My new column in Taki's Magazine straightens out a collaboration between economists and prominent anthropologist Joseph Henrich on diversity and innovation.
America has always been Diverse! Anglos, Saxons, Bavarians, Martin van Buren, Vito Corleone, you name it. Therefore we need more Aztecs, Arab Muslims, and sub-Saharan Africans.
If anybody reading this got magically popped back to 1850 - 1945 America they'd think they'd died and gone to a Gordon Lightfoot concert.
Hilarious how the giant pothole the researchers had to carefully drive their tractor-trailer-sized load of priors around is the wildly ethnically diverse Global South.
That's like The World's Greatest Ballad. I tear up every time I hear it.
I went down a rabbit hole on the wreck one evening and some things I learned:
The Coast Guard's initial theory was an intoxicated, sloppy crew left the hatch covers unsecured. This is a very uncomfortable and understandably contested conclusion, and apparently there's persuasive evidence from submarine video of the wreck that the hatch covers failed due to excessive loading and not human negligence.
Given the extreme conditions, there were plenty of ways for the ship to founder. The ship could have broken apart while straddling two waves, or come down into a trough and driven its bow unrecoverably deep into the next wave.
Bodies entombed in water become waxy and mummified, and are apparently visible at the wreck. You have to get a permit to go down and film and there are some content-based restrictions.
A reader of mine once commented that when he was young, he had a flunky job at the State Dept. or CIA or something like that. Anyway, his job was to babysit the younger members of a powerful pro-American Lebanese Maronite family that had lost a power struggle during the Lebanese Civil War to the Maronite Gemayel family and now the U.S. had them holed up in a small town in New England where their many enemies in Lebanon couldn't find them and kill them. So, one evening he took his charges into town to see a revival of "The Godfather." On the way back, the most thoughtful scion got even more thoughtful and said, "My family ... my family is just like the Corleones.
My acquaintances were a lot more pacifistic. LOTS of emphasis on maintaining face and social signaling and keeping your place in the socio-economic hierarchy.
Lebanon had a good run with everybody working at that from 1943-1974. But after the Palestinians arrived in 1969, it got all too complicated and the gates of hell opened up in 1975-1990.
Lebanon had lots of Palestinians back from 1948. What changed in 1969 was that Jordan (with Israeli cooperation) kicked Soviet-supported PLO and other affiliates out, and these then colonized Lebanon. From then on, the Soviet block used them for their "Anticolonial" Global South strategy. Mamdanis (or Angela Davis, for example) are just chips of that block.
Patents, eh? My grandmother's family bore a grudge against Thomas Edison, for supposedly stealing one of my great-grandfather's ideas for some part of his incandescent light patents. Whatever the case, great Grandpa King immigrated from Birmingham environs, so his inclusion in Edison's patents would not have increased "Inclusiveness" as now defined.
This reminds me that the most forgotten immigrants to America are the modest but steady flow from Britain after 1776. For example, Bob Hope arrived in Cleveland at age 4 from England and assimilates 110%.
Yeah, I saw that when I did ancestry research on my wife's family. Apart from a couple of 17th Century arrivals (notably Chaddus Brown) in Providence RI, there were more post-1870 arrivals to RI and Connecticut (river-powered brass and other industry) and Eastern Ohio and Western PA. I expected that era immigration for her Scottish forebears (as for my Irish), but the English midlands were also immigrating.
Don't forget that it was Steve Sailer who largely popularized some important things about the "Bowling Alone" findings (Diversity lowers social trust and civic participation across the board, even among monoracial sub-environments), and that the scholar, Robert Putnam, who made the findings suppressed them for years because he was embarrassed by them.
Thanks for the post. I recall reading about Putnam years ago, but could not remember his name. Putnam suppressed his work but did not lie. That's refreshing.
I recall reading an interview with Putnam about his diversity findings. He agonized over publishing results that seem almost childishly obvious to iSteve readers, but that did not support his ideological/political proclivities. IIRC, he also spun great webs of rationalization and qualification to try to soften the undeniable impact of his work.
You're right, though -- he did not lie, and he did ultimately go public.
