On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:54:03PM +0530, Venky wrote: > known as the author of Bowling Alone. According to Putnam a > variety of research from the United States, Canada, Australia and > Europe shows that ethnic diversity is associated with lower > social trust, lower "investment in public goods," less
perfect example of correlation misinterpreted (or overinterpreted) as causality. it is unclear whether the researcher meant that, but he couldn't have imagined that the press wouldn't do it, as shown by the smooth and unexplained switch from "ethnic diversity is associated with" in the above paragraph to "consequences of ...diversity" further down the text. > In part this is due to the fact that homogeneous teams tend to > outperform diverse groups because diverse groups often suffer > from communication and process problems. yes, but there is nothing to show that homogeneous teams are necessarily of the same ethnicity. a team of people in their 20s, 40s and 60s of the same ethnicity is probably less homogeneous than a team of 40-yr-old batchmates from the same class at MIT, of different ethnicities. ethnic diversity in parts of the west, where this is most studied, is a recent phenomenon and the reason swedes are a better functioning society is probably more due to the fact that swedes have been living together in the same spot for 100s of years (and therefore know what to expect, how to trust etc), not because they're all white. in a couple of hundred years, when everyone is (multi-ethnically) brown, the correlation may not work. -rishab
