Please stay on topic. Please don't be asses.
I'm old enough to remember how radical the original Star Trek seemed in 1966, by showing people of different races, sexes, nationalities, even species - working together toward a common goal.
Granted, it was 1960s Hollywood, but nobody was depressed on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
Digs, you and I live in one of the most diverse cities in America - LA - and if someone here is depressed about the diversity here - and I have met those who grumble about immigrants for example - it's their attitude that's the problem. Others find the diversity exciting and stimulating, like those on the bridge of the Enterprise.
This is just more conservative whining, in yet another ridiculous form.
Personally, I think we should just put some Prozac in the water and forge ahead.
Your wish has been anticipated, but maybe expanded a little too far. Perhaps it's the cocktail we've been guzzling that's making us depressed and hopeless.
Yes LA is a very depressing place. It is also very diverse. I am familiar with statistics and multivariant analysis. It is extremely difficult to factor out secondary influences when there is such a high correlation to begin with. Thus it is almost impossible to deal with cause and effect in these cases. But this is what statisticians try to do, it is what they do for a living. But for the rest of us, we should rely on common sense.
Digby, Mostly I agree with you. But, I also live in an area that has seen a large influx of Mexican immigrants over the past couple of years. The so-called-natives aren't taking it well. And, I fear (although I won't be surprised) some day I'll pick up the paper and discover there has been some ugly vigilante action.
I believe this country has easily withstood all manner of immigrant surges. And, likely, many of them occurred during periods of economic uncertainty. To the extent that any one period can be compared to another, probably there isn't anything unusual about this one. Still, there is something about this not like before group that really rankles with the rednecks near me. Maybe new groups have always been met with this level of hostility. But it feels both angrier, or nastier than I've ever heard anyone describe.
Mark Buchanan at The Social Atom has been blogging on this area of research recently. There are some interesting insights to be gained from his column, as well as the comments.
If the fear factor is high enough, just telling people to get over yourself isn't sufficient. We're programmed for fight or flight. White Flight is available to those who are socially/economically mobile. Those who aren't, get pressed into the alternative.
Male minorities also scare white men, causing the white men to offer them money and oral sex, evidently. I don't think that is a healthy work environment, is it?
Oh for heaven's sake. These people need to get to Brooklyn more often.
If you bother to actually RTFA, you will find that the study clearly states that diversity at the workplace enhances productivity and innovation. The author also withheld publication in order to make sure he wasn't mis-interpreting some critical data.
I know someone who managed to inflict severe career damage upon themselves by being completely honest and forthright.
That happened when their large corporate concern sent all of its mid-level managers to mandatory "diversity training". Said company being notorious for sexual and racial discrimination in its upper ranks -- but wishing at the same time, for legal reasons, to cloak itself in the appearance of sanctimony which adherence to such Potemkin programs can give.
My friend related that pretty much everyone who had been sent there, by no means limited to the white males, thought that the whole thing was a circuslike waste of time. Not unlike sending a bunch of pasty flabby cubicle dwellers out on a ropes and rafts course.
(About which my friend said, "The Outward Bound thing was supposed to teach us teamwork." I asked whether or not it had done so. He said, "It taught me that my teammates are nasty creeps who will steal my stash of personal food when my back is turned, and who will slack when heavy lifting is required. Also, water is wet and cold. And mosquito bites itch.")
But he, perhaps alone, thought that the diversity program would be a good thing, and he was fully on board, because he thought it would help him with a managerial dilemma which kept raising its head.
So he stood up during question hours at the diversity training seminar, and said this:
"Okay. You've been telling us for the last three days that we need to be as respectful as possible of our employees' diverse origins and cultures. I totally agree. So here is my situation. I have several African-American employees. They're great. I am glad to have all of them."
Heads nodded.
"However, two of them are members of a black church organization which hates homosexuals. Completely viciously hates them. I have read up on this outfit. Not nice people. But this is, needless to say, their culture, and it is not my place to question or denigrate or downgrade their culture."
He ploughed ahead despite the fact that the diversity trainer was beginning to frown. Not a good sign.
"And then at the same time I also have several GLBT employees who work in the same functional group, shoulder by shoulder with these first two. They are also all fine high-quality employees."
"This as you might imagine creates unavoidable friction. Nothing direct is ever voiced, but it is quite clear to even a casual observer that there is a lot of intense mutual loathing going on back and forth across the cubicle walls."
"Although all of these people are individually good hires, collectively they do not do well because of their dislike of one another. This is having a poisonous effect upon productivity and quality and morale, even though there is nothing overt that I can prohibit or punish."
"So, what I really want and need to know as a manager is, whose diversity do I opt to suppress? Who gets fired or transferred? Which culture wins out?"
There was a long silence. Because he had of course said The Unsayable, suggested That Which May Never Be Suggested, to wit, that diversity is not always a happy Disney mosaic, there are certain types of diversity which are intrinsically immiscible with one another, and that attempting to so combine them will cause trouble, sometimes serious trouble.
The diversity trainer hemmed and hawed and spewed a long Babel of buzzwords and catch phrases, but never did answer his question in clear and unambiguous language. Wonder why not?
--
I live in downtown Minneapolis and while it's no LA, it's pretty diverse here. If there is any correlation between living here and depression it may be due more to economic circumstances than racial/ethnic ones.
I'm fairly poor and don't own a car so I take the bus to get anywhere. It's quite an experience for someone raise white suburban middle class. We have a lot of Somalis here so I get to feast my eyes on the beautiful, rich fabrics the women wear. And the Somalian woman could be sitting next to the Russian guy who is across from the aging punk rocker. We might be stopping downtown for the open air farmers market run mostly by the Hmong and Laotians. I'm not even mentioning the usual urban Blacks and Latinos and hipsters and various Queer folk. I'm an artists so it's q visual feast of faces, body shapes, colors and textures.