But Putnam was already a Very Big Name at that point, based on his famous 'bowling alone' work. If even Putnam just barely dared to publish unfashionable findings, well, that says a lot about the value of vast swathes of current academic research.
I have learned to be skeptical about sociological research. Of course, sociology is the official science of socialism. That is not a coincidence. In socialism, society determines every thing, especially "diversity." Concepts like kinship, genetics and biology do not matter.
Some of the places growing most rapidly, Texas, Florida, UAE, are very diverse.
What I see is a general principle where voluntary exchange is better than government mandates. The "diversification" Americans experienced starting in the 1960s was not voluntary, it was forced by the civil rights regime on an unwilling white population. When the diversification is people voluntarily hiring and renting to immigrants, you don't see the same kinds of pathologies. Voluntary exchange gives people incentives to behave well and avoid low-trust behavior.
> When the diversification is people voluntarily hiring and renting to immigrants, you don't see the same kinds of pathologies. Voluntary exchange gives people incentives to behave well and avoid low-trust behavior. <
Exactly. Like the Midlands mill owners who voluntarily hired Pakistani immigrants who integrated well and have avoided low-trust behavior in places like Rotherham.
Great essay. If Steve ever decides to go to grad school in a STEM field, his Journal Club seminars will be mobbed.
On patent authorship, he writes: "But how was this theorized benefit of diversity supposed to work in real life...? Did Leland Miller, head engineer at the Carnegie steel mill, hear about an old Ruthenian trick for improving the Bessemer process from puddler Jan Kowalski, but diabolically decided not to put his name on the patent application?"
When crafting an application, lawyers pay a great deal of attention to who does and doesn't get listed as an Inventor. Then as now, getting it wrong either way can invalidate a patent. Leland Miller would have been well aware of that.
Right. 19th Century Americans were highly litigious over patents. Anytime you look up some famous inventor you heard about in 5th grade, it turns out he was up to his neck in patent lawsuits because inventions tended to be invented multiple times all within a short time span. For example, I had a summer job in 1979 at a weedwhacker factory. The industry was gearing up for a huge patent lawsuit that played out over the 1980s because the weedwhacker, the gardening implement that cuts down weeds with spinning fishing line, had been independently invented in 3 countries in a span of 3 weeks. Once monofilament fishing line was invented, the weedwhacker was inevitable.
If there was a common pattern in America of working class immigrants filing credible patent lawsuits against their WASP bosses, well, that would be interesting. But I've never heard of it.
"WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and he invented it to point out that Americans and Northwest Europeans tend to have fewer of the self-defeating cultural traits, such as clannishness, of more normal human cultures like, say, Sicilians or Pakistanis."
See also: "The persistence of “high trust” in Europe west of the Hajnal Line and the future of Western uniqueness in the 21st century"
I think the study tells us more about the time period than anything else: low-hanging fruit in the decades following the Industrial Revolution.
Edit: And, of course, the Albion's Seed thesis, which really is a great catch by Steve.
Also, the purpose of a patent is not necessarily to innovate; it's to capitalize on a time-limited grant of monopoly status. I assume there's lots of crackpot or just not-very-good stuff with a patent attached to it.
Compare this with another dataset some like to use: publications of scientific-academic papers. They say:
"China and x, y, and z other countries are publishing x more scientific papers than before; Western Man is finished, and it's his own fault for being lazy, and he desperately needs morally superior immigrants. I am Vivek Ramaswamy, and I approve this message."
We must assume that there's "lots of crackpot or just not-very-good stuff" in scientific papers in many of these non-Western countries.
Many of the people producing them tend to be committing a soft kind of fraud, publishing without purpose. They are pursuing a sort of currency, but a far-different one than the tinkerer of 1870 who thought he'd made a better handle for a telegraph was aiming for.
The authors look at both total patents and a list of significant patents put together by previous researchers (and get similar results). Apparently, patent analysis is a pretty mature field these days, kind of like baseball statistic analysis, so you can make use of previous scholars' work to sidestep a lot of the methodological problems. If Jones in 2010 published a list of the most significant patents based on some reasonable criteria that got quite a few citations and then Smith in 2015 publishes a revision of Jones' work that subsequently gets many citations, then you can pretty safely use Jones' database ... assuming neither Smith nor Jones were looking into the questions you are looking into.
