January 24, 2014

Diversity and "ambient cultural disharmony"

From The Economist:
The downside of diversity
Jan 21st 2014, 16:00 by our Schumpeter columnist

THE closest thing the business world has to a universally acknowledged truth is that diversity is a good thing: the more companies hire people from different backgrounds the more competitive they will become. Diversity helps companies to overcome talent shortages by enlarging their talent pools. It helps them to cope with globalisation by expanding their cultural horizon. It stimulates innovation by bringing together different sorts of people. And so on. 

Diversity has multiple meanings which get conflated.

- The first type of "diversity" is in settings where sheer talent matters most and the talent comes from all over the world. For example, the richest baseball team, the New York Yankees, has players from all over the world. For example, they just signed the best Japanese pitcher to a $22 million per year contract. Hiring people who don't speak a common language doesn't do much for clubhouse morale, but that's probably overrated versus sheer individual skill in winning baseball games. The glamor of the diversity of the Yankees then sheds itself onto other, quite different uses of the term.

- The second use of the terms "diversity" means to hire the less talented and less productive. For example, the Yankees very rarely hire Asian Indians or even Mexicans. And they sure don't let any women on their team. But nobody notices and nobody cares. But if you mentioned the fact that women and, surprisingly, Mexicans aren't really good enough to play much for the Yankees, people would get mad at you.

- The third use is to refer to certain favored groups and to not refer to certain unfavored groups. For example, hiring a white NFL cornerback would, technically, increase diversity at that position, but nobody cares. Whites simply don't count as diversity, even when they should.

- The fourth use is to assume that diversity means that 1+1+1=4. If, say, the Yankees have some players who speak English, some who speak Spanish, and some who speak Japanese, they will play better as a team than if, all else being equal, they all spoke one language. Why? Due to the synergistical magic of diversity. This is the theme of many of the corporate image ads you see during the Olympics and golf tournaments.
But what about the downside of diversity? It does not pay to ask this question. Many countries have equal-opportunity laws on their books. American universities (and many others as well) are institutionally committed to the idea that diversity promotes learning and creativity. Most important perhaps, nobody wants to come across as unsympathetic to minorities or unappreciative of cultural variety. 
Yet a glance beyond the corporate-diversity statements suggests a more complicated picture. It is notable how many of the world’s best companies, such as McKinsey and Apple, have cult-like cultures—probably because they are also very diverse: they need a strong culture. It is also notable how many of the world’s best companies are rooted in small towns: think of Lego (Billund) or Walmart (Bentonville).

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it struck me in 1991-92 that Walmart was a vehicle for previously underachieving Scots-Irish hillbilly types to come out of nowhere and take over, like one of Ibn Khaldun's high asibya tribes coming out of the Sahara to conquer the diverse rich cities of the coast.
Distinctive religious groups such as the Mormons in America and the Parsis in India have also made an outsized contribution to corporate life. 
It is far too easy to present “diversity” in one-sided terms: as a triumph of enlightenment over bigotry and creativity over closed-mindedness. But the subject is too important to be left to the cliché-mongers. Diversity can bring risks as well as benefits and perils as well as perks. There are trade-offs to be made, for example between the trust that comes from sharing a common background and the cultural sensitivity that comes from employing people from different parts of the word. 
Roy Y.J .Chua, of Harvard Business School, is one of the few academics to produce serious studies of this subject. Mr Chua agrees that in a world of multinational corporations and global product markets success depends more than ever on your ability to foster multicultural thinking and cross-border collaboration. But in a paper in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal (“The Costs of Ambient Cultural Disharmony: Indirect Intercultural Conflict in Social Environment Undermine Creativity") he goes on to note that getting people from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds to co-operate is fraught with difficulties. At best differences in world-view and cultural styles can produce “intercultural anxiety”, at worst outright conflict. The very thing that can produce added creativity—the collision of different cultures—can also produce friction. The question is whether the creativity is worth the conflict. 
Mr Chua argues that creativity in multicultural settings is highly vulnerable to what he calls “ambient cultural disharmony”. Tension between people over matters of culture, he says, can pollute the wider environment and reduce “multicultural creativity”, meaning people’s ability to see non-obvious connections between ideas from different cultures. “Ambient cultural disharmony” persuades people to give up on making such connections because they conclude that it is not worth the trouble. 
Mr Chua also says that “ambient cultural disharmony” has its strongest impact on people who regard themselves as open-minded. Closed-minded people expect cultural tensions. Open-minded people don’t expect them and so react to them more strongly. ...
In all three studies, subjects who had a greater experience of ambient cultural disharmony fell short on one or another of Mr Chua’s measures of creativity. Mr Chua says that he is not certain how much of a problem this is because his is the first study to identify it. But his results are important partly because many companies have such an optimistic view of cross-cultural pollination and partly because the second-order effects of cultural conflict (particularly among people who regard themselves as open-minded) are so hard to manage.