I feel safe. It's the white boys from the burbs that scare me.
Daniel Boone kept pulling up stakes and moving whenever he could see smoke from a neighbor's chimney.
More to the point, where are people more diverse? In suburbs like mine, where hardy anybody knows anybody else. In gentrifying areas, where the new and the old are suspicious of each other. In better urban apartment complexes, where people don't know each other either.
Where are people less diverse? In small towns like the one where I grew up, and everybody's distantly related or at least everybody's parents went to grade school together, where there are centuries of history behind some of the churches and clubs, and people's parents worked together on the committee to build a public swimming pool or the committee to beautify the riverfront. There's a lot of civic involvement in such monochromatic places, but they're boring and even oppressive.
If there is any correlation between living here and depression it may be due more to economic circumstances than racial/ethnic ones.
Bingo!
Where you have an economic climate resembling a scramble for lifeboats aboard the Titanic, everyone will tend to hate everyone else. And the easiest handle for hatred is to pick up on someone else's racial or ethnic difference.
In other words, it's not a question of cultural diversity versus non-diversity. It's a question of economic solidarity & cooperation versus a social Darwinist struggle red in tooth and claw.
In still other words, a reasonably equitable economic setup will tend to promote those beneficial aspects of diversity while minimizing its destructive aspects.
So I guess it's the economy, stupid...
I thought y'all might get a kick out of the GOP
fundraising scam of the week: donate to the RNC because your voter registration is invalid!
California doesn't have real diversity. California is importing far too many people from poorer nations. All of CA's so-called diversity is from India, Mexico, and the Philippines. I can't recall the last time I encountered a first generation Russian, Romanian, or African. The standard of living is beginning to dip with an undereducated and third-world population base.
A state population that is nearly 40% Latin American is NOT diversity. It's a gradual switching of a state's dynamic. Political shifts towards the direction of open borders will surely ensue. I find it comical that citizens of that state look the other way on the Aztlan and the reconquista mindset that many Latino Californians now hold.
All the study really indicates, is that in a diverse area, the residents have to confront their prejudices, and not hide or ignore them.
To quote Ms. Malkin, "Boo-frickin'-hoo".
Maybe if more people would confront their prejudices, then more people would say, "Gosh, why the heck to I have this prejudice?"
Personally, I think we should just put some Prozac in the water and forge ahead.
I'm all for this, but only because it would save me $20 a month on Prozac.
If I may, because I actually respect Putnam's academic work and think he's a first-rate scholar, we should note that his research findings are being hijacked by right-wingers and the press who are only seizing upon what fits their narrative.
What right-wingers are seizing on here is Putnam's finding that in the short-term, newly arrived and established residents experience a lessening of social ties and cohesion. The research is on the up-and-up, so I don't doubt his conclusion. But the right-wingers ignore that looking over the long-term, diversity is actually has a positive impact for communities - it's those initial "coming togethers" that are so disorienting to people. That, of course, would take the shine off the apple for the right-wingers to mention that.
As I said before, Putnam's research is pretty meticulous, and so if his conclusion about a loss of cohesion in the short-term as new immigrants arrive, we should obviously ask, "why?" Being a political scientist, I don't think Putnam is overly given to analyzing context, but as I'm a sociologist, context is everything. Now when new immigrants arrive in American communities, what sort of political environment are they integrating into? One that is profoundly xenophobic, where native-born (or more appropriately, white native-born) residents are repeatedly told to fear those who are different. Is it any surprise, then, that new immigrants and established residents begin to feel alienated?
So my two take-aways:
1. The long-term benefits of diversity are actually positive, which Putnam makes note of, but right-wingers won't tell you about.
2. Short-term breakdowns of social cohesion aren't because "diversity is bad," but is a result of a persistent campaign of xenophobia perpetuated by nativists which has poisoned our ability to reach out to others who might be a little different than us.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, three stages of philosophy are defined:
1) How do we eat -- where's our next meal coming from?
2) Why do we eat -- what's the meaning of life?
3) Where do we eat -- where shall we go out for dinner?
The greater the diversity, the greater the range of choices when you reach stage 3! Of course diversity is good.
I am in favor of diversity. I find young black women really hot and would like to have sex with as many as I can.
Well, it's Robert Putnam.
Putnam's whole "bowling alone" thesis has been amply criticized on a variety of grounds, and I think there's probably going to be good reason to be cautious in interpreting this data as well.
However, there is something to this that needs to be addressed: there's a good deal of data showing that people are more supportive of social spending when the level of racial & ethnic diversity is lower. There's data both at the national and international level to support this. This is, of course, something that deserves our attention to work on overcroming, not an immutable fact that we should simply accept as the judgement of heaven or whatever.
What this gets back to, for me, is that social behaviors are learned, and it's the job of political leaders (among others) to help society as a whole learn behaviors that are healthy and prosocial, and unlearn ones that are not.
Diversity is not a value that needs to be taught to young children. To the contrary, prejudice needs to be taught. Young kids don't even cognize the concept of race. This was commonly accepted in the Old South, where relatively little effort was made to segregate children before school age. It's the inhereted social system, not the kids themselves, that are the source of the problem.
david78209, three stages of philosophy? Sounds like the last conversation between me and my husband.
"...they have decided to withdraw into their homes to watch TV and play on their computers in the dark all by their lonesome."
I thought I was that way because I was lazy.
