I like this essay a lot. The best I could think to add is that the lack of enforcement of baseline behaviors goes a long way towards causing intolerance, and I think enforcement would help correct for it. If eg the police would catch and punish people who stole cars such that there was a low incidence, people wouldn’t worry much about what people moved in; when the state won’t do its damned job, then the way to ensure a decent neighborhood starts looking like “keep out people we can’t trust to act like us.” Humans can tolerate an awful lot when they feel safe in their life, liberty and property.
Do you think blacks would tolerate the measures necessary to bring order to the streets?
No.
The black tolerance for crime is set at 1990 levels. The white tolerance for crime is set at 1960 levels. That's a huge gap.
Sure, if we had a dominant ethnic group sure of itself and united (like in East Asia) we could just impose it on difficult minorities whether they like it or not. But that isn't our situation.
I disagree somewhat. Most surveys I have seen show the majority of blacks want more police presence in their neighborhoods, not less like the BLM crowd claims. Surveys are always a bit worrisome, but that makes sense considering the vast majority of crimes, especially violent, are committed locally and within group. I suspect that actually prosecuting real crime (property, physical violence) would be widely appreciated by the actual community, no matter what the “leadership” says.
Blacks want crime to decrease "in abstract", but my nephew Jamal "is a good kid".
I chose my data points empirically. It took until the crack epidemic of the early 90s for blacks to endorse Bill Clintons triangulation against crime. And there are inklings of rejecting "defund the police" which has reversed those gains. But bottom line black tolerate much higher levels of crime than whites will tolerate.
It's somewhat like the fact that Native Americans would tolerate higher levels of raiding then white settlers, or the horsemen of the steep/siberia would tolerate the same compared to the Russians.
Perhaps encouriging more private security and moving away from corrupt americal police would be a good way to increase security and trust in ghettos and poor places in the usa
When we had riots in Baltimore, the rioters all seemed black to me.
83% of blacks show “some support” for blm.
The general attitude in the black community is “against snitching”.
I think this is one of those thing where a group would like a certain outcome “less crime” but when asked to do what is necessary to bring about that outcome they don’t like doing what it will take.
After all, “my nephew Jamal may have made a few bad choices, but he’s basically a good kid!”
Here I thought I was pretty clear that I was referring to crimes against life, liberty and property, not “victimless crimes” when it comes to baseline behaviors. I guess I wasn’t.
I'm a very individualist/libertarian person. Nonetheless, I think we have lost much in the west, in terms of personal wellbeing, by losing our sense of belonging. Many of us have no religion, no racial or ethnic ties, and have come to look down a little at blind nationalism and patriotism. What do we have left? Sadly, most of us aren't uniquely awesome, and the old ways of having a place in the machine had great psychological benefits (so I hear).
And of course there's the elephant that we can't talk about which is that in actual practice in the west, only white, heterosexual males are actually expected to have no in-group. Everyone else can.
An interesting post, as always. Two possible considerations that somewhat undermine the practicability of the thesis, if not the thesis itself. First, tolerance is far more likely to succeed when the identity of the in-group is already at least implicitly committed to tolerance - and even then it's very hard work. Christian teaching is explicitly inclusive (e.g. "there is now neither Jew nor Gentile...") and teaches believers to love our enemies, and it still a long time and tremendous effort (with Vatican II going a long way to help by switching from the language of anathemas to acknowledging Protestants as "separated brethren") to bring the differences between Catholics and Protestants into proper perspective. Likewise, the U.S. embraces in its founding document the thesis that all men are created equal and have God-given rights, which gave gave civil rights theorists a further peg in addition to our Judeo-Christian morality to hang their claims on. But even then, it wasn't easy - it still took the Civil War and another 100 years just to reach full legal equality.