You can pretty reasonably use other people's top 100 lists without too much worry about their biases as long as you are sure they weren't interested in questions you are interested in. For example, say, you are researcher into left-handedness and you want to know how many top musicians are left-handed. Well, you can look at the pictures in a guitar magazines Top 100 guitarist countdown and count the lefthanders. Unless there's some evidence that the editors were biased for or against lefthanders, their list should be basically fine for you to use.
But you do have to be aware of potential biases. Say you are looking at a list of baseball's top 100 pinchhitters of all time, and 40% are lefthanded. That doesn't prove that, say, lefthanders are especially good at jumping right into an activity without much warning. Instead, it's because managers prefer to use lefthanded pinchhitters against righthanded pitchers, who throw 60% or 70% of innings. So, there's a big bias in favor of keeping a lefthanded pinch hitter on the roster.
South Carolina also stands out for lack of surname diversity.
I suspect that South Carolina was kind of like a lowland, civilized version of highland Kentucky, with each county being dominated by a few aristocratic landowning families and you could not really get ahead in the county without marrying into, say, the Calhoun family, or whomever. So, South Carolina generated articulate, educated spokesmen for extreme ideologies of hierarchy, both racial and class. The white lower class residents in South Carolina tended to be from the most civilized parts of rural England where the class structure was most taken for granted.
In contrast, the highlanders were from the unsettled English-Scottish border region and were used to joining with their kin to fight for their rights, but also with quarreling with their kin and other neighbors. So they were much more fractious and divided over great political questions like slavery. They distrusted the lowland John C. Calhoun-like spokesmen for class subordination, and were likely to light out for the frontier in the Ozarks, Oklahoma, or Bakersfield.
South Carolina was like what would happen to the Highlands if the Hatfields and McCoys got educated and civilized and agreed to share power with each other at the expense of all the Smiths, Jones and Boones. And the Smiths, Jones, and Boones didn't think much of that idea at all.
I'd like to see a historical study of how many whites and which white social classes left the South for the frontier or elsewhere in the antebellum period. But my impression is the Southern economy was at least diversified enough to keep most of the white Southerners there and loyal, for whatever reasons, to the cause of the Southern planters and their cheap-labor/inherited-land economic model.
I believe I read here that according to genetic tests South Carolina is the state in which the highest percentage of self-identified whites have some black ancestry. Not that it’s anything earthshaking; only about 10% of SC whites are mixed in this way, and the percentage of black ancestry is almost always in the low single digits.
Great piece. I have noted elsewhere that there are tons of in-your-face examples from pretty recent history/business that runs totally contrary to the contention that diversity is an essential ingredient to success. In fact, I cannot think of any example of a successful organization that from its founding looked like a delegation from the UN. More likely the core group behind these enterprises either looks like a collection of mostly white high school jocks or the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.
It also seems bizarre how on the one hand economists tend to look at human inputs into the economy as interchangeable to justify mass immigration, but on the other hand also insist racial and ethnic backgrounds provide some essential spice that needs to be carefully calibrated for an optimal economic stew.
Low levels of immigration would allow for selection of foreigners most likely to fit into the WEIRD framework that has worked well for us. High levels means less successful cultural traits are prevalent enough to erode the qualities that not only helped our nation succeed but also American-ness itself. There is a poignant line in Morrissey's song "We'll Let You know" from 1992(!) where he ends with "we are the last truly British people you will ever know." We aren't at that point in the US yet but it's on the horizon.
Tech can now sort together extremely high IQ males from all around the world (but still predominantly Northern Europe, Ashkenazim, Indians and East Asians) so I think many people assume innovation must always have been like that. But before say 1900 the world was simply much less sorted for IQ, thus increasing the relative importance of creative minorities like dissenting Protestants.
My guess is that Sicilians tend to have a lot of genes and culture left over from the Roman Empire's big importation of Eastern Mediterraneans from places like Syria, whereas
Rome appears to have been indigenous Italian in 600 BC, then heavily Eastern in 100 AD, then back to indigenous Italian in 800 AD. Apparently, with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the city folk in Rome left or died, and the city was slowly repopulated over the centuries by the native farmers from the surrounding hinterlands whose ancestors had founded the Roman Republic.