I live in central Missouri (not by choice at the moment) and the first thing I noticed when I got here was the lack of diversity in every way, from skin color to languages to food to cultural activities. Yes there are African Americans and Hispanics and even Chinese operating the few take-out places. But for the most part it's very white, very Republican, very Christian. The primary diversity is in the number of Christian denominations. For true diversity we go up to the nearest college town where you can find a little of everything. Without diversity life can be a big bland blob. I get uncomfortable when I'm surrounded by too many middle-class whites like myself. Fear=ignorance.
Bu$hCo is an equal opportunity discriminator. For that matter, they are the real miscegenation proponents:
They have been screwing all the races on the planet, but, so far, they're shooting blanks with the screwing, and real bullets at anyone who is not white.
Canadians (I proudly claim that heritage) just accept it. Just because the early Canadian settlers were from England, Scotland and Ireland and therefore white, doesn't make later immigrants have any less worth.
I think America has lots of frightened white men who are way too defensive when they see their society changing.
Maybe new groups have always been met with this level of hostility. But it feels both angrier, or nastier than I've ever heard anyone describe.
Tell that to the Irish. Oh, sure, we're embraced now, but if you go and watch Blazing Saddles, the line from the townsfolk of 'Ok, we'll take the spics, the chinks, and the niggers, but we don't want the Irish!' is pretty much dead on. Irish integration into New York was brutal and sometimes bloody, and the backlash against that bigotry is why so many Irish Democrats went into politics and law enforcement, and ended up becoming their own little enclave of oppression and bigotry.
The difference now is, it's easier to tell if someone's hispanic or middle-eastern or south-asian by looking than 'hey, that guys a mick!' or a polack, or a kraut, or a frog... every wave of immigrants has faced exactly the same bullshit.
The difference is, this time we're more aware because there's more communication.
Diversity creates depression and hopelessness.
So America-centric .... Canada's society, economy and the life off it's neighbourhoods would by and large put the lie to this assertion.
In my experience, the people who are most concerned with immigrants and 'furriners' are those just above them on the socioeconomic level, or who are otherwise frustrated at their low standing in American society. These people also tend to be uneducated about the history of California, and the historical value of immigrants to this country.
off = of
I worked in a place once where the group immediately over the partition from where I sat was composed of several black baptist church sisters, a couple of very out gay white guys and a couple of Filipinas. I could sense a lot of tension in the conversations that floated over the partition to me, but the one thing on which they could unite unequivocally was that they hated, hated, HATED Mexicans.
It makes you proud to be an American.
from the article-
If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.
In other words, if people are educated and have good jobs that enable them to be creative and make enough money to live well-above the poverty range then they are more tolerant.
D'UH.
Reminds me of a visit to my city by Richard Florida and his "Creatives" etc. about diversity being an indicator of a better place to live. A woman (green politician) stood up in the audience and said...but where are the musicians at this talk? where are the artists? You know where they are, they're working their day jobs in a restaurant trying to survive" -- and when the "creatives" (i.e. well-off who like to be around artists and musicans, etc.) move in, the artists cannot afford to live in the area. but I digress...
however, both florida and putnam ignore the obvious... the coorelation between education, job status and happiness -- and thus feelings of compassion, etc. toward others... as well as certain seeming ignorance of the issue of wealth for various groups when both think about their data. -- or so it seems to me after I read the article.
what about the size of the places he looked at? were some small towns that are "inbred" and thus in many cases share an affiliation that resembles genetic relatedness? are some declining neighborhoods in which poorer people can afford to live... and thus threaten the financial security of the majority whose only investement equity is in their home?
if one of his criteria is "religious activity," I find that to be a ridiculous standard. I live in an area with a statistically high number of atheists/agnostics and yet many are involved in various activities -- how were the different categories decided and how were they weighted?
the actual study and how he created categories is not included in the article, so the above questions are of interest to me. I'm constantly amazed by how blind so many Americans are about the impact of financial security in all areas of peoples' lives.
My question here is whether Mr. Putnam is asking the right questions.
I haven't yet read the whole article but just enough to wonder whether Putnam's markers for civic engagement in diverse communities accurately reflect the changing nature of civic engagement.
For several decades voting has declined (beginning with the "baby boom" generation and increasing with each successive generation) but involvement in cause activism has increased. Involvement in neighborhood organizations and traditional organizations like the Masons may be down in more multicultural areas but these are places where people seem more likely to be involved in communities of affinity (that may be regional or even - increasingly - entirely virtual).
Re: increasing rates of depression I don't know that we have historical data going far enough back to draw meaningful conclusions but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that religious conservatives were happier; absolute belief has this effect on people.
I think it's a pipe dream to think that xenophobia is somehow a modern American invention. Can we not remember discrimination against the Irish, Slavs, Italians, Catholics/Protestants (depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon you were praying), Jews...and so on and so forth.
We may be a melting pot, but it's often been in spite of the ingredients.
Putnam's study only dealt with the USA. Would his results be different in another cultural or geographic setting? What about Canada? the UK?
It seems to me that the pervasive racism that affects every institution and every person in the US, whether they intentionally subscribe to its tenets or not, is likely an enormous independent variable here.
It would be important to see if anyone is doing a cross cultural look at this work.
Marquer, that was shameful. But do you really get such good production out of straw men?
Alison- yes, would the data be different in countries with less darwinian economic policies? in ones that do not have politicians/policymakers who constantly disparage the "social safety net?"
and on a related note-
I remember a bioanthropology prof telling our class that xenophobia is a trait that is widespread among all primates...but isn't something that is set in stone. in other words, people, apes, etc. can "make friends" with the "others" that scare them.
which again goes back to economic resources or lack thereof. hoarding is common with xenophobia... it's a response to fear, to the idea that survival is threatened by possible loss.
but this information doesn't justify huge disparities in incomes to the detriment of a society.