Second, it seems that tolerance and unity with a previous out-group often comes when there's a brand new group to "other". When the options were Catholic vs. Protestant, with only tiny numbers of Jews and members of other religions, it was "natural" for Catholics and Protestants to fight. Once there were perceived threats from secularists and communists, it was natural for them to bracket their own differences and join forces in a common cause against those whose beliefs and political aims posed a far larger threat.
Now, with the threat of wokeism, there are very strange bedfellows who have united in support of common values. But does this mean that, if they defeat wokeism, that they will remain united and tolerant of each other? I have my doubts, but that would perhaps be at least one relevant question to work through in considering Caplan's proposal. To put it another way, Caplan suggests that "when the mutual tolerance between two groups gets high enough, we stop thinking of them as two groups." Caplan is critical of those who offer the saw that "true" communism hasn't been tried, but the same sort of thing may be at work here. Jews were well-integrated in many parts of Western Europe in the last century...until they weren't. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians were still basically on the same team, 1054 notwithstanding, until the 4th Crusade.
A possible response: if human nature is such that it will always look for a scapegoat, we might as well have open borders, increase our GDP, and make the lives of immigrants better. Maybe. But if neither the incumbent in-group nor the immigrants have a shared commitment to a creed of tolerance (whether, say, of the Christian sort, the Declaration of Independence sort, or both) I think the possibility of further Balkanization is severe. A house is not (by itself) a home, and a nation is not just a more-or-less geographically arbitrary collection of human beings.
Add Russia and Ukraine as a very real reminder of how people who seem to largely have very few differences for long periods suddenly split into very different groups.
Well, I think Scott Alexander's commentary on the Outgroup - how people who are far away but very different from you are often much less obnoxious than people who are close to you physically but have seemingly slight differences in belief.
I agree with most of the points here, and think it's very thoughtfully argued. I think the issue of immigration and diversity is very complex, and is connected to a lot more than most people usually are willing to connect it with.
There are some entirely separate non-intolerance-related costs of diversity:
1. Lack of a common language impairs productivity. Ceteris paribus, a country that had 10 different languages each spoken by 10% of its population would probably be 10-50% GDP worse off than a country that spoke a common language.
2. More diversity of preferences among consumers makes it harder to satisfy those preferences with economies of scale. Especially in books, movies, television, and radio, a product that appeals to one culture may not appeal to another culture, so the larger the dominant culture the larger the market for such things, and the stronger competitive pressure to maximize quality.
3. The exponential effect of IQ on productivity, combined with the linear effect of IQ on offspring IQ, implies that genetic mixing of a low IQ population with a high IQ population will reduce aggregate productivity.
Not sure the religious examples are a winning argument here. Someone who’s worried about losing their cultural inheritance because of diversity isn’t likely to be swayed by how religious tolerance grew as religious practice collapsed.
This reminds me a lot of that comic Bryan made a while back about how immigrants in the USA are more liberal/leftist precisely because the right is so anti-immigrant. Right wingers lament that there is so much ethnic and partisan division in society and I'm like: "If you hate ethnic and partisan division so much, maybe you should stop causing it. Stop acting like diversity automatically makes societies divided, when it's actually your response to it that divides people. You aren't passively noticing division, you are the reason it exists."
I don't deny that the right needs to chill a LOT on immigration dislike. I think saying "they cause it" is ridiculous, though. Did right wing distrust cause the Rotherham grooming scandal, or the Germany New Years assaults, or the Hatfield and McCoy feuds, or innumerable other examples of immigrant caused crimes?
Anti-immigration right wing candidates systematically over perform pro-immigration right wing candidates by insanely wide margins. Think Trump vs Romney, DeSantis vs Anyone, etc.
Immigrants are leftists for reasons other then immigration policy or rhetoric.
Immigrants in the US have always leaned Dem. Alexander Hamilton even blamed them for Jefferson winning the presidency! There is no evidence for immigrants having equal political leanings prior to the effect of "intolerance".
When different racial groups are in close proximity, it leads to racial division. Clearly it is not only whites who cause racial division. However, if millions of whites don’t like alien phenotypes, they are not the cause of anything--mass immigration is the cause of their loss of a homeland. That can be seen once the PC framework is jettisoned.
