Today a friend mailed me a clipping from last Saturday’s New York Times. It was an Op-Ed by Charles M. Blow, in which Mr. Blow presented a chart summarizing a report ranking the world’s nations on their level of “social justice”. (I’ve reproduced it below the fold.)
The columns in the chart include an “overall social justice rating”, which rolls together such measures of “social justice” as, apparently, “environmental policies”. Mostly, though, they measure “poverty”.
Taken at face value, the chart would suggest — as Mr. Blow intends his readers to conclude — that the U.S.A. is clearly on a lower moral plane than the nations near the top of the list.
However:
Note the nations at the top of the pile: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg…
What do they all have in common? They’re all northern European nations with low ethnic diversity and correspondingly high social cohesion.
Low poverty in Scandinavia? Someone once pointed that out to Milton Friedman, and he replied: “That’s interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either.”
Just saying.
23 Comments
Are these countries still low in ethnic diversity?
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Note the nations at the bottom of the pile: Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey.
What do they all have in common? They’re all nations with low ethnic diversity and correspondingly high social cohesion. Darn near everyone who lives there are Greeks, Chileans, Mexicans, and Turks.
There is probably no country on Earth which has a higher degree of low ethnic diversity and social cohesion than Japan and South Korea, and they are near the bottom.
What do the nations at the top have in common that is missing from the other nations? They have the most progressive governments in the world. You could not pick a more left wing group of countries. Some of them are even – gasp! – Socialist.
Ethnic diversity and social cohesion are completely exogenous factors. The countries which lead the rest in terms of social justice are those countries which have made it a priority, and which have organized their society and government around that principle.
Socialism by its very nature will obviously work best where there is high social cohesion. (After all, it isn’t called “social”-ism for nothing.) And as diversity increases in those Northern European nations, social cohesion is beginning to unravel, eroding the underpinnings of the comfortable Scandinavian socialism that has prevailed there since the war.
But there’s another factor to consider, which you actually pointed out. As did Milton Friedman.
Jeffery,
Yes, they are, for now. But that’s changing fast, with the result that nativist political parties, seeking to preserve the homogeneity that has made their system work, are on the rise.
Regarding Scandinavian “social cohesion”, it still seems to me that the most important “homogenizing” influence is not ethnicity per se but, as Peter suggests, a deep commitment to social justice. I say this as one who grew up in Minnesota, where “Scandinavian style” social mores were generally accepted as the best foundation for a healthy society.
Growing up, I was well aware that the social millieu in which I found myself was not based on an authoritarian German model, despite the fact that Germans outnumbered Scandinavians. And I was thankful for that. Indeed, a common story in German American families in Minnesota (including my own), was that their immediate ancestors emigrated to “escape” a rigidly structured authoritarian society, and weren’t about to create another one in their new home.
This is not to say that Minnesotans were, or are, immune to racial, religious, etc. tensions. But these problems have been mitigated, at least to some extent, by the sense that we are all better off if we look out for each others’ social well-being. Sadly, I think this sort of “social cohesion” has declined in the past several decades, but not because of the recent influx of immigrants, who seem to be following roughly the same trajectory as my own ancestors so far as “assimilation” is concerned. Rather, the decline seems to reflect a general coarsening of American sensibilities.
At least, that’s how it looks to me.
Bob,
Well, there’s an old joke that what passes for “diversity” in the Northern Midwest consists of inviting a few Norwegians to the Svenskarnas Dag festival. Things become more “challenging”, though, as three factors increase: the absolute rate of immigration, the variety of sources, and the degree of difference between the immigrant cultures and the host’s.
You and Peter are right that low diversity alone is not sufficient for prosperity. I’ll even agree that mild forms of socialism in relatively prosperous and homogeneous societies can provide a better life for the least productive members of society than less-redistributive systems do. But high diversity makes poor soil for socialism — just as it makes poor soil for anything that requires robust community cohesion.
It is unreasonable to expect the United States to be like Iceland. It is also reasonable to expect to see tensions increasing, and cracks appearing in the socialist compact, in those traditionally homogeneous societies where diversity is now rapidly increasing — just as we do in fact see in Northern Europe today.
