Synthstuff - music, photography and more...

Diversity is good - liberal-think gone horribly wrong

All the liberals I know about have this knee-jerk belief system that it is a Good Thing to foster diversity in our communities. A bit of a shame then that they don't stick around to observe the outcome... From the Boston Globe:

The downside of diversity
A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Perfect example of what happens when ivory-tower intellectual ideas meet the real world. Trying to encourage something that is a detriment to healthy communities. Posted by DaveH at August 7, 2007 9:15 PM | TrackBack