Diversity and Its Limits

Charles Murray, writing on the American Enterprise Institute and Claremont Review of Books writes an unusual review of Yascha Mounk's The Great Experiment: How Diverse Democracies Fail and What they Can Do to Endure. He likes it an believes it contains important information - for Western Europeans, but not so much for Americans, because it does not much apply to us. Murray likes to make lists and be precise, and identifies five "disparities" between The US and Europe that make comparisons too far off to be much use. He then identifies three sins of omission that make the work irrelevant for us, however much it may still be relevant there. (FTR, Mounk is a German-born American citizen who teaches at Johns Hopkins). First, he disregards evolutionary biology, though he does hint that he knows about it.

The second sin of omission is closer to mortal: ignoring the empirical literature on ethnic diversity and social trust. “Social trust” refers to humans’ confidence in the good faith and good will of those around them. This is the kind of confidence that allows neighbors to leave the front door unlocked when leaving home for the afternoon, encourages people to do good deeds in the expectation that eventually they will be directly or indirectly reciprocated, and enables sellers to extend credit to buyers. Writ large, social trust is indispensable to an environment in which communities, capitalist economies, and democracy itself can flourish—a theme that has been developed by such eminent scholars as Edward Banfield in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), Francis Fukuyama in Trust (1995), and Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000).

Third, he overlooks the ethnic differences in social behavior, which Murray considers a "mortal" wound to illustrating Mounk's premises. He mentions marriage, and especially crime rates, and more especially urban crime rates as being so unmentioned as to make the work fairly dishonest overall. It is the same dance repeated endlessly; the hinting that the difference in black incarceration must have its origins in policing, though this has been repeatedly shown to not be so; the retreat into opportunity, or neighborhoods, or education, or have-you-looked-under-the-seat-cushions-dammit-it-must-be-something, with the eventual conclusion that it must still be racism somehow, even absent evidence. 

It is worth mentioning - or at least I have mentioned it often - that conservatives are often not much help in the matter, as they have their own pet theories, also unevidenced that must, simply must be the answer.

Do I sound discouraged? I am. I see no solution for our divide if we continue along current lines.  Worse, not even if we continue on anything like our current lines.