I agree with you also that social cohesion in the US has declined in the past several decades, though I certainly don’t share your belief that it has nothing to do with the tidal wave of immigration that began in 1965.
I agree with you also about the “general coarsening of American sensibilities” (which is of course what the traditionalist conservative movement defines itself in opposition to). The causes of that are many, but the general social withdrawal and shrinking commonality in the public square that rising diversity causes are surely among them, I think.
Well, the differences between traditional Vietnamese, Hmong and Somali culutures (the most prominent of immigrant groups into Minnesota) and the Scandihoovian culture I grew up with are pretty profound. Still, the process of assimilation follows its typical trajectory. Of course, the vast majority of these immigrants came here because they desparately wanted to live in a free society that would afford them the opportunity to build a “good life” for their children. These are the kind of people I want as neighbors, and if I can help them over some rough spots, well, it seems like old-fashioned enlightened self-interest to do so.
Note the nations at the bottom of the pile: Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey.
What do they all have in common? They’re all nations with low ethnic diversity and correspondingly high social cohesion. Darn near everyone who lives there are Greeks, Chileans, Mexicans, and Turks.
Dear God, that’s stupid. You might as well say that “darn near everybody who lives in America is American”. Turkey has significant ethnic minorities, including Kurds, Levantines, Greeks, and Armenians. The other countries you mentioned are also not ethnically homogeneous.
Bob,
I am not under the impression that Somali/Hmong assimilation is proceeding along exactly the same “trajectory” as that of, say, Northern European immigrants to the region.
As it happens, the friend who forwarded me the newspaper clipping that was the subject of this post is a former Minneapolis chief of police (though his term had expired by the time the wave of Somali immigration to the region began in the early 1990s). I should ask him his opinion about that.
Severn,
Quite right you are. Wikipedia lists, for example, the following ethnicities in Turkey:
Turkmen, Azeris, Tatars, Karachays, Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, Uyghurs, Kurds, Zaza-Dimli Kurds, Bosniaks, Albanians, Pomaks, Armenians, Hamshenis, Greeks, Arabs, Assyrians/Syriacs, Jews, Circassians, Georgians, Laz and Chechens.
Whenever you start thinking that Peter may have a point, that’s when you have to fact-check all his assertions. So many assertions; so little time …
Malcolm –
I assume you speak of Tony Bouza… I’d be very interested in hearing his opinion on this issue. He’s a thoughtful guy.
Wikipedia also notes that ethnic Turks account for 71-76% of the total population, making it far less diverse than America.
Turkey is not as good an example as South Korea (which Wikipedia reports to be “one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world, with more than 99% of inhabitants having Korean ethnicity”) or Japan (which is “composed of 98.5% ethnic Japanese”), both of which – as noted above – are in the bottom ten. If China was included on the chart, it would probably rank dead last, although it is also ethnically monochromatic, with over 90% of its population is Han Chinese.
Obviously, if there were a correlation between social justice and lack of ethnic diversity, then China, South Korea, and Japan would be at the top of the list. However, there is no correlation; it’s like saying that Scandinavian countries will score higher on the social-justice-o-meter because their inhabitants are more likely to be blond.
Also, regarding Milton Friedman’s point about Scandinavians: Arab Americans have a median income which is well above the national average, and Indians have the highest income of any ethnic group.
Presumably there is a direct correlation between median income and the poverty level. So Friedman could just have accurately said “among Muslims and Hindus, we have no poverty either.”
Peter, you’re just swinging wildly here, and willfully missing the point.
Taking your last comment first: in India, and in Arab nations, there is plenty of grinding poverty. So if you’ve demonstrated anything there, it’s that the American system lifts those Indians and Arabs who come here out of poverty, presumably increasing their measure of “social justice”. (Also, are you talking about Hindus and Muslims, or Indians and Arabs? They are not the same thing; a great many Arabs in the U.S., for example, are Arab Christians who fled Muslim persecution.)
