Inductivist

McDonald's is running an ad campaign with pairs of photos of customers to show us how much we have in common and how kind we can be to each other.  Honestly, I am getting a lot of warmth from the couple (I'm in Mickey D's all the time but have never seen guys like this there -- they wouldn't be caught dead in such a place, too much taste) but I gotta be frank: the young woman is not melting my heart. What's the deal? After Michelle Obama we're supposed to think that cold, hateful black women are the greatest thing since sliced bread?

Recently, I argued that Scott Adams' defense of the view that "diversity is our strength" is as weak as could be.  Now I see that neo-conservative Max Boot has tried the same thing. Both are responses to Tucker Carlson's diversity skepticism.

Since Boot's argument is written, in contrast to Adams' videorecording, it's more carefully done, but it's ends up just as dumb and dishonest.

Of course, Boot's first move is to claim that Tucker merely parrots neo-Nazi talking points. Boot is a classy thinker.

The way these people make "diversity is our strength" seem credible is to cherry-pick their examples and to equivocate: they use various meanings of diversity when it suits them. They use it to mean diversity of opinion when they give of examples of stifling uniformity. Boot relies on this meaning when he cites North Korea as an example.

Of course, Boot is cherry-picking here. These guys never focus on the typical situation. Yes, competition of different opinions can help a country arrive at better decisions, but normal countries have more than enough diversity to generate different perspectives. A typical country does not need to import millions of aliens to achieve sufficient diversity. Plus, more to the point, what you need for good decisions is smart people. A very diverse group of dummies is not going to cut it.

Boot conveniently ignores the general tendency: across countries, ethnic heterogeneity correlates with dysfunctional conflict. As a Jew, Boot should be aware of the fact that ethnic heterogeneity predicts genocide.  I don't need to cherry-pick to make my point: Everyone knows it's a general truth.

Next, Boot cites the examples of South Korea and Japan. They are aging and need young immigrants to help pay the bills. Here, "diversity" means cheap labor. He conveniently ignores the cost side of the ledger and the long-term consequences of importing huge, alien populations. Poor immigrants are very costly to welfare states, and, again, the consequences over the long haul are likely to be dysfunctional conflict and a society that ends up worse off.

Boot's next move is to sing the praises of America's genius immigrants. He goes all the way back to Levi Strauss to make his point. Again, equivocation. Diversity here means "geniuses."  He's cherry-picking. According to a study by Jason Richwine, the average IQ of US immigrants is somewhere between 91 and 94.  A person with IQ in the low 90s is suited to do a low-skill job--not to be the next Alexander Graham Bell.

Boot does manage to cite one study that found that public companies with more ethnic and gender diversity have higher profitability. I'll give him credit here -- he's debating in a serious way, for once -- but one study can find anything, and it might be the case that strong, profitable companies can afford the luxury of promoting more diverse leadership. The causal mechanism here seems unlikely: What is it about more minorities and women that would translate into more profit? The only answers that have any credibility are that these people understand minority/female customer desires better, or if "minorities" include large numbers of high IQ individuals (e.g., East Asians, South Asians).

Finally, he argues that diversity strengthens our national security. If the NYPD is made up of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu speakers, we will be safer. In other words, the grave security problems caused by diversity can be addressed a little better with diversity.  Lame.

UPDATE: Boot, like Adams, finishes with the point that diversity in the US is inevitable. This is practically an admission that diversity is a weakness -- a weakness we must live with. Like others, part of this "inevitability" is the tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants who haven't come yet. To the PC-minded, even our future policy choices are inevitabilities. We're somehow paralyzed. There is no way we can change course with respect to mass immigration. So much dishonesty by these people. 

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and Trump analyzer, has attempted to answer Tucker Carlson's question, "How is diversity a strength?"

He opens by stating that US diversity is a given -- it's not going anywhere -- so we need to find ways to turn diversity into a positive. That's a weak opening if you're trying to demonstrate that diversity is inherently a strength.

Next, Adams claims that it depends: diversity can be beneficial or harmful. Again, this is a lame argument if your point is to prove that diversity is a strength.

Adams argues that minorities know minority issues better than billionaires, and so are in a better position to know how a business should operate among minorities. In other words, diversity is needed to deal with the knowledge gap caused by diversity.

Next, Adams goes back to his original point that we don't have a choice about being a diverse society; it's a given. We have to deal with it. I'm becoming repetitive, but this, as before, is lame if you're attempting to prove diversity is a strength.

Adams compares the US to an organism that benefits from more sensors:  We all see things from a different angle, so multiple inputs creates a more accurate picture. Few people, even educated people like Adams, realize there is tremendous diversity of this sort in even the smallest ethnic group. Heck, there is tremendous diversity in a single family. To illustrate, the variation in personality is almost as wide in a family as in a population. Is it your experience that families are overly agreeable? That members see all issues in the same way? I suspect your family is like mine: 6 people, 7 opinions. 

Adam then argues that the US needs to standardize our language so diverse people can understand each other. In other words, we need to reduce diversity so we can tap into the advantages diversity offers.