Except for occasional redheads like myself (who are still scorned as "gingers" in the U.K.), it was nearly impossible to identify Irish or Scottish immigrants based on physical characteristics alone. Or Polish or Russian or Swedish immigrants, for that matter.
But when you combine anti-immigrant nativism with a racist legacy that goes back four centuries, the obstacles to the economic and social assimilation of people of color become overwhelming.
The struggle against racism in the U.S. has proceeded in three stages: 1) ending slavery (250 years); 2) ending legal discrimination (another 100 years); and, 3) ending de facto discrimination based on cultural stereotypes about people of color (barely begun). The third step is clearly the most difficult and we've made little real progress.
"All of CA's so-called diversity is from India, Mexico, and the Philippines. I can't recall the last time I encountered a first generation Russian, Romanian, or African."
Not entirely true. The Sacramento area has a large number of Slavic (Russian and Ukranian) immigrants. Sadly, there have been quite a few clashes between the extremely Christian conservative Slavic community in the Sacramento area and those who are GLBT-friendly, including the recent murder of a young gay man, Satender Singh. The two suspects have now fled back to Russia.
Karl Jewenstein doesn't live in my California, which has first-generation almost everything, including Russians and Romanians.
I endorse the economic reason for depression. When you don't know if you'll have a job - or a roof over your head - in two months, it's hard not to be depressed. When your paycheck is barely enough to cover rent and food and bus fare, if you're not depressed, you don't understand the situation.
It's important that everyone reads the study. Putnam places a very high value on what he calls "social capital" which seems to come down to a willingness to join the PTA and have block parties. I think it's debatable just how valuable that is in the modern world, but that's where he's coming from.
He's just the messenger, though. This study has been hijacked by right wingers to support their racist fears and that's what I'm talking about with this post. These people always find a justification for their racism. This is just the latest.
I can't say this is representative of anything, but I live in an extremely racially and economically diverse neighborhood --- and we have block parties and neighborhood meetings and we put propositions on the local ballot protesting the airplane noise from the Santa Monica airport and all that good stuff.
Are we all hanging out on the street corner singing doo-wop tunes? No. We are all working. But the kids are all over the place, of all ages and races, bugging the shit out of us with their motorcycles and skateboards and their loud hip-hop. It is as it ever was.
I think the difference here is that most of the people where I live are liberals. It's really that simple.
Geaghan,
While I agree that Americans seem stuck in that third phase, I think we have made some impressive progress.
Legal, formal racial policies were largely dismantled in the period from Brown to Bakke. After that came the racist revanche, led by Reagan and the Republicans. I may be overly optimistic, but I feel that the force of this revanche is spent.
We are always going to have portion of the population that is racist to its core. I am sure that a similar portion of Germans long for the days of the matching jackets.
We cannot eliminate this tendency in humans, at least not in any imaginable time period. We must, however, make loud and frequent statements against it. And constantly push the social, political and legal institutions to expand human rights.
Wow....did you misrepresent those findings or what???? His empricial evidence shows diversity hurts civic values. That's not racist. That's a fact. But the fact is, we will deal with it as a people, so there's hope in it. But enough with the knee jerk racial-Left reaction. Of course mass immigration has a negative impact--it's there for all to see.
Of course mass immigration has a negative impact--it's there for all to see.
JFK
Sadly, no. Wanna link to that "mass" and the "negative impact" for "all to see"?
I don't see it here, and we have all kinds of newer residents.
Was on Prozac 20 years ago. Came full anti-depressant circle and am on it again today. Digby, I love you dearly so you know a "but" is next. BUT by referring to Prozac as a chill pill you are perpetuating a myth and a groaning cliche. Prozac does not smooth the rough edges of one's psyche. Prozac stimulates a lethargic brain. Ask anyone else who's taken it.
A "Jew" complaining about immigration! The Messiah must be on His way. Everythings turned topsy-turvy.
It's sort of ridiculous to be an American Nativist when the bulk our ethnic cohort arrived here, just a few generations ago, and every one of them from the most reviled nationalities in the world.
I think the difference here is that most of the people where I live are liberals. It's really that simple.
Although you might find that, if and when those ethnic groups start having to compete more directly with one another, that the veneer of mutual tolerance is actually quite thin.
(After all, in the American south, much of the antipathy of poor whites towards blacks has traditionally been rooted in a sense that blacks were and are potential economic competitors for the kinds of employment available to the poor whites.)
There was a fascinating article, which I believe I have posted here before, and which I will try to find again, about the newly poisonous relations between black and Hispanic employees of the Postal Service in urban Southern California.
The article related that, ever since the 1970s, a career as a postal worker had provided a comfortable middle-class living for many blacks, who had benefited from a very aggressive federal affirmative action program.
Then, starting in the 1990s, the rapidly growing Hispanic population looked at those stable jobs with decent benefits, and said, "We want some of that good stuff for ourselves."
And since there were more of them, they demanded proportionality in hiring and promotion. Which could not, per affirmative action, be denied. Thus curbing the ambitions of a number of blacks who had set their sights on the same positions. It is not as though postal employment is a rapidly growing sector of the economy. There is a relatively static pool of such jobs. The proverbial pie which cannot be made larger, but merely distributed differently.
Severe bad blood immediately ensued between the two groups.
If and when the current debt bubble has truly serious consequences -- such as a long-lasting recession with a serious spike in middle-class employment -- expect for such friction to occur in many more places, and to rapidly hit combustion temperature.