For a few centuries (I'm too lazy to look it up), Sicily was ruled by Muslims, presumably Arabs. IIRC, Razib Khan has noted that studies can detect that element in Sicilians' DNA.
Thanks for this, Steve. I guessed correctly before I got to the summary that the paper was going to suffer the same flaw as all of the McKinsey pro-diversity work: they find a correlation between profitable companies and their "diverse" workforce, and assume the causation is diversity->good things without any further investigation.
Fascinating article. Having been in two econ doctoral programs, one on each coast I can assure you that economics is anything but a settled discipline and far from a 'science'.
Never really thought about this. I always attributed this phenomenon to the combination of temperature and humidity. Forced to stay indoors and tinkering when the bible wasn't being read versus sleeping mid day and expending little energy enjoying the easily achieved bounties of food and drink.
> We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. <
No you didn't. Not even by your own terms.
This is utterly foul. This is some of the most slimy, obsequious--and open--lying yet. No iSteve level debunking required. A nanoseconds' reflection: more patents from counties with growing industry that draw immgrants (with different surnames), duh. That whole "industrial revolution thing"--yeah, I think i've heard of that.
I'll never understand the willingness to prostitute oneself like this. I've said a raft of stupid/wrong shit over my life. But I have never--and am just constitutionally opposed to--happily swallowing and spewing bullshit. These guys decided--*chose to*--give "diversity!" a big wet sloppy blow job--deep throat and swallowing. They are pathetic faggotty dick sucking scum. They should be kicked out of America, the West. They do not belong among honest decent people.
This is the key issue. We have a host of people now in the West--some from white hostile outgroups, Jews, Muslims, the Mamdani types, etc. etc. and some utopian, virtue signaling, yard signing, obsequious, diversity deep-throating, lemmings--who are simply hostile to maintaining Western civilization.
We are simply incompatible. Let them have their rainbow hued, surname diverse utopia. But they have no right to drag down and destroy *our* nations, our civilization.
For ourselves and our posterity ... let's get away from them--by any means necessary--and survive.
Your comment reminded me: 95% of modern inventions and processes came from behind the monolithically occidental Hajnal lines.
It's a slippery argument: Enrico Fermi was a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant and Robert Oppenheimer was first-generation Ashkenazi German, therefore Diversity works!
When keeping their jobs depends on spewing crap, most people spew crap. The most disturbing aspect to me is the symbiotic relationship between these kinds of researchers and journalists who want to cite “evidence” that diversity is our strength. I can imagine the articles now saying that “research shows” a diverse population leads to more innovation, when the question at hand is whether ICE should be deporting illegals.
To be fair, Sicilian entrepreneur Michael Corleone made his family business more innovative by increasing its surname diversity, bringing in an Adams and a Hagen.
An interesting coincidence (?), just as Mario Puzo was writing his fiction about the Corleone family in 1968, the Corleonesi, mobsters in the Sicilian town of Corleone, in 1968 set off on a hyper-violent attempt to take over the entire mafia in Sicily by murdering anybody who stood in their way. Before the rise of the Corleonesi, Sicilian mobsters had been fairly restrained about impinging on each other's traditional turf.
The Corleonesi murdered so many other mafia in the 1970s and the 1980s that when the end of the Cold War removed America's need to to keep Italy from electing a Communist government based on its strength in the north by letting the Christian Democrats make get out the vote deals with mobsters in the south, some brave Italian prosecutors, several of whom were murdered, got non-Corleonesi mobsters to drop their traditional omerta code and testify against the Corleonesi in court.
I have an Italian-from-Italy friend who just about foams at the mouth with rage at the cute winky attitudes of Americans toward the mafia. She associates them with Giuseppe Di Matteo.
A longtime commenter at The Phora said the same thing. He grew up in NYC and his godly Italian mother would slap him anytime she thought he had made the wrong acquaintance.
I remember a lot of reviewers grouching about the nihilism of Goodfellas when it came out, versus Puzo's completely fictionalized version of dignified old men in tuxedos.