When I was in the marketing research business, the firm I worked at bought a Waltham, MA firm founded by MIT professors. A young Lebanese executive from the firm soon moved to headquarters in Chicago and rocketed up the ranks because he was unbelievably smart. (Papers were piled six inches deep all over his desk in a seemingly random fashion, but he would instantly retrieve any paper needed because he simply remembered in 3-d fashion where each one was.) The only problem with this Lebanese executive was that he was extremely brusque. Fortunately, I recalled that I had known five Lebanese people previously, and they were all brusque. By Levantine standards of politeness, this new fellow was David Niven reincarnated. So, I got along fine with him because I judged him on the Levantine curve. 

But if you are "open-minded" (which these days means "empty-headed") and rejected on principle my kind of ethnic stereotyping, you'd be as personally annoyed by his behavior as many of our less ethnorealist colleagues were. 

64 comments:

  1. do american companies ever get tired of getting clobbered by companies which are run exclusively by heterosexual east asian males, or is this yet another detail to exclude from wharton and sloan level analysis on the subject.

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  2. Apple is diverse? Apple is the company with the all-white male executive corps, right?

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  3. a few years ago though the mariners did have a real problem with 'the jumble' issue which steve raises here. the manager threw together a team of random players from a bunch of different countries and nobody could talk to each other that well, there was no team chemistry, and they did play worse because of it. baseball is the sport where team chemistry matters the least and this problem still sunk them.

    you have to wonder how much of an issue this is with soccer at the international level.

    as a humorous aside, i always LOL when 2 soccer players start swearing at each other at some international tournament. i'm thinking, they don't even speak the same language. do they all just swear at each other in english? do english language movies provide the international curse word lexicon to people everywhere?

    could "Fahk you, mahdafahka" be the universal insult today?

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  4. rightsaidfred1/24/14, 3:49 PM

    Tension between people over matters of culture, he says, can pollute the wider environment and reduce “multicultural creativity”

    A comic understatement, especially when one culture is intent on killing the other. It gets to be a buzz kill.

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  5. Lebanese are brusque? I have many Lebanese friends and I have never found them to be like that. Then again, I'm from the northeast so being an a-hole is pretty much how we roll.

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  6. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/01/22/DOD-Eases-Regs-Dealing-With-Religious-Apparel-Hair-Grooming

    ROTFL.

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  7. Diversity is advantageous in offering more to choose from, but diversity itself is not the formula for success.

    American diversity can be an advantage depending on the goal at hand.

    If the goal is to bring home the gold medal in basketball, US is advantaged because it can choose from a pool of black players.

    If the goal is to build an atomic bomb, US is advantaged because it has high IQ Jews among the populace.

    But making the basketball team diverse won't be advantageous. An all-black team will likely be better than one with 2 blacks, 2 Jews, 2 Mexicans, 2 Polish-Americans, 2 Chinese Americans, etc.

    And an atomic team with lots of Jews will likely be better than a more diverse one with equal numbers of Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, Turks, etc.

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  8. Corporations don't really believe the "Diversity" BS. They are driven to profess belief in the interest of lawsuit avoidance.

    I worked for 20 years as an internet programmer and online course developer for a variety of corporate clients. During that period, I put up half a dozen "Diversity" courses for clients.

    None of them had a clue what the content of those courses ought to be beyond that one paragraph summary at the top of your post.

    So, they always wanted their online course to be 45 minutes to an hour in duration for the user. How to fill up that time?

    They invariably delegated the task of puffing up the verbiage to me, because nobody else wanted to put up with the vacuity of the subject. And, I loathe the very concept of "Diversity." I spent many a weary day trying to find something... anything... to say to fill up the required space.

    There is no there there when it comes to Diversity.