I don't think the premise is true that differing racial groups in close proximity leads to division. Fear of the unknown leads to division and getting to know people different to you lessens that.
People have a natural tendency to reject alien phenotypes. To the extent there are racial/cultural differences, then “getting to know people”, might even reinforce this tendency; hence, white flight from blacks.
That's just fear of the unknown though. I don't think that getting to know people reinforces it.
So long as someone has decent social skills and an open demeanor, they can usually find common ground with almost anyone. Though I guess it's like anything- stepping too far outside your comfort zone can have a sensitising effect and make fear worse.
My point is that after we get to know people from other races, or become familiar with their behavior based on accurate stereotypes, any undesirable group differences might actually reinforce discomfort (with exceptions of course). For example, blacks have a high crime rate, so whites are often correct to be fearful at times.
Bryan, you talk a lot about loving your "bubble". You are in a literal "information bubble".
I was intolerant of the blacks in Baltimore because they are shitty to be around. Objectively! This isn't like a matter of aesthetic taste, they are objectively terrible neighbors that made made my life worse.
The Blacks/Hispanics in Fairfax have six/near six figure household incomes. The blacks/hispanics in neighboring Loudoun County are even richer than that. Your own town is even richer and less diverse than Fairfax, which is one of the richest counties in the country. Do you think that is typical? Do you think you can assign those observations to Baltimore, or to the dark skinned Puerto Ricans that took over my grandparents old neighborhood? You said your kids can't even tell the difference between Latins and Hispanics. Maybe because the "Hispanics" you're dealing with are White Hispanics that would be majority European DNA on Ancestry.com!
This Catholic/Protestant shit was covered by Charles Murray literally in his introduction to The Bell Curve. Come on!
Look, Southern European immigration did cause growing pains. They formed ethnic spoils systems in the cities. They were heavily involved in organized crime. The 1924 immigration act helped a lot of integrating Southern Europe into "white people". It also helps that, you know, those people were actually white. Similar IQs, same continent, Christian. You really think mass African immigration would go over the same.
I don't find it surprising that foreign born % was around where it was in 1924 today and people are talking about immigration. It might as well be a law of social science.
It seems unrealistic that intolerance (or dislike of) racial groups will dissolve like Catholics and Protestants given that alien phenotypes are less superficial than religious differences. In addition, it is PC to simply ignore the costs imposed in the name of “tolerance”. Imagine if Protestants still hated Catholics and the state forced Catholics to accept Protestants living in their neighborhoods with illiberal anti-discrimination laws. This would produce massive externalities for millions of people. Is it really the case that under your preferred social order (anarchy) that Protestants couldn’t keep Catholics out of their neighborhoods if the streets, roads, parks, etc. were privately owned? In similar fashion, mass non-white immigration is really only possible if the PC state forces it on millions. Once the PC framework is jettisoned, externalities matter (as they should for economists who aren’t PC).
I'm deeply skeptical of some of this - perhaps partly because I am a Protestant who is very excited about being a Protestant. I think the things that have helped some of these tensions to go away over the past 100 years aren't actually the lessening of identity, but the increasing of shared identity - whether "citizen of the world" (globalization) or "American" (you're a Catholic American, I'm a Protestant American, the latter half trumps a lot of prior things - but that could partly be because American was being contrasted with Soviet, so...again, I don't think it's really as comparable).
I also think that antisemitism is on the scary rise on both the right and the left right now, so while intolerance can go down radically, it can spring right back up.
I do think tribalism is on the rise as well, and is almost certainly linked to a lot of these things, and I'm not 100% sure what practical steps we can take to lessen it. But we desperately need to lessen it for sure.
There is no lever that policymakers have over intolerance. There IS one they have over diversity. I just read Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands", which ends with the ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe as WW2 ended. Stalin ended ethnic squabbling by removing the ethnicities. And he was a communist who believed in creating the New Soviet Man!