Mario Puzo did not speak Italian and had no firsthand knowledge of the Mafia when he wrote The Godfather. He was a magazine writer who had gotten deeply in debt and figured that writing a novel would be the way out. This required extensive research, given his lack of firsthand knowledge.
Puzo was lazy. My grandfather would spit when he or Coppola were mentioned. He spent 50 years working in Bed Sty at their government-funded housing, being mugged and robbed by the thugs, then the mafia would take half his paycheck. He had to get their permission to move him and his wife and four girls out, after a terrible incident. The day they released him, he had a stroke and never walked or talked coherently again. So, f**k the mafia and its fan boys. Do you feel the same about other urban crime enterprises? All he ever wanted was a tomato farm. Immigrant warlords always victimize their own. See, the Afghani, Somalis, and Kennedys.
My proudest moment was helping put Dominick DiPaolo in prison for using Union#1, the buggywhip local turned ILGPNWU, to infiltrate southern factories and trade shows and use the bosses to make us pay them money, to keep real unions out (who are little better). I testified in federal court, thinking of my grandfather. Of course I was blacklisted and ended up washing dishes in restaurants. My car tires were slashed. I would do it again. Of course, they just regrouped under SEIU.
I don't think entertainment matters more than human lives.
Similarly, I don't think academic economists, doctors, or lawyers should ever be paid for their testimony. They are already paid by taxpayers, whether their institution is public or private, to do the job of research and teaching. Yet most of the best-known ones do virtually none or no teaching and use our public institutions to make 6-7 figure salaries in addition to their faculty pay every year -- working hours we are paying them. If they were in other types of work, that would be fraud. You want to earn off your insights and inventions? Join the public marketplace and stop double-dipping the taxpayers.
It is an interesting question: when are experts reliable, and when are they not? This goes back to on the one hand political convictions having a religious quality, and on the other that political convictions are ALWAYS informed by "experts". So every different political conviction is informed by different "experts". Economy as a "science" plays a pivotal role in undergirding specific political convictions. So it's not that surprizing to see DEI-adjacent economic "experts".
Usually hard sciences are more resistant to being gobbled up by political religion. But there are tons of exceptions - see the problems Galileo had with his heliocentricity, Lysenkoism in Stalinist Soviet Union, or more recently, the "climate science" and covid-19 mania here in the West.
America has always been Diverse! Anglos, Saxons, Bavarians, Martin van Buren, Vito Corleone, you name it. Therefore we need more Aztecs, Arab Muslims, and sub-Saharan Africans.
If anybody reading this got magically popped back to 1850 - 1945 America they'd think they'd died and gone to a Gordon Lightfoot concert.
Hilarious how the giant pothole the researchers had to carefully drive their tractor-trailer-sized load of priors around is the wildly ethnically diverse Global South.
Interestingly enough we’re only five days from the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
That's like The World's Greatest Ballad. I tear up every time I hear it.
I went down a rabbit hole on the wreck one evening and some things I learned:
The Coast Guard's initial theory was an intoxicated, sloppy crew left the hatch covers unsecured. This is a very uncomfortable and understandably contested conclusion, and apparently there's persuasive evidence from submarine video of the wreck that the hatch covers failed due to excessive loading and not human negligence.
Given the extreme conditions, there were plenty of ways for the ship to founder. The ship could have broken apart while straddling two waves, or come down into a trough and driven its bow unrecoverably deep into the next wave.
Bodies entombed in water become waxy and mummified, and are apparently visible at the wreck. You have to get a permit to go down and film and there are some content-based restrictions.
God rest their souls!
Damn! I couldn’t imagine going down though and checking out the shipwreck. Some things are best left to the water.
Everyone should get a different surname and then innovation will shoot through the roof!
The Sicilian-Hillbilly similarity was the basis of the Patrick Swayze movie "Next of Kin."
I've told Middle Eastern Christians that the group they most reminded me of was middle and upper class American Southerners.
A reader of mine once commented that when he was young, he had a flunky job at the State Dept. or CIA or something like that. Anyway, his job was to babysit the younger members of a powerful pro-American Lebanese Maronite family that had lost a power struggle during the Lebanese Civil War to the Maronite Gemayel family and now the U.S. had them holed up in a small town in New England where their many enemies in Lebanon couldn't find them and kill them. So, one evening he took his charges into town to see a revival of "The Godfather." On the way back, the most thoughtful scion got even more thoughtful and said, "My family ... my family is just like the Corleones.
