What Science Says About Diversity (1st half)

What Science Says About Diversity (Part II)

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, December 2007
Part I described how humans, animals, and even plants behave in ways that benefit their close kin. The very structures of the brain appear to be designed to distinguish between genetically related and genetically distant groups, and this is reflected in strong preferences for one’s own race. In multi-racial societies, a clear racial identity appears to confer psychological advantages that mixed-race people do not enjoy.

Part II describes how ethnic preferences affect societies.

What are the implications of strong ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a classic, book-length study, he ranked no fewer than 148 countries according to both ethnic diversity and levels of conflict. Not surprisingly, he found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, with homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland showing very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife (see “The Anatomy of Ethnic Conflict,” AR, June 2002).


Prof. Vanhanen found ethnic conflict in all diverse societies, and believes it reflects human nature: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.”

One of Prof. Vanhanen’s goals has been to discover what kind of economic or political institutions best defuse ethnic tensions, but he has concluded that they have little effect on conflict. Wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones. Oppressive regimes such as the Soviet Union or Tito’s Yugoslavia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq can produce an appearance of harmony, but ethnic identification often grows stronger under attempts to eradicate it. Prof Vanhanen concludes:

“In ethnic conflicts, people seem to follow a similar behavior pattern across all existing developmental, civilizational, and cultural boundaries. The more the population is divided into separate ethnic groups, the more they seem to become organized along ethnic lines in interest conflicts, and the more often they tend to resort to violence in ethnic conflicts.”

And likewise: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and … it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.”

The United Nations has approached the question from a different angle. For the period 1989 to 1992, it found there were no fewer than 82 conflicts that had each resulted in at least 1,000 deaths. Of these, 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations can be vastly bloodier, of course, but they are almost always ethnic conflicts as well. In our time, however, internal ethnic bloodshed is much more common than war between nations. Internal struggles of this kind are now the greatest threat to the survival of most nations. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.”

The United States is not exempt from the negative effects of diversity. Robert Putnam of Harvard did a large-scale study of 41 different American communities that ranged from the extreme homogeneity of rural South Dakota to the very mixed populations of such places as Los Angeles. He found a firm correlation between homogeneity and level of trust, with the greatest distrust in the most racially diverse areas. He was not happy with these results, and checked his findings by controlling for other variables that might affect levels of trust, such as poverty, age, crime rates, population densities, education, commuting time, home ownership, etc. He found that none of these had much effect on trust, and concluded that “diversity per se has a major effect.”

In extensive surveys in these 41 communities, Prof. Putnam found that as racial diversity increases, there is a consistent pattern of lower levels of happiness, withdrawal from community life, and less confidence in local leaders and news media (see “Diversity Destroys Trust,” AR, September 2007).

Prof. Putnam cited other studies that have found people in “diverse” workgroups—not only of race but also age and professional background—are less loyal to the group, more likely to resign, and generally less satisfied than people who work with people like themselves. He also noted a study that found carpooling is less common in racially-mixed neighborhoods. Carpooling means counting on your neighbors, and people are more likely to trust people like themselves. Studies from Australia, Sweden, and Canada also show that ethnic diversity lowers levels of trust, and the same effect is found in non-Western countries.

Dora Costa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn of Tufts University analyzed 15 recent studies of the impact of diversity on social cohesion. They found that every study had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. In more diverse communities, people participate less as measured by how they allocate their time, their money, their voting and their willingness to take risks to help others.”

Similar research has uncovered what has come to be known as “the Florida effect,” or the unwillingness of taxpayers to fund public projects if the beneficiaries are of a different race. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion or gross state product on public education. “There does seem to be a correlation,” says Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau.

James Poterba of MIT has found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people without children rises. He notes, however, that the effect “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups”—which is notably the case in Florida.


There is a widespread conviction that charity begins at home, that is to say, with one’s own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Likewise, it has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are racially and culturally like themselves. As a percentage of national wealth, all social transfers in the United States , including food stamps, pensions, medical care, etc. are about a third less than in Italy, France or Belgium, and even less generous than in Scandinavia. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties.

This is not to say Americans are stingy; they give more to charity than Europeans do. However, they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are often homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.

There is a field of study called “happiness research,” which tries to analyze what makes people happy. Prof. Michael Hagerty of the University of California at Davis surveyed decades of international happiness research and found that “for the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” The happiest people are the Danes. “People there have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives,” he explains. “They don’t have race problems, they don’t have crime problems, and they have political freedom.”

