The Solidarity of Ethnic Homogeneity: Not Liberal, Other Things Work Better
Reihan Salam makes an excellent point:
As Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have argued, it seems that ethnoracial fragmentation cuts against redistribution — taxpayers are reluctant to subsidize members of outgroups, a gut instinct that is easily characterized as racist. But perhaps this impulse is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable. Now, I don’t think this is obviously true, but it’s no less plausible than the other story, namely that the interrelationship between extreme homogeneity and social democracy is an unambiguously good thing.
My take is that the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that leads to popular, high levels of redistribution ought to be unattractive to liberals, who are either cosmopolitan pluralists or not really liberals at all. Add the fact that that there are superior feasible policy alternatives to lavish state-provided social services — deregulated labor markets, actual markets in insurance and health services, higher rates of growth, etc. — and American liberals really ought to stop trying to wish Nordic levels of solidarity and redistribution into existence, and instead just get with the program of promoting actually feasible market-based reforms.
March 18th, 2008 13:27
I’m fairly skeptical about the emperical claims that are made on this subject. (Kymlicka and Norman have some work on this.) For example, both Australia and Canada have become _significantly_ more racially diverse since the mid 1960s or early 70’s when they got rid of explicitly racist immigration policies. My impression, though, is that neither country has significantly cut back welfare-state policies since that time, and in some cases increased them. Now, we might think that they would have increased them _even more_ if they had stayed racially homogenous, but that seems far from obvious to me. So I’m skeptical that this diversity, rather than other features, are what’s doing the majority of the work.
March 18th, 2008 15:04
But Matt, you realize that there are confounding variables here, right? I don’t think you’re asking the right questions. Australia has seen a lot of deregulation, including some very controversial labor market deregulation. Is that because of increased ethnoracial fragmentation? Probably not. As Paul Pierson argues ages ago, welfare state retrenchment is pretty rare for a lot of reasons, among them the relative weight of the public sector workforce and dependent constituencies. Canada is extremely decentralized, and there are many factors at work in the provinces — high levels of urbanization lends itself to more redistribution, for example. And of course the most urbanized provinces tend to be more diverse. That’s why Glaeser and Alesina tried to tease out the relative impacts of density from diversity.
The issue is — how does ethnoracial fragmentation shape the preference for redistribution, and what kind of redistribution is demanded?
March 19th, 2008 19:27
A while back I said “Be grateful diversity reduces trust“.
June 3rd, 2008 15:41
[...] and even fascism, has turned off some liberals from the very idea of redistributionist politics, like Will Wilkinson: “the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that [...]