My acquaintances were a lot more pacifistic. LOTS of emphasis on maintaining face and social signaling and keeping your place in the socio-economic hierarchy.
Lebanon had a good run with everybody working at that from 1943-1974. But after the Palestinians arrived in 1969, it got all too complicated and the gates of hell opened up in 1975-1990.
Lebanon had lots of Palestinians back from 1948. What changed in 1969 was that Jordan (with Israeli cooperation) kicked Soviet-supported PLO and other affiliates out, and these then colonized Lebanon. From then on, the Soviet block used them for their "Anticolonial" Global South strategy. Mamdanis (or Angela Davis, for example) are just chips of that block.
Great movie. Liam Neison has early role.
Patents, eh? My grandmother's family bore a grudge against Thomas Edison, for supposedly stealing one of my great-grandfather's ideas for some part of his incandescent light patents. Whatever the case, great Grandpa King immigrated from Birmingham environs, so his inclusion in Edison's patents would not have increased "Inclusiveness" as now defined.
This reminds me that the most forgotten immigrants to America are the modest but steady flow from Britain after 1776. For example, Bob Hope arrived in Cleveland at age 4 from England and assimilates 110%.
Yeah, I saw that when I did ancestry research on my wife's family. Apart from a couple of 17th Century arrivals (notably Chaddus Brown) in Providence RI, there were more post-1870 arrivals to RI and Connecticut (river-powered brass and other industry) and Eastern Ohio and Western PA. I expected that era immigration for her Scottish forebears (as for my Irish), but the English midlands were also immigrating.
Tying together two themes, didn’t early Mormons recruit heavily among Protestants or lapsed Protestants in the English North and Midlands?
On the basis of my observations, I conclude that Diversity brings division, strife and moral decline.
Don't forget that it was Steve Sailer who largely popularized some important things about the "Bowling Alone" findings (Diversity lowers social trust and civic participation across the board, even among monoracial sub-environments), and that the scholar, Robert Putnam, who made the findings suppressed them for years because he was embarrassed by them.
Thanks for the post. I recall reading about Putnam years ago, but could not remember his name. Putnam suppressed his work but did not lie. That's refreshing.
I recall reading an interview with Putnam about his diversity findings. He agonized over publishing results that seem almost childishly obvious to iSteve readers, but that did not support his ideological/political proclivities. IIRC, he also spun great webs of rationalization and qualification to try to soften the undeniable impact of his work.
You're right, though -- he did not lie, and he did ultimately go public.
But Putnam was already a Very Big Name at that point, based on his famous 'bowling alone' work. If even Putnam just barely dared to publish unfashionable findings, well, that says a lot about the value of vast swathes of current academic research.
I have learned to be skeptical about sociological research. Of course, sociology is the official science of socialism. That is not a coincidence. In socialism, society determines every thing, especially "diversity." Concepts like kinship, genetics and biology do not matter.
Some of the places growing most rapidly, Texas, Florida, UAE, are very diverse.
What I see is a general principle where voluntary exchange is better than government mandates. The "diversification" Americans experienced starting in the 1960s was not voluntary, it was forced by the civil rights regime on an unwilling white population. When the diversification is people voluntarily hiring and renting to immigrants, you don't see the same kinds of pathologies. Voluntary exchange gives people incentives to behave well and avoid low-trust behavior.
I learned directly about "diversity" during the '60's and '70's.
> When the diversification is people voluntarily hiring and renting to immigrants, you don't see the same kinds of pathologies. Voluntary exchange gives people incentives to behave well and avoid low-trust behavior. <
Exactly. Like the Midlands mill owners who voluntarily hired Pakistani immigrants who integrated well and have avoided low-trust behavior in places like Rotherham.
Great essay. If Steve ever decides to go to grad school in a STEM field, his Journal Club seminars will be mobbed.