Although the mechanism of how diversity reduces trust isn’t that trust decreases only across groups, but within groups as well.
I’m not sure what that mechanism is, but it’s not necessarily a case for reducing diversity. Rather it’s one for increasing trust.
It’s a bit like the “inequality is correlated with X (social problems)” argument, citing findings from the Spirit Level. The solution isn’t to radically change our economic structure to reduce inequality, but just to address those social problems. We shouldnt go straight into rights violations to deal with unintended consequences when there are reasonable interventions available.
The relativism of duck-rabbit is the basis of (non-choice) diversity. Leftists deny the validity of mans mind, thus politics must not protect the minds worthless judgments. Instead, Leftist politics must protect the factual or non-factual equality of unchosen group characteristics, eg, race, biology, culture, psychology,etc. Unfortunately, Rightists also deny the validity of mans mind. The alternative is Ayn Rands defense of the mind and its needed protection, individual rights.
Can it be that the tolerance grows when between-group differences get smaller and the two groups integrate so they really aren't two groups any more? If I understand correctly, the Jews during WWII in South-Eastern Europe formed very distinctly separate cultural groups and their fate was tragic, while the Jews of e.g. Denmark were well integrated and almost indistinguishable from the locals, so locals were compassionate and helpful instead of hunting them down.
If this is the main way to achieve tolerance, then the most important thing, the thing that actually helps would be - after accepting immigrants - melting all the cultures together as best as we can, perhaps even actively fighting against leaving too large cultural differences un-mixed? (why would I mention actively fighting - it sometimes looks like groups are not all that eager to have their cultures mixed up). Am I making some obvious mistake or is this the best strategy there is, how do you think?
Just in case, I'll add that the best mixing would be both-sided, not that the immigrants have to drop all their culture and accept the new one while locals stay as they are. However, if the local culture has something rare and powerful (e.g. low corruption, liberty, or tolerance itself) then this should be separately protected, i.e. no mixing in these few areas.
I think a huge part of how intolerance comes about is due to various incentives.
There are various incentives for interacting positively or negatively between groups, and these incentives look different in different contexts and countries.
They can be economical, social, ideological, or psychological.
I believe for example that countries with more economic freedom and less welfare fares better over time at fostering tolerance, because to make money you need to bring value to people, and then there is a positive feedback loop. Contrasting this, if one just gets money from being in say, sweden, than its very easy to get mad at immigrants on welfare.
Social ones can be like whether its encouraged to be racist, or emphazizing nationality in certain ways: or whether one gains status and respect by gathering more traditions
Ideological and paychological are the most subjective. I think a lot of people just dont like new things and people, and cultural difference can be very stressful.
I think that by moving towards more economic freedom and bu changing the things we emphazize in our culture, that intolerance over time can dramatically go down. But if one already has a strong prior towards diversity being a cost, than its just easier to imagine less diversity by excluding new groups
One more note: these incentives also affect your viewpoint on whether diversity or intolerance is a cost. If your internal or external incentives change, your view will change. Of course, some incentives (like some people just being suspicious or negative towards new things) can be impossible to change. But i think we underestimate the malleability of incentives .
This is the kind of stuff that gets one’s soul singing. The thing is, the reasoning suggests that intolerance would have been negotiated out of existence a long time ago.
I like this essay a lot. The best I could think to add is that the lack of enforcement of baseline behaviors goes a long way towards causing intolerance, and I think enforcement would help correct for it. If eg the police would catch and punish people who stole cars such that there was a low incidence, people wouldn’t worry much about what people moved in; when the state won’t do its damned job, then the way to ensure a decent neighborhood starts looking like “keep out people we can’t trust to act like us.” Humans can tolerate an awful lot when they feel safe in their life, liberty and property.
Do you think blacks would tolerate the measures necessary to bring order to the streets?
No.
