exposed to diversity in their daily residential environment reported the least trust; measured at the municipal level.… Denmark’s aggregate serenity coexists with a measurable trust penalty for those who actually live amid diversity. …
And Sweden:
Analysing Swedish survey and demographic data from 1986 to 2002, Eger found that people living in areas with larger foreign-born populations tended to express less support for government welfare spending, even after accounting for income, education, employment and political ideology. Increasing ethnic diversity, in other words, was associated not only with lower interpersonal trust but with a reduced willingness to sustain the redistributive institutions for which the Nordic countries are famous. …
The western ruling class tend to live in white enclaves:
Taken together, the Danish and Swedish evidence suggests that attitudes towards immigration track exposure to it. That is perhaps why the professional and academic classes who most confidently celebrate diversity are disproportionately likely, by virtue of income and the housing, to not experience the horribly negative effects of it. …
My surprised face is almost worn out:
People, it seems, find it easier to act collectively with people like themselves. …
Costa and Kahn’s own most arresting evidence comes from the nineteenth century. Using records of Union Army companies in the American Civil War, they examined what predicted whether soldiers deserted. Companies whose men were more alike, in birthplace, occupation and age, held together; more diverse companies bled deserters. Men facing identical dangers, under identical discipline, for an identical cause, were measurably more willing to risk death alongside men who resembled them.
It seems as if the raw material of solidarity is similarity, and asking human beings to sacrifice for a group is easier when they recognise themselves in it. …
Putnam’s discovery:
The intellectual centrepiece of this literature remains Robert Putnam’s 2007 paper “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” …
Putnam expected, and by his own account hoped, to vindicate one of two established theories. Contact theory predicts that diversity breeds familiarity and tolerance, conflict theory predicts that diversity sharpens in-group loyalty and out-group suspicion, trust within your group rises as trust across groups falls. Yet, he found neither. He found something, as a self-described liberal that he feared, in more diverse communities, trust fell across the board, in neighbours of other races and in one’s own.
Diversity did not turn people against each other so much as away from everyone. Residents of high-diversity areas reported less confidence in local government and leaders, lower rates of voter registration, less volunteering and charitable giving, less participation in community projects, fewer close friends and confidants, lower expectations that others would cooperate, lower reported happiness and quality of life, and more time in front of the television. His summary was that people in diverse areas “hunker down,” pulling in, as he put it, like a turtle.
In Putmans’ own words:
“Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us”
So how do you make your society worse? Import lots of people from different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups — and then say it’s fine not to assimilate, because we’ve got multiculturalism.
Two main points make this finding really hard even for a leftist to dismiss. The first is its scale and robustness within the dataset: the associations survived controls for poverty, crime, age, mobility and much else. The second is the author. Putnam is no immigration restrictionist … Putman published these results even though they cut against his own left-wing sympathies.
Nevertheless, a finding of this magnitude, from the most celebrated social scientist of his generation, produced no detectable adjustment in how any major Western party talks about diversity. The slogan sailed on untouched by reality. …
US welfare is lower because the country is (was?) less homogeneous:
Why does the United States, richer than Europe for a century, have so much stingier a welfare state? …
Support for redistribution is consistently lower where the poor are perceived as belonging to a different group from the median taxpayer. In their accounting, America’s racial divisions explain a large share, their estimates suggest roughly half, of the transatlantic gap in social spending, with institutions carrying most of the rest. Solidarity, has always been easiest to sell as solidarity with people like us. European welfare states were built by ethnically compact nations in the mid-twentieth century, so the uncomfortable question now is what happens to their political foundations as those nations diversify …
Doesn’t work, there will be trouble:
A political project that wants simultaneously high immigration, a generous welfare state and a high-trust society is betting that it can keep three balls in the air that the research strongly suggests interfere with one another. …
Diversity is a horrible destiny:
Return, finally, to the mantra at the beginning. “Diversity is our strength” which functions in the same way as “the science is settled”: it is a device for ending the conversation before it can begin. Yet the research examined here, much of it conducted by left-wing academics across the United States, Australia, Denmark, France, Sweden and Britain, thoroughly demolishes the slogan.
Even when academics and politicians insist on emphasising the supposed benefits of diversity, we should remember the extreme trade-off they are imposing on us: measurable declines in local trust, civic participation and social solidarity, alongside rising crime and disorder.
These costs fall most heavily where demographic change is fastest and common identity is weakest. They are borne by the diverse neighbourhoods themselves, not by the affluent, mostly homogeneous suburbs in which the slogan is most confidently said.
The research all points towards something that should be obvious to anyone with open eyes and a functioning brain: trust does not arise from difference. It grows from what people hold in common, race, ethnicity, language, culture, habits, mutual obligations and, above all, a shared understanding of who “we” are.
Countries were a great solution, keeping the peace and making for happy, harmonious societies by having each cultural, linguistic and ethnic group in its own country. So simple a child could understand. But the globalists thought they knew better.