There is a widespread conviction that charity begins at home, that is to say, with one’s own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Likewise, it has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are racially and culturally like themselves. As a percentage of national wealth, all social transfers in the United States , including food stamps, pensions, medical care, etc. are about a third less than in Italy, France or Belgium, and even less generous than in Scandinavia. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties.

This is not to say Americans are stingy; they give more to charity than Europeans do. However, they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are often homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.

There is a field of study called “happiness research,” which tries to analyze what makes people happy. Prof. Michael Hagerty of the University of California at Davis surveyed decades of international happiness research and found that “for the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” The happiest people are the Danes. “People there have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives,” he explains. “They don’t have race problems, they don’t have crime problems, and they have political freedom.”

A sense of kinship is an important source of harmony. In the conclusion of his 148-country survey Tatu Vanhanen wrote, “It is easier to establish harmonious social relations in ethnically homogeneous societies than in ethnically divided ones because people are more helpful towards each other in ethnically homogeneous societies.”

There can, of course, be many different kinds of division in a country: language, religion, race, class, etc. However, of all these, race seems to be the most difficult to bridge. Prof. Vanhanen explains that this is because racial divisions are tens of thousands of years old, and are immediately visible. “The more a population is ethnically divided and the more ethnic groups differ from each other genetically, the higher the probability and intensity of conflicts between ethnic groups,” he explains.

Milica Zarkovic Bookman, who is an expert on ethnic struggle, especially in the Balkans, also underlines the significance of race:

“Assimilation takes place in the spheres of religion and language most easily and is most successful among people who are culturally similar to the dominant group. When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.”


Like many others, J. Philippe Rushton traces this tendency back far into the evolutionary past: “For millennia, racism was not a word,” he says, “it was a way of life.”

The conclusion that race is a serious and possibly permanent social fault line is not a popular one in the social sciences. Many scholars have downplayed its importance, and have insisted that class differences are the real cause of social conflict. Political scientist Walker Connor, who has taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cambridge, criticized his colleagues for ignoring ethnic loyalty, for which he uses the term ethnonationalism. He wrote of “the school of thought called ‘nation-building’ that dominated the literature on political development, particularly in the United States after the Second World War:”

“The near total disregard of ethnonationalism that characterized the school, which numbered so many leading political scientists of the time, still astonishes. Again we encounter that divorce between intellectual theory and the real world.”

He explained further:

“To the degree that ethnic identity is given recognition, it is apt to be as a somewhat unimportant and ephemeral nuisance that will unquestionably give way to a common identity uniting all inhabitants of the state, regardless of ethnic heritage, as modern communication and transportation networks link the state’s various parts more closely.”

He argued, instead, that when ethnic groups come into closer contact it tends to intensify group consciousness: “There is little evidence of modern communications destroying ethnic consciousness, and much evidence of their augmenting it.” Prof. Connor came close to saying that any scholar who ignores ethnic loyalty is dishonest:

“[H]e perceives those trends that he deems desirable as actually occurring, regardless of the factual situation. If the fact of ethnic nationalism is not compatible with his vision, it can thus be willed away. … [T]he treatment calls for total disregard or cavalier dismissal of the undesired facts.”

This harsh judgment may not be entirely unwarranted. Robert Putnam, mentioned above for his research on how racial diversity decreases trust in American neighborhoods, waited five years to publish his data. It may have been an interview with the Financial Times of London that finally forced his hand. The paper quoted him as saying he was studying ways to show how the bad effects of diversity could be overcome, and that it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that.” Prof. Putnam was displeased with his findings, and worked very hard to find something other than racial diversity to explain why people in Lewiston, Maine trusted each other more than people in Los Angeles.

Setting aside the reluctance academics may have for publishing data that conflict with current political fantasies, Prof. Connor wrote that scholars discount racial or ethnic loyalty because of “the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group identity.” Social scientists like to analyze political and economic interests because they are clear and rational, but Prof. Connor argues that “explanations of behavior in terms of pressure groups, elite ambitions, and rational choice theory hint not at all at the passions that motivate Kurdish, Tamil, and Tigre guerrillas or Basque, Corsican, Irish, and Palestinian terrorists.”

Prof. Connor quotes Chateaubriand, writing in the 18th century: “Men don’t allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions.” Prof. Connor adds that group loyalty is evoked “not through appeals to reason but through appeals to the emotions (appeals not to the mind but to the blood).” Academics do not like the unquantifiable, the emotional, the primitive, even if these things drive men harder than the practical and the rational.


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