I have several friends who live in the UK who report something similar. Despite the fact that the economy there boomed hugely during the Blair years, there is still immense sub rosa interethnic and intercultural tension in Britain. So far, the fact of relatively broadly distributed prosperity has masked the worst of that. What will happen when the bloom comes off the rose, and Britons end up arguing over who gets what diminishing pieces of their post-Imperial, now post-industrial, and soon to be post-North-Sea-energy economy? It will probably be quite ugly.
--
Shorter Putnam, as filtered through the right:
"It's good to tolerate intolerance and, white people are happiest when they have all the resources, and if nobody complains, they're even happier. Don't you want them to be happy?"
"It will probably be quite ugly"
marquer
Don't threaten me, punk! We'll see who it gets ugly for, asshole.
marquer lives in the middle of an agri-business sized field of straw men.
If your can get to a place that has a subscription or want to pay, you can find the article here.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.c...p?ref=0080-
6757
IMHO, the results are being wildly overinterpreted. They found that more racial diversity and immigration has a moderate independent negative association with lack trust or participation in community. Not a big or overwhelming effect, but moderate, compared to other factors such as neighborhood crime and home ownership, which are much larger. They did a multivariate linear regression, so this effect is independent of other factors, but they did no formal analysis of interactions that I could find, and nothing to validate their very simple regression results. And it explains about a quarter of the variation in attitudes. I don't see how he did all this advanced analysis to really udnerstand the data. Unless you call running variations of the same linear regression measuring an independent association with similar specifications, over and over again, a fancy analysis. I hope some one with some more imagination will get these data and take a good look at them.
I wonder how many of the reactionary pundits concernedly pondering the results and broadcasting grave thougthful conclusions about ' social dilemmas' and 'hard choices and truths' have actually read the paper.
So let me see if I got this right: People get freaked out when they are around people who are different from them and protect themselves by being less involved than people who are surround by people who are all the same.
OK, got it.
Duh!
"It is extremely difficult to factor out secondary influences when there is such a high correlation to begin with. Thus it is almost impossible to deal with cause and effect in these cases. But this is what statisticians try to do, it is what they do for a living. But for the rest of us, we should rely on common sense."
I am a professional statistician. Statisticians do NOT publish these studies and are very often not even involved in the analysis. Gender studies, sociology, political science and other psuedo-science-ology graduate students take 1 or 2 courses in statistics (not enough to avoid the pitfalls) and then go off publishing these studies, often doing thier own statistics. I don't trust ANY study published outside the hard sciences (including, for example the study that stated that women working the same jobs as men make, on average 30% less) I know exactly how these studies are manipulated by those with a political agenda, and if anyone wants to send me an email, I will explain in detail how it is done.
However, it looks like Digby read the title of the article and then just flew off the handle. The study says nothing about depression or hopelessness, only about measurable civic participation indexes. Also, considering the background and political leanings of the author, it seems unlikely he skewed the findings of the study to support a racist agenda (unless he is really an evil racist that has disguised himself as a liberal his entire career). You can't have an atmosphere of academic freedom when you become outraged anytime somebody comes out whith research that seems to contradict your world view, or research that may be mis-interpreted by ignorant people to support their racists and backward views. I haven't read the study yet (I'll find it online as soon as I finish this post) and if I find any glaring statistical oversights, I will be sure to post them on this comment board.
Examining the author's background and political
By the way, my email address is statbio_cg@yahoo.com
"And it explains about a quarter of the variation in attitudes."
By 'it' I meant the whole regression analysis, which is done on individual resonses, if I read correctly, so the published statistical results explain less than 25% of variation in individual attitudes in the sample.
This data set seems very interesting, but they have found diversity to have a moderate independent effect on average, on individual attitudes, with most of the variation in individual attitudes not expalained by the model. And about half a dozen explanatory variables have a much larger effect, some more than three times, by their chozen metric (standardized regression coefficient, which is quite a primitive measure, but the only one they report). They also rely on a simple, rather special, univariate index of neighborhood diversity which is also problematic.
No one should blow this up into any big deal one way or the other, unless you want to over interpret statistical results to push an agenda.
You can find the study at: http://www.blackwell-
synergy.com...77.2007.00176.x
No one should blow this up into any big deal one way or the other, unless you want to over interpret statistical results to push an agenda.
comment
If they can push an agenda with an army of straw-men and anecdotes, just think what they could get if they torture statistics!
Mooser, did you mean "torture statisticians". Almost happened to me once. Working at the Clevelend clinic (internship) for a Guy named Dr. Agerwal. When I first met him, he had pointed at a wall of studies he had published and said that if I was a good statistician (or something to that effect), I could have my name on a whole bunch of his new ones. He later gave me some data to analyze from a study he did. I analyzed it for him but the result was not what he had aticipated. He told me to re-analyze it again. I did, obviously obtaining the same result. He got angry and told me to go back and keep analyzing the data until I got the result he wanted. Anyway, that kind of thing happens a lot, even in the hard sciences.
I looked over Putnam's original paper.
In Table 3 he presents a multiple regression analysis of his results, including the effect of ethnic homogeneity index on trusting neighbors.
He admits the multiple regression model ignores some statistical niceties. When he runs a multivariate, multilevel model (the more appropriate way to analyze the data, given its structure), he says that the significance level of the ethnic homogeneity index is worse than in the presented model, but does not give the effect size.
Nonetheless, taking what's given in the paper, we can compare the effect size of the homogeneity index with the other variables in the model. The appropriate column of Table 3 that allows us to compare effect sizes across different variables is the one labeled "Beta", representing "standardized coefficients". This measure gives the percentage change in Trust in Neighbors given a one standard deviation change in the independent variable.
Putnam doesn't give descriptive statistics but we can estimate a one standard deviation change in the ethnic homogeneity index from the graph he presents in Figure 4. The range of the index in his data set is from about 0.46 to 0.97. If we roughly estimate a one standard deviation range as about 37 or 38% of the total range, we get 0.19 homogeneity index.