Last, Adams cites the example of his start-up company WhenHub. He explains that the genius who has made the business a success is an Asian Indian immigrant. In other words, his company is a success because this partner is high IQ, like Adams. High IQ people working together is an example of homogeneity, not diversity. If Adams had hired a retard to complement his intelligence, that is diversity with respect to IQ.

Lame.

Just when I begin to develop some hope that America might be able to survive the ethnic diversification of the country, some Lefty moron throws cold water. This Asian UCLA professor tells the crowd of DREAM Act activists that they will someday replace the old white men in Congress. So did the crowd, in defense of a color blind America, boo him? On the contrary: the quiescent audience burst into cheers as the words "old white men" were uttered.

My approach on this blog is limited because surveys capture the attitudes of the average person. But history is driven by elites, and all too many of them want whites to take their rightful place at the bottom of American society. All this talk of equality and justice for all is just a smokescreen. It's about power and domination for these people, pure and simple.

Many ordinary people might have benign intentions, but they are easily manipulated by demogogues. Race-baiting and racial politics as methods to advance politically are such powerful temptations, I'm afraid the country is going to become increasingly dysfunctional. 

Coulter is always fun:

It cannot be said often enough that the chief of staff of the United States Army, Gen. George Casey, responded to a massacre of 13 Americans in which the suspect is a Muslim by saying: "Our diversity ... is a strength."

As long as the general has brought it up: Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.

Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare -- I mean the beautiful mosaics -- in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

"Diversity" is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: "Cancer is a strength!" "Pollution is our greatest asset!"

Diversity ruined journalism: Older-guy insiders are always a pleasure to read and listen to because they don't give a damn anymore and enjoy actually telling the truth.

Bernie Goldberg admitted on the O'Reilly Factor tonight that diversity ruined journalism. It was dominated in the old days by white men who had a code of skepticism and were after the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a story.

As minorities and women moved into the profession, anything remotely resembling objectivity disappeared. It wasn't clear if he was saying these demographic groups are simply more liberal, or that they, on average, lack the ability to be objective, but he puts the blame squarely on diversity.

God bless grumpy old men for getting past the lies.

The joys of diversity: I ran across a couple of late-breaking Texas stories. In the first, 80 Mexicans were arrested in Martin County for cockfighting. The birds were rigged with knives to make them more deadly. In the other, there have been two riots in two months in a federal detention facility in Pecos that holds illegals. They're rioting because the food and health care are not good enough.

The blessings of diversity: Only in this age could people get away with claiming that diversity is a crucial asset to society's wellbeing. I gathered data on 82 countries from various sources (e.g., World Factbook) in order to examine the correlates of ethnic heterogeneity. Here are the Pearson correlation coefficients:


Correlations with an index of ethnic heterogeneity

Social welfare expenditures (health and education as % of GDP) -.30*
Income inequality (GINI coefficient) .22*
Per capita GDP -.36*
Male homicide victimization rate .45*
Female homicide victimization rate .37*

* p < .05, one-tail test

In case you're not into statistics, the results indicate that countries with lots of ethnic diversity tend to have governments that spend less on education and health; they are poorer and characterized by greater inequality; and they experience more violence. The larger the absolute value of the correlation, the stronger the connection: the inequality correlation is weak, the male homicide one is moderate.

Conservatives might like less government spending and not care too much about inequality, so it is liberals who should be most concerned about diversity.

Now, I can't claim that the correlations prove that ethnic diversity is causing all these bad things, but I can at least say that they tend to go together: where you see lots of different kinds of people, you often see bad social conditions.

These data were originally used for other projects, so it's not like I cherry picked indicators that would make diversity look bad. I do know that I have never randomly looked at correlations and found that heterogeneity is related to a list of positive social indicators.

Multiculturalists love to blow gas about how great it is to have a real mix of people, but I am still waiting for some demonstrations of it.

Diversity breeds murder, inequality does not: A standard finding in criminological research is that homicide is strongly related to inequality: in societies with a big gap between the wealthy and the poor, the poor become resentful and take it out on nearby targets, also poor. This theory always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, the idea that I hate how the Man is screwing me, so I kill some guy at the bar for calling me queer. The theory turned every fist fight into something political. But the macrolevel correlation has been very reliable and very strong, I admit. A little investigation of mine evidently explains what is going on. Past cross-national studies always had a handful of Latin American countries with soaring homicide rates, and we all know that part of world reigns supreme in the rich-poor gap. So these outliers basically determined the size of the correlations. And yes, Latin murders are frequently political and tied to inequality.

But the whole situation changes with the sample I just constructed. I gathered the most recent homicide data for all countries that have published it. Data is now available from all the former Soviet countries. These are relatively equal countries, many of which have horrible violence of the organized crime type. When they are included in the analysis, the inequality-homicide link disappears.

Ethnic heterogenity, on the other hand, does have a significant influence on violence. The correlation between it and male homicide victmization rates is .41; for female victims, it's .48. Diversity breeds distrust and conflict, and can even lead to murder.