As for China, which you suggest would be “dead last”: right, plenty of poverty there too. China’s a socialist country, though. So the key to Utopia clearly isn’t socialism itself.
Nor is homogeneity itself sufficient to lift people out of poverty, and I’ve never said it was. There are plenty of relatively homogeneous nations that are among the poorest places on Earth.
Intelligent, industrious people who form tight-knit social networks will do well wherever they go, so long as they are not limited by lack of resources or held down by actual oppression, which can take many forms: authoritarian socialist and Communist rule, the caste system in India, apartheid in South Africa, religious persecution, the traditional oppression of unbelievers under the Muslim caliphate, institutionalized racism in the West, etc. It is a tribute to the social and economic mobility of America that people from poor, sweltering places like India and the Mideast can come here and move on up, if they have the brains and the drive to do it. America is still a place where you can succeed spectacularly well if you work hard, but run the risk of having a tough life if you don’t — and that attracts a certain type of people. But in the socialist welfare states of Europe, immigrants from those same parts of the world don’t do nearly as well, and their “social justice” end up consisting of their being net consumers of public funds. This is causing the social fabric to unravel all across Europe: as diversity increases, and as those new arrivals increasingly weigh on the public fisc, people get resentful, and begin to understand that they were happier before Diversity conferred on them its alleged blessings.
My point is this: a happy, smoothly functioning socialist system requires several things: an intelligent, industrious population that is capable of generating wealth in the first place (so there is something there to redistribute), enough people functioning as net producers to offset the drain on the system caused by the net consumers, and high enough levels of homogeneity and social cohesion that the net producers are willing to carry those net consumers on their backs. It’s one thing when the people you are carrying are Grandma and Grandpa, or your crippled cousin Dagmar; it’s quite another when it’s someone just off the boat who shares none of your folkways, beliefs, manners, traditions, history, language, etc. — and the problem is compounded when they begin to insist that your own traditional culture and forms of expression must be altered and muzzled to accommodate their own sensitivities and preferences. It’s no surprise that the decades-long surge of mass alien immigration into these traditionally homogeneous European states is causing enormous tension, with nativist sentiment sharply on the rise. Expect things to get steadily worse.
Japan and South Korea are places where some mild form of socialism could probably work: the native populations are of high average IQ, they are hard workers, and as you say, they are highly homogeneous places. Apparently that just isn’t the way they feel like running their countries!
Yes, Bob – Tony Bouza. A very thoughtful fellow indeed.
It is so excruciatingly obvious that socialism is a flawed ideology that it boggles the mind how any serious Westerner can insist on clinging to its tenets.
Oh, I don’t know, Henry — the mild Scandinavian form of socialism seems to have given fairly happy results until recently. But it’s fragile, and depends on the factors I mentioned above.
Obviously the more extreme forms are awful all round.
Malcolm,
Even a pencil can be balanced on its point, briefly. But unstable equilibrium is merely a curiosity. It (i.e., unstable equilibrium) can never serve as a foundation for a successful dynamic socioeconomic organizing principle. Instability (or “fragility”) is itself the major flaw of the Scandinavian form of socialism.
Agreed. Societies of any sort are not simple machines, but complex, living organisms, easily sickened. Tamper with them at your own risk.
Whoa there, pardner. I think it is awesome that people come here from India and Arab countries and do well (although I’m not so sure about the grinding poverty bit. The immigrants I’ve met, at least here in the Valley, were from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Come for the education, stay for the In-N-Out Burger.) It is truly an exceptional thing, as you note.
My point re Friedman is simply.that I thought it peculiar that he chose Scandinavians to extol for their lack of poverty, when other ethnic groups fit the bill just as well.
I’m also strongly in favor of capitalism, although not the laissez-faire variety. If you’re Steve Jobs or Lady Gaga, and can make a gazillion dollars because of your talent and hard work: that’s great. I think the cap on your earnings which is implied by socialism is absolutely the wrong thing.
It is not peculiar at all that Friedman made his observation about Scandinavia, prompted as he was by what was pointed out to him about low poverty in Scandinavia.