Returning to the Beta column of table 3, coveniently arranged from largest effect to smallest effect, we find the ethnic homogeneity index in 10th place, with smaller effect than age, owns home, education, black ethnicity, census tract poverty rate, satisfaction with current finances, Latino ethnicity, household income and non-violent crimes per capita.
The Ethnic Homogeneity Index is actually tied for 10th place with four other variables. Its effect size is 0.04, meaning that a change in ethnic homogeneity of one standard deviation (about 19%) is associated with changes in trust in neighbors of 4%.
Compare that with the effect of a one standard deviation increase in age (no idea from the article how many years that may be but let's guestimate 10-15 years) where the predicted trust increases 15%. Or lower down on the list, being black decreases trust in neighbors by 13%, compared to being white.
The key point here is not to question if there may be an effect of ethnic homogeneity of your census tract on increased trust in neighbors, the point is that on the scale of examined variables, it accounts for a relatively small effect.
People in their 60's trust their neighbors much more than people in their 20's. Black and Latino people trust their neighbors much less than whites. The effect of living in sparsely populated census tracts is associated with increased trust just as much as as living in ethnically homogeneous census tracts. The census tract poverty rate has twice the effect on trust (negative) than ethnic homogeneity.
One further note: the model talked about here is what percent of the respondents said they "trust their neighbors a lot". It would have been interesting to compare the effect of ethnic homogeneity in models where the response was "I trust my neighbors more than I distrust them", a response that was surely calculable from the survey responses.
So let's keep the spin on this study in perspective. There is a likely effect of homogeneity on neighborly trust as measured by "I trust my neighbors a lot", but it is relatively small compared to age, ethnicity of the respondent, poverty, household income, among others. Reducing economic discrimination would go much further in increasing neighborly trust than would homogenizing neighborhoods.
James E. Powell sez, on the subject of racism and recent progress in fighting it: We must, however, make loud and frequent statements against it. And constantly push the social, political and legal institutions to expand human rights.
Nicely stated, and I agree. In Philosophy and Social Hope, Richard Rorty defines "moral progress" as "a matter of being able to respond to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people." (And, as he later writes, also entails expanding that widening circle of concern to include animals and even the earth itself.)
The opposite tendency toward exclusion is described by social anthropologists in a real tongue-twister of a phrase: "cultural pseudo-subspeciation." That is, declaring a particular group to be almost a separate subhuman species based on some innate characteristic like color.
These concepts are two edges of the same sword that needs to be used in challenging racism.
Well great Geaghan and Wonk, fact is that the regular public won't bother to challenge the way the study was presented or racism itself; they'll accept the blithe tidings of truth from their chosen messengers.
I am appalled actually that Powell made this study if he indeed, is serious about confronting racism, unless possibly he imagined that he would be able to present his findings in a way that couldn't be twisted.
But twisted they are and flawed as well I think the study is in that it doesn't ask the correct questions and leaves up to assumption as absolutes certain attributes of American society that should be challenged.
Like many other countries that balanced their entire economic and cultural system on skin color differences, the plow of hatred ran deep furrows that will take a lot of effort to smooth out.
Making up vague and ill thought out surveys doesn't help the cause of eradication of racism.
It's really news to some that many people would rather be among people that look and sound like themselves? At least they are more comfy.
Hell, you see that in every level of the animal kingdom. Life isn't a friggin rainbow, no matter what PBS says.
Also, let's see Digby's neighborhood. I'd also like to see the neighborhoods of all of the oh-so-outraged here.
That YearlyKos gathering hardy looked liked the United Nations either, ya know.
Thanks to Chris for the commentary. In only had time to take a very brief look. I am surprized that the author did not explore interactions between variables (for example an interaction 'trust*crime*pop density variables'. Also, when you have so many variables, should try to look at structure of data set all at once. The multi-level nature of the data set, and mixutre of cointinuous, ordered category, and yes-no variables make that a difficult project, so Prof Putnam should call on his friendly neighborhood statistican. But dong a linear regression, whether with multi-level, or random effects, stuff added, is just a start. Certain pundits are just using these results to push their preconceptions, seems to me.
Ramones,
My "census tract" is predominantly Mexican, with a scattering of German, Austrian, Swedish and other nationalities and ethnicities.
I'm none of those and I wouldn't live anywhere else. I never feel uncomfortable and I trust my neighbors. We all look after each other.
Generalization from personal prejudice weighs lightly in any discussion.
marquer lives in the middle of an agri-business sized field of straw men.
Ah, sorry for the fireworks, folks. Mooser is still touchy from the last time that he got into it with me.
I had noted en passant that among the less welcome habits of recently arrived Hispanic immigrants is a regrettable tendency to drive while inebriated.
Mooser said that I was full of shit, and backed this up with... well, with the complete authority and the full faith and credit of his personal opinion. And accused me, on the strength of that argument, of making the whole thing up.
I backed up my note with multiple studies by recognized authorities like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Institute of Justice, all of those studies being formidable in both detail and depth, and all of which amply confirmed the disproportionate DUI problem among Hispanic immigrants.
I then put the cherry on the cake with a national survey of Hispanic community leaders who said that the single worst public health problem in their communities, by their own self-assessment was -- you guessed it -- drunk driving.
Mooser, apropos of straw, that marvelous (Hispanic) invention of adobe often has straw in it, but it's not a comfortable thing to repeatedly slam your head against, and it's embarrassing when you do it in public. I wish you would stop.
--
Did there used to be a Marquer on the Yahoo Energy/Resources UseGroup?