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  9. Steve: The only problem with this Lebanese executive was that he was extremely brusque. Fortunately, I recalled that I had known five Lebanese people previously, and they were all brusque. By Levantine standards of politeness, this new fellow was David Niven reincarnated. So, I got along fine with him because I judged him on the Levantine curve.


    Z Blog said...
    Lebanese are brusque? I have many Lebanese friends and I have never found them to be like that. Then again, I'm from the northeast so being an a-hole is pretty much how we roll.


    The Lebanese must have been a Lebanese middleman minority, right?

    I once met a Lebanese boy at a summer camp, and he had exquisite manners.

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  10. Someone who takes frequent and entertaining digs at the corporate diversity cult is one Mrs David Goodhart, better known to the world as Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times. I don't know if her sister Kate, an Observer columnist, has the same common sense-- their parents are Aussies-- but Lucy and Kate each have four children, so maybe there's hope for the old isle.

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  11. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Times_Rich_List_2013>Yikes. This explains the way of British politicians.</a>

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  12. Then again, I'm from the northeast so being an a-hole is pretty much how we roll. --Z Blog

    Yes. Our present immigration crisis is hardly the first!

    In my northeastern hometown, the Lebanese were somewhat down the annoying list-- too much competition. If anything, they were closer to the outnumbered WASPs. One was mayor, and his (half-breed) son was among my closest friends. We were both nerdy wannabe jocks, and kept score (literally) on the bench.

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  13. Reminds me of the black coach of an all black basketball team. When asked about possibly adding some diversity to his team, replied, "What you talkin' 'bout? We all brothers. You don't get more diverse than that!"

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  14. Believe me, "ambient cultural disharmony" - let's call it ACD - can be disabling. You need your own kind of people around you, like Antaeus needed to remain in contact with the ground in order to be strong.

    Living outside the US brought that lesson home to me almost every day. Working in corporate environments that sometimes resembled the Mos Eisley bar (with yours truly as Luke Skywalker) also, over the years, whispered the same lesson.

    The last conversation I had with my grandfather before he died was his telling me to stay put in the state where I grew up. "Those are your people," he said. I ignored this advice.

    Despite the seeming "glamor" of being a multy-culty nomad, I must concede he was right. Some people are cut out to be nomads; others are not.

    In Jean Renoir's film "The Grand Illusion," Jean Gabin plays a French POW in WW2. The thing that practically breaks him is not physical deprivation, but the lack of people around him who speak French.

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  15. "The only problem with this Lebanese executive was that he was extremely brusque."

    Maybe it's genetic. Steve Jobs was an a-hole.

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  16. Apple's senior management doesn't look very diverse. And diversity has been problematic for McKinsey.

    More broadly, diversity seems useful to corporations at the local level in the sense that it's good to have an local guy be the public face of your company. So, for example, Subaru of America is run by this American guy, but the parent company back in Japan, Fuji Heavy Industries, is run by a bunch of Japanese guys.

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  17. Steve,

    OT, but Puerto Rico is back in the news.

    Puerto Rico is in an epic struggle to borrow money from the markets, and the clock is ticking.

    The island, a territory of the United States, is in the midst of a debt crisis. With only 3.7 million people, it owes an eye-watering $70 billion in public debt, behind only New York and California. And much of that debt is widely held by American investors in municipal bond funds.

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  18. Simon in London1/24/14, 5:03 PM

    Interesting stuff. I guess those who find Diversity interesting as well as dangerous have an advantage for the empty-heads who regard Diversity as, well, non-Diverse. Remembering that my colleague has a particular nationality and sex makes it much easier to get along with her idiosyncracies, and not expect her to behave exactly like a British man would or should (whereas my wife is much more a Liberal who judges everyone by universal standards). It helps with all nationalities to remember that they're coming from a different place.

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  19. Yeah Apple is non-diverse. Ditto SAP, Oracle, Microsoft (at higher levels), Linux developers, etc. Straight White Male and Nerdy. Every one.

    Yes Lucy Kellaway is worth reading in the FT. Which for all its flaws is a better paper than the WSJ under Murdoch.

    But creativity historically has been non-diverse. That is, other than fusion cuisine, great inventions or technical leaps forward come from very non-diverse, uniform, high-trust environments: China for silk, the compass, firearms, gunpowder, paper money, etc. Late 18th Century England for the Steam Engine, late 19th Century America for the telephone, etc. Even the airplane was not invented by "diverse" groups but by a couple of bicycle mechanics from pre-diverse Ohio.

