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I don't get it

ksen

ksen

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A lot of times when I read a story about how country A fights a particular social problem better than the United States a caveat is made about how the US is more diverse than country A which may be one reason why the US has a harder time of it.

Why would being more diverse make it harder to fight social problems?

Normally I just write that sort of criticism off as some sort of veiled bit of racism. But today I read it on a normally left leaning site.

So what gives?
 
Left-leaning sites can be racist as well. What was the context in which it was used?
 
Ya, that just seems like plain old ordinary racism. They're quite explicit in why all those other factors that they mentioned would contribute to Japan handling the homeless problem better but then just toss that bullshit in at the end without any context, analysis or explanation.

If a stronger safety net and lower income equality would help to lower the rates of homelessness, then I don't see why racial and cultural diversity would impede that. He might be trying to say that a racist landlord would stop the spics and niggers from living in his buildings even with a government subsidy but other than that, it seems to be a completely baseless sentence.
 
There is greater social participation in more homogeneous societies. That's just an observation of human nature.

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
Click to expand...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/?page=full

This paper has documented an empirical regularity—civic engagement is lower in more-heterogeneous communities.
While a large number of applied-economics papers are independently generating this finding, a number of questions
remain. Ideally, we would want to study how civic engagement changes as we move people into different types of
communities. But what is an individual’s community? Because of data limitations, researchers are using the
metropolitan area as the measure of community, not the nearest neighbors or coworkers. Even if we had narrower
measures of community, we would still wonder whether being in a particular neighborhood leads to greater activity or
whether those more likely to be involved picked that neighborhood. Ideally we would want to follow individuals over
time and observe their response to random exogenous shocks that change their community, such as immigration
increases into a border port or European labor market integration.
If homogeneity increases civic participation, why are so many in our society pushing for diversity in the workplace and
in communities?
Click to expand...

http://web.mit.edu/costa/www/costa.kahn.1.4pdf.pdf
 
More diversity means more cultural issues cropping up with any particular solution. Since cultural issues are often a factor in social problems that means that a solution that works in a monoculture very well might not work nearly as well in our system.
 
Trausti said:
There is greater social participation in more homogeneous societies. That's just an observation of human nature.
Click to expand...

Yes, there is greater social participation in more homogeneous societies. There's nothing that necessitates that, however.

The question at hand is that there are these various government policies which are very effective at lowering the rates of homelessness. Strong safety nets and lower income inequality reduce the problem drastically. While the diversity of the society could serve to lower support for such policies, in that those with the resources are more inclined to use them to maintain the status quo since it's mainly the "others" who are negatively affected, it doesn't mean such policies would be less effective if they were implemented due to the effects of this diversity. That makes it a fair comparison between the two systems regardless of the levels of diversity.
 
ksen said:
A lot of times when I read a story about how country A fights a particular social problem better than the United States a caveat is made about how the US is more diverse than country A which may be one reason why the US has a harder time of it.

Why would being more diverse make it harder to fight social problems?

Normally I just write that sort of criticism off as some sort of veiled bit of racism. But today I read it on a normally left leaning site.

So what gives?
Click to expand...

National myth forming. Exceptionalism. These things apply to the left as much as the right.

The myth, the 'exceptionalism', is the idea that the US is somehow unique in terms of its diversity. "The great melting pot". In reality, it's not fundamentally different or all that much more diverse than many other countries; countries that often do indeed manage to do better in various areas. It's hard to get over an idea that is ingrained into a national psyche, however, no matter what your politics are. If you've been told your entire life that you belong to a special group, then it becomes very difficult to accept the idea that your group is not in fact all that special. In fact, the US doesn't even rank very high at all on many lists of international diversity; definitely not on fractional lists that are based more on religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity. It doesn't even rank particularly high on the list of foreign born residents as a percentage of the total population (it ranks below the likes of Sweden or Austria, and not that far above the likes of France or the UK). The 'diversity' of a country is just a matter of how you define diversity; and few cultures like to to describe themselves as "mediocre" in any area, so they usually gravitate towards assigning importance to the lists using methodology that happens to put them nearer to the top rather than those that put them somewhere unremarkable.

So I don't think people are necessarily arguing that it doesn't matter that country A is doing better in x *because* they're less diverse, but rather they're just subconsciously trying to maintain the belief about their group/country that they've been raised with.
 
ksen said:
A lot of times when I read a story about how country A fights a particular social problem better than the United States a caveat is made about how the US is more diverse than country A which may be one reason why the US has a harder time of it.

Why would being more diverse make it harder to fight social problems?

Normally I just write that sort of criticism off as some sort of veiled bit of racism. But today I read it on a normally left leaning site.

So what gives?
Click to expand...

It is easier to attribute solutions to simple factors than to acknowledge there might be complexity.
 
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