If there was (if my memory is correct), was that you or a different Marquer?
I grew up in Manhattan during the white flight period. It amazes me not at all that homogenous communities are more organized and have more established social networking - many of them were created specifically (hello, suburbanization?) to avoid diversity, and many of the older ones kept their homogeneity by excluding Teh Other.
I live in the most diverse community in the world these days (that would be Queens, NY) and while it may be less politically active than Manhattan in many ways, if you correct for income and citizenship status and the less-showy political involvement of being actively involved in your child's public school, I'd match the people I live with against anyone when it comes to working to make their world a better place.
If they follow the New York pattern, in a generation or two they'll have a nice power base in the civil service and local politics, unless they take it on the road when they can afford to and diversify those suburbs whose non-diverse early adopters are sitting on prohibitively expensive real estate because, let's face it, the post-WW2 investment in returning soldiers which enabled those non-diverse communities tended to devolve to the non-diverse.
Ironically, in our area, those non-diverse white flighters tended to be of irish and italian descent (my own antecedents). Ironically, because when they got here, the irish and italians were the Those People everyone wanted to keep out (my grandma used to see NINA - no irish need apply - help wanted signs when she was growing up.)
I guess what I'm getting at is that the study may be accurate, but without context it means nothing at all.
by neighborhood has blacks, whites, asians, non-americans (like Russians, Indians - not N.A. -but maybe, who knows- Iranians, Asians from a variety of nations) and Americans who also come from these nations. it has students and professionals -- the most homogeneous feature is the value placed upon education. my kids went to elementary school with kids from 39 different nations. politically, there are strong green, democratic, republican and libertarian groups. (More than one green has been elected to office, for instance... the area has definitely been "blue" (but not depressed) for a while.
where I live has a commitment to the idea of diversity. It's part of the "identity" of the city. -- there are events hosted for this purpose, sister cities, etc.
there are people here who do not share that worldview, obviously, and more people have been moving here over the past few years who built macmansions and who vote for republicans.
I tell you what makes me depressed - to live around a bunch of narrow-minded white people. I like my black next door neighbor way more than my white neighbor with a support our troops bumper sticker. My black neighbor was one of those troops in the past, btw.
I find it interesting that wonk noted the greatest statistical marker seemed to be economic, not race. The phrase "money can't buy happiness" was not written for poor people. For them, it's a lie. It can also buy health care, education, resources and a sense of community and belongingness not alienation.
Putnam should talk to some poor people.
As someone who grew up in Cleveland Heights , OH I know the benefits of living and working in a diverse environment. It wasn't until I relocated after 30 years to the wilds of Maine that I realized how much I valued the Heights community.
Where I am in Maine now, we have had successive waves of Somalis and Africans and for the most part they are doing just fine. There are some ugly incidents as well, but I think that is natural whenever immigrants move into a community.
I recently took my girlfriend to LA, her first time there. She got really depressed too.
She comes from Toronto (also extremely racially diverse), but in LA, she couldn't get over how segregated it was. Class lines were nearly the same as racial lines, unlike in Toronto where correlation between race and class is much less pronounced. She told friends a story about how her summer job in college was to pick strawberries in the field and one said, "I though only Mexicans did that!"
From her perspective it seemed like Americans still had slaves, only now they just paid them minimum wage instead of providing them with food and housing.
She said its sick and never wants to go back.
A number of commenters have noted that there tends to be more tolerance of diversity among the upper classes than among the lower classes.
The real story, as always, is in how those upper-class elites use the antagonisms between lower-class ethnic groups to manipulate those lower classes, and to keep them in their place.
Yes marquer, I remember your masterful work in that thread. Since you have the upper hand, please go easy on me for a while. I'm not sure I can take it.
And having seen that you were right, I reversed 50 years of my liberal attitudes and began hating all Mexicans.
If you can save one poor soul from a horrible death at the hands of a drunk Mexican driver, it'll all be worth it. So you just keep erecting those straw men, and marshalling those anecdotes. They're irrefutable, baby!
You might find this interesting. Putnam was on Ashbrook this week:
http://www.onpointradio.org/
show...0809_b_main.asp
...but rather that I wondered why this latest bit of uncomfortable diversity would result in a withdrawing from civic life, when earlier waves of the exact same "discomfort" did not. I'm genuinely curious as to why it has had this result now when it is obvious that these problems would have existed, in big cities at least, forever.
Because it's not actually diversity that's the issue. I've not read Putnam's latest work, but there almost has to be some conflation here with the modern tendency to become cavedwellers and slaves to home entertainment: movies on demand, DVDs, digital cable/satellite, etc. etc. I wonder how Putnam controlled for that.
At first glance, the conclusion is the same if one was studying the withdrawal from civic life and the rise of the Internet, or something.
...but rather that I wondered why this latest bit of uncomfortable diversity would result in a withdrawing from civic life, when earlier waves of the exact same "discomfort" did not.
What makes you so sure that earlier waves didn't cause the same withdrawal?
At least, the converse was certainly true: Homogenous groups of immigrants banded together and became more civically aware and active. (e.g., Irish & Police, 100 years ago)
Racism definitely plays a part in "the diversity paradox" (the other study mentioned in the article about welfare and homogeneity is particulary striking), but it hasn't come out of nowhere, it's simply been given room to breathe after being suffocated in the 60s and 70s.
(Yes, the 60s and 70s. I'm sure you can think of many racially charged riots during those times, such as the School Busing riots in Boston, but those could have been the dying gasps of a particular way of thinking about race. Instead, the Republican party propped racism back up on its feet, and has weaned it back to health over the last 40 years.)
Well!...this study and the uses of it and the reactions to it certainly offer us a teachable/learnable moment on statistics, studies, and whatall. And the uses and abuses of studies annd data.