The black tolerance for crime is set at 1990 levels. The white tolerance for crime is set at 1960 levels. That's a huge gap.
Sure, if we had a dominant ethnic group sure of itself and united (like in East Asia) we could just impose it on difficult minorities whether they like it or not. But that isn't our situation.
I disagree somewhat. Most surveys I have seen show the majority of blacks want more police presence in their neighborhoods, not less like the BLM crowd claims. Surveys are always a bit worrisome, but that makes sense considering the vast majority of crimes, especially violent, are committed locally and within group. I suspect that actually prosecuting real crime (property, physical violence) would be widely appreciated by the actual community, no matter what the “leadership” says.
Blacks want crime to decrease "in abstract", but my nephew Jamal "is a good kid".
I chose my data points empirically. It took until the crack epidemic of the early 90s for blacks to endorse Bill Clintons triangulation against crime. And there are inklings of rejecting "defund the police" which has reversed those gains. But bottom line black tolerate much higher levels of crime than whites will tolerate.
It's somewhat like the fact that Native Americans would tolerate higher levels of raiding then white settlers, or the horsemen of the steep/siberia would tolerate the same compared to the Russians.
Perhaps encouriging more private security and moving away from corrupt americal police would be a good way to increase security and trust in ghettos and poor places in the usa
Private security in the ghetto….gangs!
They seem to me like a sort of private security, but bad: i expect companies or actually competitive security to do far better
Who’s going to pay this private security? Broke hood rats?
Who is this private security going to serve? Everyone? Those that pay it the most?
If the private security does something the government doesn’t like do they send cops to arrest that security? How is that different then today?
I dunno I think gangs are basically the private market equilibrium for the ghetto.
When we had riots in Baltimore, the rioters all seemed black to me.
83% of blacks show “some support” for blm.
The general attitude in the black community is “against snitching”.
I think this is one of those thing where a group would like a certain outcome “less crime” but when asked to do what is necessary to bring about that outcome they don’t like doing what it will take.
After all, “my nephew Jamal may have made a few bad choices, but he’s basically a good kid!”
Here I thought I was pretty clear that I was referring to crimes against life, liberty and property, not “victimless crimes” when it comes to baseline behaviors. I guess I wasn’t.
I'm a very individualist/libertarian person. Nonetheless, I think we have lost much in the west, in terms of personal wellbeing, by losing our sense of belonging. Many of us have no religion, no racial or ethnic ties, and have come to look down a little at blind nationalism and patriotism. What do we have left? Sadly, most of us aren't uniquely awesome, and the old ways of having a place in the machine had great psychological benefits (so I hear).
And of course there's the elephant that we can't talk about which is that in actual practice in the west, only white, heterosexual males are actually expected to have no in-group. Everyone else can.
Same here: i feel far greater affinity to various subcultures or intellectual traditions than just being swedish.
If i have the choice between an average non swedish effective altruist person, and a local swedish person, i rather talk to the former
An interesting post, as always. Two possible considerations that somewhat undermine the practicability of the thesis, if not the thesis itself. First, tolerance is far more likely to succeed when the identity of the in-group is already at least implicitly committed to tolerance - and even then it's very hard work. Christian teaching is explicitly inclusive (e.g. "there is now neither Jew nor Gentile...") and teaches believers to love our enemies, and it still a long time and tremendous effort (with Vatican II going a long way to help by switching from the language of anathemas to acknowledging Protestants as "separated brethren") to bring the differences between Catholics and Protestants into proper perspective. Likewise, the U.S. embraces in its founding document the thesis that all men are created equal and have God-given rights, which gave gave civil rights theorists a further peg in addition to our Judeo-Christian morality to hang their claims on. But even then, it wasn't easy - it still took the Civil War and another 100 years just to reach full legal equality.
Second, it seems that tolerance and unity with a previous out-group often comes when there's a brand new group to "other". When the options were Catholic vs. Protestant, with only tiny numbers of Jews and members of other religions, it was "natural" for Catholics and Protestants to fight. Once there were perceived threats from secularists and communists, it was natural for them to bracket their own differences and join forces in a common cause against those whose beliefs and political aims posed a far larger threat.
