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“Diversity” or “Difference”?
Posted by KTK

The conservative New York City Journal has a profile of some recent research by Robert Putnam (the Bowling Alone guy who studies social isolation).  He’s convinced immigration has a destabilizing effect on communities, and they’re convinced that’s bad news.

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “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.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income.

Note that “devastating”, “surprisingly negative”, and “crushing” are their terms, not Putnam’s. But even so, there is something going on here. Typically, the article gives little information just what it is. Putnam is not a crackpot, and his prior findings have mostly stood up. But this article gives no information at all on how the research was conducted, or what variables were controlled for.

In particular, the article makes clear he controlled for geography, age, and class, but it says nothing at all about how he even defined “diversity” (what groups - national, racial, religious, etc. - contribute to making a community “diverse”?), and it does not indicate whether he controlled for rate of population influx and outflux in a community independently of “diversity”. There is some suggestion he may not have: he refers to longitudinal effects, implying that disruption diminishes over time; if that is the case, then it’s clear that greater disruption occurs at a point in time at which “diversity” begins to affect a community, and diminishes at a later point in time - which immediately evokes a time-dependent phenomenon like population flux rather than a static one like ethnic percentages. Without information on that point, the findings described above do not distinguish between change in identity groups making up a community, or simply change in the individuals residing in the community, as cause.

I suspect that change itself - the accumulation of mere difference in a population, independent of its diversity - contributes significantly to Putnam’s findings. That is, I would suspect that communities undergoing significant population turnover while maintaining a fairly constant racial or religious makeup would demonstrate many of the same features as the ones Putnam studied. Not knowing your neighbors is probably the single greatest factor in not trusting them, and is a barrier to forming community groups and all the rest as well. (This would also explain why port-of-entry locales like San Francisco and LA show less sense of community, and rural South Dakota cowtowns show more. The latter have less “diversity” because they also have less turnover - nobody wants to move there.)

I would be willing to retract that hypothesis if, when his paper is published, it proves that Putnam did consider tenure in residence independently of racial/ethnic/religious diversity, but absent such a control I would think Putnam has no grounds for concluding that increasing diversity uniquely contributes to short-term loss of community other than by way of being simply a form of population turnover. The fact that his results disappear over time would seem to support such a supposition. (The article suggests that he believes communities respond to diversity by “constructing new identities”, but it doesn’t give any detail. It’s not clear what this means or what evidence he has for it.* Absent that evidence, again, it seems simpler to imagine that social tension diminishes over time simply because the residents get used to each other.)

This suggests something about the function of “diversity”, as well. There are certainly some features of “diversity” that inherently make it hard for people to get along: the experience of Muslim immigrant communities in England right now is a case in point. When certain practices among communities in contact are so incompatible that they make it materially difficult for them even to live together, there are problems. But a great deal of national, ethnic, or religious tension often seems to be of that mindless kind of bickering over issues that have no material impact - which is a sign that it is not really the diversity itself that is the problem, it’s people’s discomfort at living with others unlike them. And that, at bottom, is the problem of “difference”, not “diversity” as we use that term. It’s the same problem, whether it arises between racial groups, religious groups, or new neighbors: an inability to trust or to regard the other as a part of one’s circle because of the simple lack of shared background or experience. The flimsy rationalizations given - they’re “shiftless”, “ill-bred”, “infidels” - only point up the fact that the problem does not lie in any overt points of distinction between the groups, but merely in the fact of lack of mutual connection. Differences in race, ethnicity, cultural practice, and so forth can make those connections harder to establish, but it is the difference, not the diversity, that is the heart of the problem. And if that is true, there are two implications: that lack of community can be overcome in time (as Putnam appears to have shown), and there is no reason to fear diversity any more than there is reason to fear people moving from one location to another in the same country (both are disruptive, but for the same reason, and in each case those disruptions are manageable).

* Why is there such a firm rule that journalism dealing with technical matters or scientific research must always be written by someone completely ignorant of the topic and who knows nothing whatsoever about how science, math, or the research process work? I know that most reporters do not have detailed technical knowledge, but can’t they at least dig back down to their third-grade lessons on “the scientific method” and ask “what variables did you control for?” It’s simple: just say the words “what variables did you control for?” and write down whatever comes out as an answer, then put that in the story. You don’t even have to know what it means. Just say “what variables did you control for?” and print the answer. If that works out, you might consider going on to ask “Were these results statistically significant?”

June 27th, 2007 General, Politics, Economics, Religion, Culture, Science, News & Current Events, Immigration, Race | 7 comments