I wonder, might some of the depression, estrangerment, untrust, etc., being attributed to the 'diversity' level of residential areas really be due to the low percent
of people having been there for any length of time? If you and everyone around you have been living someplace for only a few years; and you and everyone around you know that you and everyone around you will be moving somewhere randomly else; how will any of you establish any community or trust?
I live in a low-to-lowermiddle-income co-op. About half the members are Black. About 2/3rds of the other half are White. The next group is East Asian. Then some South Asians. Finally a mixed assortment of Jews, Turks, and Arabs. Those of us who have been there for many years have a structure of trust, mutual back-watching, etc. The newcomers can work their way into the structure if they take enough time, but many of them are
students anyway, and are gone before that can even happen. So maybe it is a function of people being in one place long enough to be a community, and not just a residential population.
The diversity seems to be beside the point.
By the way, here is an article about some Angelenos who seem not to have gotten the memo on diversity:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
w...2036580,00.html
(Now, the Guardian is supposed to be
a respected Left Wing newspaper. If they are wrong about this and the events referrenced just above are basically a hoax, what else might the Guardian be wrong or hoaxing about?)
Julia, I just read your comment upthread. Doh!
What she said.
FWIW, I've been thinking about this topic on a personal note as well. We're in Chicago, and moving from Logan Square (Mexican and gentrifying) to Lakeview (gentrified. Sexually diverse [Boys Town runs through it], but not very racially diverse). Thinking about Logan Square, I feel like I wasn't particularly engaged in the neighborhood, while I feel like Lakeview is more of an urban hub. I usually attribute this to the differences in population density (the only areas in Chicago where I feel like I'm back in Manhattan are where there are more high-rises and fewer three story buildings), but now I'm beginning to wonder if there's a reverse-diversity component to it as well.
Interesting anecdote: The most diverse population I see in or around Chicago is at the Ikea in Schaumburg. The "diversification" of the suburbs has already happened, though it's certainly possible that each ethnic group is from their own homogenous enclave, much like Chicago itself.
If you bother to actually RTFA, you will find that the study clearly states that diversity at the workplace enhances productivity and innovation. The author also withheld publication in order to make sure he wasn't mis-interpreting some critical data.
felixrex | 08.10.07 - 3:02 pm |
Yes, interesting, isn't it? I'm particularly interested in how black conservatives will handle this information, especially when their white ideological bretheren are embracing it gratefully. The Ward Connerlys of this country think they can safely oppose affirmative action, but Mr. Putman is talking about housing here, and that hits them where they live, so to speak. Will black conservatives disagree with white conservatives on this one? I think they will want to, but will demur from doing so, poor things.
If you want a copy of the Putnam article without having to go through a subscription wall, you can find it here:
http://www.humanities.manchester.../
Putnam2007.pdf
This is the "nut graf" from Putnam's article:
"In this article, I wish to make three broad points:
• Ethnic diversity will increase substantially in virtually all modern societies over the next several decades, in part because of immigration. Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable, but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset, as the history of my own country [the United States] demonstrates.
• In the short to medium run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital. In support of this provocative claim I wish to adduce some new evidence, drawn primarily from the United States. In order to elaborate on the details of this new evidence, this portion of my article is longer and more technical than my discussion of the other two core claims, but all three are equally important.
• In the medium to long run, on the other hand, successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities. Thus, the central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of ‘we’."
Putnam says there are short-term costs to diversity, but that the long-term benefits make it worthwhile to figure out how to deal with those costs. John Leo etc. are completely misrepresenting his work when they argue that it's a slam-dunk case against diversity. The problem is not Putnam, but the conservative pundits and their MSM enablers who distort his work.
"I recently took my girlfriend to LA, her first time there. She got really depressed too."-(Nylund)
In Los Angeles,perhaps more than in most large American cities, the reality of de facto American slavery, seems to be less mitigated and less hidden.
The pure structural valences of the economic system itself, seem to be more apparent, more visible, and rawer.
What these dynamics are in actual operating practice ,seem less pasted over there. They are expressed more purely in the comings and goings-the queasy phantasmagoria which is daily life in that city.
These leakages from the forced dynamic of American capitalism is what causes the omnipresence of a floating "depression" in Los Angeles.
Of course, one must know, that for American corporate capital, the re-institutionalization of slavery, would be a dream come true.
There are simply nodes in America, where that dream is closer to the surface, more palpable.
The disquieting feeling which overwhelms one in Los Angeles is the nearness of that 'surfacing.'
Haven't read the whole thread, but...
Don't forget correlation does not give the direction of causation. My interpretation would be
a) Many blacks are poor due to their backgrounds, a consequence of their ancestors' persecution
b) A higher proportion of whites are rich
c) Neighborhoods are separated by rich and poor
d) Poorer people are unhappy in the US
So poor blacks and whites are unhappy and mixed, rich whites are separate and happy. OK, trusting, not happy, but I hope you take my point.
Also most people are racist at some level
( have a go at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ if you find this implausible ) and this needs to be actively challenged. Many don't, so segregation is preferred. This is an influence too, but I don't have time to work this in just now.
me: you made very good points, and the issues you raise are among those that cannot be addressed by satistical methods used in Putnam's paper.
Nylund,
Canadian friends have recommended to me:
Grace-Edward Galabuzi's book "Canada's Economic Apartheid: The Social Exclusion of Racialized Groups in the New Century" (2006).
I hope this does not pop the Canadian fairy tale world so many Canadians insist on inhabiting.
It's always something, but that something is never racism. I know that because white folks say so.
Whatever something might be, that something is always racism. I know that because black folks say so.
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