Now, with the threat of wokeism, there are very strange bedfellows who have united in support of common values. But does this mean that, if they defeat wokeism, that they will remain united and tolerant of each other? I have my doubts, but that would perhaps be at least one relevant question to work through in considering Caplan's proposal. To put it another way, Caplan suggests that "when the mutual tolerance between two groups gets high enough, we stop thinking of them as two groups." Caplan is critical of those who offer the saw that "true" communism hasn't been tried, but the same sort of thing may be at work here. Jews were well-integrated in many parts of Western Europe in the last century...until they weren't. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians were still basically on the same team, 1054 notwithstanding, until the 4th Crusade.
A possible response: if human nature is such that it will always look for a scapegoat, we might as well have open borders, increase our GDP, and make the lives of immigrants better. Maybe. But if neither the incumbent in-group nor the immigrants have a shared commitment to a creed of tolerance (whether, say, of the Christian sort, the Declaration of Independence sort, or both) I think the possibility of further Balkanization is severe. A house is not (by itself) a home, and a nation is not just a more-or-less geographically arbitrary collection of human beings.
Add Russia and Ukraine as a very real reminder of how people who seem to largely have very few differences for long periods suddenly split into very different groups.
Well, I think Scott Alexander's commentary on the Outgroup - how people who are far away but very different from you are often much less obnoxious than people who are close to you physically but have seemingly slight differences in belief.
I agree with most of the points here, and think it's very thoughtfully argued. I think the issue of immigration and diversity is very complex, and is connected to a lot more than most people usually are willing to connect it with.
There are some entirely separate non-intolerance-related costs of diversity:
1. Lack of a common language impairs productivity. Ceteris paribus, a country that had 10 different languages each spoken by 10% of its population would probably be 10-50% GDP worse off than a country that spoke a common language.
2. More diversity of preferences among consumers makes it harder to satisfy those preferences with economies of scale. Especially in books, movies, television, and radio, a product that appeals to one culture may not appeal to another culture, so the larger the dominant culture the larger the market for such things, and the stronger competitive pressure to maximize quality.
3. The exponential effect of IQ on productivity, combined with the linear effect of IQ on offspring IQ, implies that genetic mixing of a low IQ population with a high IQ population will reduce aggregate productivity.
Not sure the religious examples are a winning argument here. Someone who’s worried about losing their cultural inheritance because of diversity isn’t likely to be swayed by how religious tolerance grew as religious practice collapsed.
This reminds me a lot of that comic Bryan made a while back about how immigrants in the USA are more liberal/leftist precisely because the right is so anti-immigrant. Right wingers lament that there is so much ethnic and partisan division in society and I'm like: "If you hate ethnic and partisan division so much, maybe you should stop causing it. Stop acting like diversity automatically makes societies divided, when it's actually your response to it that divides people. You aren't passively noticing division, you are the reason it exists."
I don't deny that the right needs to chill a LOT on immigration dislike. I think saying "they cause it" is ridiculous, though. Did right wing distrust cause the Rotherham grooming scandal, or the Germany New Years assaults, or the Hatfield and McCoy feuds, or innumerable other examples of immigrant caused crimes?
This isn't empirically justified.
Anti-immigration right wing candidates systematically over perform pro-immigration right wing candidates by insanely wide margins. Think Trump vs Romney, DeSantis vs Anyone, etc.
Immigrants are leftists for reasons other then immigration policy or rhetoric.
Immigrants in the US have always leaned Dem. Alexander Hamilton even blamed them for Jefferson winning the presidency! There is no evidence for immigrants having equal political leanings prior to the effect of "intolerance".
That's extremely confusing, given that there was no Republican party before Lincoln...don't know what you're trying to prove there.