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  20. I had a feeling that Roy Y.J .Chua is likely to be a Diaspora Chinese like that other Chua. Sure enough, he is a native of Singapore.

    So we have a bunch of intellectuals, all coming from remarkably undiverse backgrounds, parroting the line that diversity is the best thing ever. And here comes an outsider from a different culture, who has seem diversity first hand and knows that it's really not that hot, and injects his new perspective into the cultural discourse. What do you know, in this particular case diversity worked exactly as advertised!

    How is that for irony?

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  21. PC Makes You Stupid1/24/14, 5:42 PM

    Diversity has multiple meanings which get conflated.

    More diversity means less White. Period.

    Most people are afraid to notice and try hard to rationalize it as something else. Even Steve.

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  22. Brooks is reading, and flailing away at, you again:
    "First, we've probably placed too much emphasis on early education...
    "So when President Obama talks aob ut expanding opportunity in his State of the Union address I'm hoping he'll widen the debate. I'm hoping he'll sketch out a stage-by-stage developmental agenda to help poor children move from poverty to the middle class.
    "Such an agenda would start before birth..."

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  23. Excerpts and my responses:

    "THE closest thing the business world has to a universally acknowledged truth is that diversity is a good thing: the more companies hire people from different backgrounds the more competitive they will become. "


    Perhaps because the workforce is divided by race, culture etc and therefore more easily manipulated by management. A divided workforce cannot unite against managment. Thus the management can squeeze more work out them. Diversity is strength...for management, but weakness for the workers.




    "American universities (and many others as well) are institutionally committed to the idea that diversity promotes learning and creativity. "


    Academia began centuries ago as a refuge for the sons of wealth. Naturally, academia took on the mores and culture of the upper class. The upper class buy labor. THus they want cheaper labor. Labor prices drop when labor supply grows faster than labor demand. THus, the upper class wants diversity and inclusiveness, racial integration etc. Thus, academia wants the same because the culture of academia has been molded over centuries by its primary patrons in its early days--the upper class.



    "Most important perhaps, nobody wants to come across as unsympathetic to minorities or unappreciative of cultural variety. "


    They especially feel that way after years of indoctrination as youth in the ideology factories of the edu-propaganda system.


    "Diversity can bring risks as well as benefits and perils as well as perks. "


    The best nations on earth are those that are small and homogeneous and white. Why not address that phenomenon?

    Diversity is also weakness for the voters. Those small white, non-diverse nations are better able to control their government because they are unified.

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  24. Darwin's Sh*tlist1/24/14, 5:46 PM

    There is also a fifth use, which is probably the most valid. In an increasingly diverse country, it makes sense to hire a work force (at least the customer-facing portion) to match the customers it serves.

    Of course, just don't mention that the only reason this is useful is precisely because customers don't value diversity.

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  25. You do realize that there has never been any empirical study showing benefits of diversity. It is all rationalization (hamster spinning).

    Having different people would give you more points of view and you would do better.

    Maybe. The entire modern world was created by a non-diverse group of dead white males living from approximately London to Berlin.

    If diversity helps people, why isn't the US exerting our great influence in diversifying Korea and China? Or countless other countries, pressure Israel to accept Mexican immigrants, Iraq to let in N Africans, Japan to import anyone at all. After all we would be helping them.

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  26. Harry Baldwin1/24/14, 6:22 PM

    The very thing that can produce added creativity—the collision of different cultures—can also produce friction.

    Is that really what produces added creativity? I'd like to see some support for that assertion.

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  27. Anonymous said...
    Reminds me of the black coach of an all black basketball team. When asked about possibly adding some diversity to his team, replied, "What you talkin' 'bout? We all brothers. You don't get more diverse than that!"

    1/24/14, 4:38 PM

    Nobody said that.

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  28. No, jody, the Mariners are shitty because other than King Felix the rotation blows and they have a below avg lineup. The speaking different languages thing didn't have anything to do with winning 61 games any more than it did with winning 116 in 2001. And managers, or general managers, do not throw together a bunch of random players.

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  29. I know managers who have liked "diversity": putting one woman, one black guy, one gay on a engineering team of a dozen or so. Several liked it for the same reason: it prevented people from becoming comfortable.

    Now in a tiny above-the-chinese-restaurant startup, you might want everyone comfortable so they can concentrate on only the task at hand.

