Liberal academic surprised and saddened by truth about diversity

Dr Robert D. Putnam could well be called the archetypal liberal academic. He is a social scientist, and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. Until recently his best-known work was Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

The good doctor is, by his own admission, pro-diversity, one of the "useful idiots" who believe that immigration is good for us because, in the words of Canuck Prime Minister Junior Trudeau, "diversity makes us strong". (Ann Coulter is one of many who disagrees. See "Diversity does NOT make us strong, sez Ann Coulter", WWW 28/11/17.) For years after writing Bowling Alone, Dr Putnam studying the effect of ethnic diversity on a community's well-being, striving to prove that he was right and that "nativists" like Ann Coulter (and Walt!) are wrong.

In 2006, Dr Putnam won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, given by the eponymous foundation at Sweden's Uppsala University. His lecture at the award ceremony was entitled E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. In his lecture Lecturethe good doctor had to admit that he was wrong, after all, and that diversity makes us weak, not strong. Contrary to his expectation -- and desire! -- his study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbours, their local leaders, and even the news.

People in diverse communities gave less to charity voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy, and were more likely to describe television as "my most important form of entertainment". Dr Putnam did not find that people in diverse communities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn't trust anyone! The difference in neighbourliness between an ethnically homogeneous town, such as Bismarck ND, and a diverse one, such as Los Angeles, he said, is "roughly the same as" the difference in a town with a 7% poverty rate compared with a 23% poverty rate.

Most of the data on which Dr Putnam relied were collected around the same time he was doing the research for Bowling Alone. But he didn't publish his study right away, because he didn't like the results. As a "liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp," said the New York Times, he had hoped to find some other explanation. He reran the numbers, accounting for differences in crime rates, age, income, marital status, home ownership, education language, mobility, and every other factor he could think of. But no matter how may variables he took into account, he kept getting the same result. Diversity damages social cohesion.

Further reading: E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture by Dr Robert D. Putnam, in its entirety (38 pages), published by the Nordic Political Science Association, 2007.

Credit where credit is due: Although I knew of Dr Putnam and Bowling Alone, which I've read and recommend, I wouldn't have known of his later work had I not read about it in Ann Coulter's Adios America!, from which this post was adapted.