It was the Federalist party instead. Per DW-NOMINATE, the Federalists were succeeded by the National Republicans, then Whigs, then Republicans.
When different racial groups are in close proximity, it leads to racial division. Clearly it is not only whites who cause racial division. However, if millions of whites don’t like alien phenotypes, they are not the cause of anything--mass immigration is the cause of their loss of a homeland. That can be seen once the PC framework is jettisoned.
I don't think the premise is true that differing racial groups in close proximity leads to division. Fear of the unknown leads to division and getting to know people different to you lessens that.
People have a natural tendency to reject alien phenotypes. To the extent there are racial/cultural differences, then “getting to know people”, might even reinforce this tendency; hence, white flight from blacks.
That's just fear of the unknown though. I don't think that getting to know people reinforces it.
So long as someone has decent social skills and an open demeanor, they can usually find common ground with almost anyone. Though I guess it's like anything- stepping too far outside your comfort zone can have a sensitising effect and make fear worse.
My point is that after we get to know people from other races, or become familiar with their behavior based on accurate stereotypes, any undesirable group differences might actually reinforce discomfort (with exceptions of course). For example, blacks have a high crime rate, so whites are often correct to be fearful at times.
Bryan, you talk a lot about loving your "bubble". You are in a literal "information bubble".
I was intolerant of the blacks in Baltimore because they are shitty to be around. Objectively! This isn't like a matter of aesthetic taste, they are objectively terrible neighbors that made made my life worse.
The Blacks/Hispanics in Fairfax have six/near six figure household incomes. The blacks/hispanics in neighboring Loudoun County are even richer than that. Your own town is even richer and less diverse than Fairfax, which is one of the richest counties in the country. Do you think that is typical? Do you think you can assign those observations to Baltimore, or to the dark skinned Puerto Ricans that took over my grandparents old neighborhood? You said your kids can't even tell the difference between Latins and Hispanics. Maybe because the "Hispanics" you're dealing with are White Hispanics that would be majority European DNA on Ancestry.com!
This Catholic/Protestant shit was covered by Charles Murray literally in his introduction to The Bell Curve. Come on!
Look, Southern European immigration did cause growing pains. They formed ethnic spoils systems in the cities. They were heavily involved in organized crime. The 1924 immigration act helped a lot of integrating Southern Europe into "white people". It also helps that, you know, those people were actually white. Similar IQs, same continent, Christian. You really think mass African immigration would go over the same.
I don't find it surprising that foreign born % was around where it was in 1924 today and people are talking about immigration. It might as well be a law of social science.
It seems unrealistic that intolerance (or dislike of) racial groups will dissolve like Catholics and Protestants given that alien phenotypes are less superficial than religious differences. In addition, it is PC to simply ignore the costs imposed in the name of “tolerance”. Imagine if Protestants still hated Catholics and the state forced Catholics to accept Protestants living in their neighborhoods with illiberal anti-discrimination laws. This would produce massive externalities for millions of people. Is it really the case that under your preferred social order (anarchy) that Protestants couldn’t keep Catholics out of their neighborhoods if the streets, roads, parks, etc. were privately owned? In similar fashion, mass non-white immigration is really only possible if the PC state forces it on millions. Once the PC framework is jettisoned, externalities matter (as they should for economists who aren’t PC).
I'm deeply skeptical of some of this - perhaps partly because I am a Protestant who is very excited about being a Protestant. I think the things that have helped some of these tensions to go away over the past 100 years aren't actually the lessening of identity, but the increasing of shared identity - whether "citizen of the world" (globalization) or "American" (you're a Catholic American, I'm a Protestant American, the latter half trumps a lot of prior things - but that could partly be because American was being contrasted with Soviet, so...again, I don't think it's really as comparable).
I also think that antisemitism is on the scary rise on both the right and the left right now, so while intolerance can go down radically, it can spring right back up.
I do think tribalism is on the rise as well, and is almost certainly linked to a lot of these things, and I'm not 100% sure what practical steps we can take to lessen it. But we desperately need to lessen it for sure.