    But in a big org, there are too many low energy down days, too many ways to slough off, too many ways to be lazy. There isn't enough constant interaction to create a singular vision. So you need a way to keep their game up. The diversity makes them afraid a bit. Can't let their guard own. Can't speak their mind. Can't assume people are their friends. Can't behave boorishly. Can't act like a frat. It lowers trust and raises vigilance. People self police themselves better --not just in PC behavior, but all work behaviors.

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  30. Oswald Spengler1/24/14, 7:29 PM

    "Diversity is our greatest strength!"

    Except when that's all too often not the case.

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  31. Closed-minded people expect cultural tensions.

    LOL on that one. Yeah, anyone with any real experience is "closed-minded". As one of those closed-minded people, and one with a lot of multicultural workplace experience, I would say that the diversity problem most underrated by Americans is the common language problem. People without serious experience operating in a second language usually don't understand how little second-language speakers actually comprehend.

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  32. Apple is the company with the all-white male executive corps, right?

    Sure, but they have lots of Indians in the trenches.

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  33. Apple is the company with the all-white male executive corps, right?

    Sure, but they have lots of Indians in the trenches.

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  34. Maybe they all like this type of diversity:

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3021466/a-girl-who-codes?cid=ps01102innovagents

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  35. In the "Chua" spirit, I've noticed that the exponentially increasing influence/presence of native Chinese in the entertainment industry makes for some very quirky interactions and alliances, and tensions. The Chinese mentality is truly Martian (as they must think of Westerners)...

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  36. Another vote against diversity:
    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369309/satan-state-house-jonah-goldberg

    oh the irony!

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  37. no steve...imagine ALL of your coworkers are lebanese and you are the only white man

    You think life is going to be good no matter how realistic you are?

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  38. It is far too easy to present “diversity” in one-sided terms: as a triumph of enlightenment over bigotry and creativity over closed-mindedness.

    Good thing The Economist doesn't do that, then!

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  39. Off Topic:

    Washington State has decided that White women are no longer eligible for affirmative action preferences:

    Is discrimination over for white women? WSDOT thinks so
    http://www.king5.com/news/investigators/Is-discrimination-over-for-white-women-WSDOT-thinks-so-239702981.html

    White women cut out of affirmative action preferences
    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/01/white_women_cut_out_of_affirmative_action_preferences.html

    At the same time, the state insists that minorities and women, presumably of color, need to receive more help winning government contracts:

    State: Too few minorities, women on tunnel project
    http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2022664018_tunnelminoritiesxml.html

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  40. "This is the theme of many of the corporate image ads you see during the Olympics and golf tournaments."

    I'm looking forward to the Winter Olympics, but the Olympic ads are just so smarmy. There's the endless diversity rubbish, of course, but it's more than that.

    You have the constant, cloying invocation of "dreams"; the flag-waving by multinational companies that don't really care about the country (see "diversity" above); the incredibly lame metaphors linking the widget industry to bobsledding or whatever; and so on.

    Golf tournament ads evince many of the same characteristics, but still, they're an order of magnitude better than Olympic ads. The golf ads are aimed at middle-management suburbanites, while the Olympic ads appear to be targeted at the cat lady in the next cubicle.

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  41. Mr Chua also says that “ambient cultural disharmony” has its strongest impact on people who regard themselves as open-minded. Closed-minded people expect cultural tensions. Open-minded people don’t expect them and so react to them more strongly. ...

    In all three studies, subjects who had a greater experience of ambient cultural disharmony fell short on one or another of Mr Chua’s measures of creativity.


    I.e., people who are good little adherents of the state ideology are less creative. Sounds about right.

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  42. Foreign Expert1/24/14, 9:44 PM

    I tend to think diversity is like alcohol. A little makes life more interesting and probably is good for you. Too much and you die.

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  43. who cares if diversity good or bad for "the economy"?

    i don't like it, period. full stop.

    i want little or none of it.

    i'm allowed to want what i want, and im allowed to demand the government give me policies that i want, just because i want them

    my wanting no diversity just because i want no diversity is every bit as valid as someone else wanting lots of it for whatever reason

    couching things in terms of "is it good for the economy" is staying within the system, and the system hates me

    and i hate the system

    some day i will say this non anonymously

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  44. @ Foreign Expert

    haha, I disagree, Diversity is more like hot sauce. In measured, reasonable doses, it adds body. Beyond that, it dulls the experience.

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  45. In Jean Renoir's film "The Grand Illusion," Jean Gabin plays a French POW in WW2.
    Indeed an excellent film, but it's about World War I.

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  46. WW1

    I know, apologies for the typo. I like the dark irony at the end when they mention thst they must work to make this war the last one of all...and the film was released in 1937....

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  47. Oswald Spengler1/24/14, 11:15 PM

    Foreign Expert said...
    I tend to think diversity is like alcohol. A little makes life more interesting and probably is good for you. Too much and you die.

    1/24/14, 9:44 PM

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Or to paraphrase John Derbyshire, foreigners are like salt or spices in a soup or stew. A little bit of seasoning adds flavor. Dump an entire box in, and the soup is ruined.

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  48. i'm allowed to want what i want, and im allowed to demand the government give me policies that i want, just because i want them

    You're not allowed to demand what you want.

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  49. Simon in London1/25/14, 12:20 AM

    "Socially Extinct said...
    @ Foreign Expert

    haha, I disagree, Diversity is more like hot sauce. In measured, reasonable doses, it adds body. Beyond that, it dulls the experience."

    That's a good analogy.
    The American concept of Diversity seems to be "different races, who of course are or should all be White Liberals under the skin". This is 'empty Diversity' in that it's meaningless by definition - the Diversity cannot actually matter, because people are all the same really.

    I know I have benefitted from seeing different perspectives other than the two I grew up with (Ulster Unionism + BBC Left-Liberalism). But the ones that are most beneficial are those different enough to be enlightening, but close enough to be comprehensible. Traditionalist Catholic perspectives, for instance, from within the Anglosphere or northwestern Europe. Other European perspectives. I can't get much from more alien perspectives other than to acknowledge that beyond some basic commonalitis they are too different to really understand, and their holders are likely to react to stimulus in unexpected ways.

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  50. Henry Canaday1/25/14, 5:34 AM

    Funny, I always think of Lebanese as being extraordinarily polite, based on a sample of, oh, three or four Lebanese Americans I have known. We may both be misled by small samples.

    Or something like the following may be true: Whatever is the dominant trait in any ethnic group will also provoke a reaction into the opposite trait by a significant portion of the same ethnic group. Examples might be Jewish liberals who obsess about the immorality of excessive money-making or puritanical Irish Catholics who obsess about the sexual slovenliness of fellow Irish Catholics.

    O. Henry made a living off spotting these intra-ethnic contradictions after he moved to New York City. Of course, he was living in a target-rich environment.

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  51. The great, unanswered question I keep repeating to the multi-cultists is, where do you think 'diversity' comes from?

    Why after centuries of interaction are there still Lebanese, Anglo's, Negros, Jews, Hindu, French, and on and on? Shouldn't we all be one Unitarian-Universalist cappuchino-shaded race by now?

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  52. So uh, anyone going to get around to writing about the upsides of diversity?

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  53. THE closest thing the business world has to a universally acknowledged truth is that diversity is a good thing

    All creatures will make merry...under pain of death

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  54. There is no there there when it comes to Diversity.

    Stop your whining. They were doing you a favor, giving you a subject that is inherently concise: the benefits of Diversity. Be grateful they didn't assign you the costs of Diversity; you'd still be writing.

    much more a Liberal who judges everyone by universal standards

    They must still have real liberals in the UK. Here, our "liberals" know damned well not to judge anyone else by the standards they use on their fellow white "gentiles."

    More diversity means less White. Period.

    Yes, exhibit A would seem to be, per Bob's Mantra, that non-"white 'gentile'" countries are already at maximum "Diversity" and thus, having reached "Mission Accomplished!" status without doing anything, are never off-limits to the Diversicrats. All-black countries, all-yellow countries, all-brown countries, all-sepia countries, the Jewish State, etc., would seem to qualify as 100% "Diverse" and thus have no obligation to "Diversify."

    LOL on that one. Yeah, anyone with any real experience is "closed-minded."

    Indeed. I spent years with an open mind. That's how I got to my current state of close-mindedness; I learned enough to make up my mind. The standing demand for a constant state of open-mindedness smacks of a hypnotist working a crowd. Or an overseer working slaves.