There is no lever that policymakers have over intolerance. There IS one they have over diversity. I just read Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands", which ends with the ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe as WW2 ended. Stalin ended ethnic squabbling by removing the ethnicities. And he was a communist who believed in creating the New Soviet Man!
Although the mechanism of how diversity reduces trust isn’t that trust decreases only across groups, but within groups as well.
I’m not sure what that mechanism is, but it’s not necessarily a case for reducing diversity. Rather it’s one for increasing trust.
It’s a bit like the “inequality is correlated with X (social problems)” argument, citing findings from the Spirit Level. The solution isn’t to radically change our economic structure to reduce inequality, but just to address those social problems. We shouldnt go straight into rights violations to deal with unintended consequences when there are reasonable interventions available.
And those reasonable interventions would be? Why haven’t they been implemented yet if they are so reasonable? What is your plan for implementing them?
The relativism of duck-rabbit is the basis of (non-choice) diversity. Leftists deny the validity of mans mind, thus politics must not protect the minds worthless judgments. Instead, Leftist politics must protect the factual or non-factual equality of unchosen group characteristics, eg, race, biology, culture, psychology,etc. Unfortunately, Rightists also deny the validity of mans mind. The alternative is Ayn Rands defense of the mind and its needed protection, individual rights.
Return Of The Primitive-Ayn Rand
Can it be that the tolerance grows when between-group differences get smaller and the two groups integrate so they really aren't two groups any more? If I understand correctly, the Jews during WWII in South-Eastern Europe formed very distinctly separate cultural groups and their fate was tragic, while the Jews of e.g. Denmark were well integrated and almost indistinguishable from the locals, so locals were compassionate and helpful instead of hunting them down.
If this is the main way to achieve tolerance, then the most important thing, the thing that actually helps would be - after accepting immigrants - melting all the cultures together as best as we can, perhaps even actively fighting against leaving too large cultural differences un-mixed? (why would I mention actively fighting - it sometimes looks like groups are not all that eager to have their cultures mixed up). Am I making some obvious mistake or is this the best strategy there is, how do you think?
Just in case, I'll add that the best mixing would be both-sided, not that the immigrants have to drop all their culture and accept the new one while locals stay as they are. However, if the local culture has something rare and powerful (e.g. low corruption, liberty, or tolerance itself) then this should be separately protected, i.e. no mixing in these few areas.
I think a huge part of how intolerance comes about is due to various incentives.
There are various incentives for interacting positively or negatively between groups, and these incentives look different in different contexts and countries.
They can be economical, social, ideological, or psychological.
I believe for example that countries with more economic freedom and less welfare fares better over time at fostering tolerance, because to make money you need to bring value to people, and then there is a positive feedback loop. Contrasting this, if one just gets money from being in say, sweden, than its very easy to get mad at immigrants on welfare.
Social ones can be like whether its encouraged to be racist, or emphazizing nationality in certain ways: or whether one gains status and respect by gathering more traditions
Ideological and paychological are the most subjective. I think a lot of people just dont like new things and people, and cultural difference can be very stressful.
I think that by moving towards more economic freedom and bu changing the things we emphazize in our culture, that intolerance over time can dramatically go down. But if one already has a strong prior towards diversity being a cost, than its just easier to imagine less diversity by excluding new groups
One more note: these incentives also affect your viewpoint on whether diversity or intolerance is a cost. If your internal or external incentives change, your view will change. Of course, some incentives (like some people just being suspicious or negative towards new things) can be impossible to change. But i think we underestimate the malleability of incentives .
This is the kind of stuff that gets one’s soul singing. The thing is, the reasoning suggests that intolerance would have been negotiated out of existence a long time ago.
Havnt intolerance dramaticlly gone down in almost all respects during the past 200 years?
Anti LGBTQ, a lot of racism, and plenty more are at maybe 10% of their past levels
Read Girard.