    Off Topic:

    Washington State has decided that White women are no longer eligible for affirmative action preferences:


    Obviously they never consulted Obsidian; if they had, they'd know that cutting out the primary beneficiaries of AA - the only ones who matter, the ones for whom the whole system was instituted - is simply not possible.

    Diversity is like neither alcohol, or hot sauce. It's like O'Doul's; each one you drink is one less real beer you can drink. Each phony bit of Diversity you include is one less bit of real diversity you can include. Each cookie-cutter leftist Diversitoid is one fewer diverse thinker or doer.

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  55. n Jean Renoir's film "The Grand Illusion," Jean Gabin plays a French POW in WW2. The thing that practically breaks him is not physical deprivation, but the lack of people around him who speak French."

    There it is, really. "Immigrants" swarm here speaking every language under the sun, and are angry and isolated because they're not in their own "Kansas" any more. And we (the white people; blacks and hispanics don't have to worry) are supposed to care. Care enough to snuff out ourselves in the impossible pursuit of a country that will immediately make everyone from a foregin country feel like they never left home.
    Again, we'd be better off paying them to stay home since we're never going to build that fence.

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  56. In 1982 I sat in on the first-ever California "wrongful discharge" trial. The plaintiff was a IBM typewriter saleswoman who'd been involved with a counterpart from a rival company. The trial was all about how corporate secrets would probably be revealed in bed. To impress the jury with the seriousness of the risk, IBM put on a linebacker-sized black executive who was bursting out of his suit. They lost the case. On appeal, it came out that she'd been earning nearly 80k/yr.in '79-80.

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  57. "Anonymous said...

    who cares if diversity good or bad for "the economy"?"

    The Economy does not exist to serve you. You exist to serve The Econonmy, blessed be it's name.

    Just try not to remember that "The Economy" really means "The financial interests of the wealthy".

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  58. "Corporations don't really believe the "Diversity" BS. They are driven to profess belief in the interest of lawsuit avoidance."

    I can assure you that the vast majority of executives at large corporations are true believers in diversity.

    If they were not, they would act very differently in terms of who they donate money to and what politicians they support.

    This nonsense that they are good guys who are being pressured into acting bad wasn't even true 30 years ago, let alone now.

    Corporate execs' favorite politician was Jack Kemp, the pro-affirmative action, pro-open borders, not very bright ex-football player who was constantly worshiping at the altar of political correctness and diversity.

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  59. Diversity means - I had some black friends in college. And some black coworkers. We were all cool. Life should be nice like that all the time.

    Quit and eat dinner.

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  60. Or to paraphrase John Derbyshire, foreigners are like salt or spices in a soup or stew. A little bit of seasoning adds flavor. Dump an entire box in, and the soup is ruined.

    Or worse, the point is reached where you have a bowl of salt with some soup ingredients in it. Its really just adulterated salt - not soup.

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  61. "the Mariners are shitty because other than King Felix the rotation blows and they have a below avg lineup."

    i said a couple years ago. not last year. i don't know what's going on at all times with the mariners or most other teams. i hate baseball.

    "And managers, or general managers, do not throw together a bunch of random players."

    the hell they don't. not only do they do this in every sport, they do this more in baseball than in any other team sport.

    herp derp, jody said every team in every sport is constructed randomly. no. no i didn't. you don't know much about sports though if you think every team in every sport is carefully put together every year.

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  62. "herp derp, jody said every team in every sport is constructed randomly. no. no i didn't. you don't know much about sports though if you think every team in every sport is carefully put together every year."

    Da Phuck you talkin about? The Mariners, nor any pro sports team is randomly put together. Scouting, statistical analysis, drafts, free agent markets, player development, minor leagues, coaches, and on and on.....

    The Mariners won 61 games 5 years ago, BTW.

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  63. "Why after centuries of interaction are there still Lebanese, Anglo's, Negros, Jews, Hindu, French, and on and on? Shouldn't we all be one Unitarian-Universalist cappuchino-shaded race by now?"

    I worked at the UUA many years ago at their headquarters in Boston. It was the most un-diverse place I've ever worked. Filled with the whitest of white people. Truly a whiter shade of pale. As lefty-liberal as you can get.

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  64. And here all along I've been thinking that diversity is what allowed the US to import people from every country on the planet and if that country didn't exactly play our game, why, we wipped-up a group of pro-freedom-and-democracy freedom fighters from that country's immigrants to overthrow the evil tyranical dictatorship that was ruining their country and killing their own people...

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