On patent authorship, he writes: "But how was this theorized benefit of diversity supposed to work in real life...? Did Leland Miller, head engineer at the Carnegie steel mill, hear about an old Ruthenian trick for improving the Bessemer process from puddler Jan Kowalski, but diabolically decided not to put his name on the patent application?"
When crafting an application, lawyers pay a great deal of attention to who does and doesn't get listed as an Inventor. Then as now, getting it wrong either way can invalidate a patent. Leland Miller would have been well aware of that.
Right. 19th Century Americans were highly litigious over patents. Anytime you look up some famous inventor you heard about in 5th grade, it turns out he was up to his neck in patent lawsuits because inventions tended to be invented multiple times all within a short time span. For example, I had a summer job in 1979 at a weedwhacker factory. The industry was gearing up for a huge patent lawsuit that played out over the 1980s because the weedwhacker, the gardening implement that cuts down weeds with spinning fishing line, had been independently invented in 3 countries in a span of 3 weeks. Once monofilament fishing line was invented, the weedwhacker was inevitable.
If there was a common pattern in America of working class immigrants filing credible patent lawsuits against their WASP bosses, well, that would be interesting. But I've never heard of it.
"WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and he invented it to point out that Americans and Northwest Europeans tend to have fewer of the self-defeating cultural traits, such as clannishness, of more normal human cultures like, say, Sicilians or Pakistanis."
See also: "The persistence of “high trust” in Europe west of the Hajnal Line and the future of Western uniqueness in the 21st century"
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/the-persistence-of-high-trust-in-europe-west-of-the-hajnal-line-and-the-future-of-western-uniqueness-in-the-21st-century/
I think the study tells us more about the time period than anything else: low-hanging fruit in the decades following the Industrial Revolution.
Edit: And, of course, the Albion's Seed thesis, which really is a great catch by Steve.
Also, the purpose of a patent is not necessarily to innovate; it's to capitalize on a time-limited grant of monopoly status. I assume there's lots of crackpot or just not-very-good stuff with a patent attached to it.
Compare this with another dataset some like to use: publications of scientific-academic papers. They say:
"China and x, y, and z other countries are publishing x more scientific papers than before; Western Man is finished, and it's his own fault for being lazy, and he desperately needs morally superior immigrants. I am Vivek Ramaswamy, and I approve this message."
We must assume that there's "lots of crackpot or just not-very-good stuff" in scientific papers in many of these non-Western countries.
Many of the people producing them tend to be committing a soft kind of fraud, publishing without purpose. They are pursuing a sort of currency, but a far-different one than the tinkerer of 1870 who thought he'd made a better handle for a telegraph was aiming for.
Unfortunately, the same holds in Western academic publications as well, including in engineering and the sciences.
The authors look at both total patents and a list of significant patents put together by previous researchers (and get similar results). Apparently, patent analysis is a pretty mature field these days, kind of like baseball statistic analysis, so you can make use of previous scholars' work to sidestep a lot of the methodological problems. If Jones in 2010 published a list of the most significant patents based on some reasonable criteria that got quite a few citations and then Smith in 2015 publishes a revision of Jones' work that subsequently gets many citations, then you can pretty safely use Jones' database ... assuming neither Smith nor Jones were looking into the questions you are looking into.
You can pretty reasonably use other people's top 100 lists without too much worry about their biases as long as you are sure they weren't interested in questions you are interested in. For example, say, you are researcher into left-handedness and you want to know how many top musicians are left-handed. Well, you can look at the pictures in a guitar magazines Top 100 guitarist countdown and count the lefthanders. Unless there's some evidence that the editors were biased for or against lefthanders, their list should be basically fine for you to use.
But you do have to be aware of potential biases. Say you are looking at a list of baseball's top 100 pinchhitters of all time, and 40% are lefthanded. That doesn't prove that, say, lefthanders are especially good at jumping right into an activity without much warning. Instead, it's because managers prefer to use lefthanded pinchhitters against righthanded pitchers, who throw 60% or 70% of innings. So, there's a big bias in favor of keeping a lefthanded pinch hitter on the roster.
South Carolina also stands out for lack of surname diversity.
I suspect that South Carolina was kind of like a lowland, civilized version of highland Kentucky, with each county being dominated by a few aristocratic landowning families and you could not really get ahead in the county without marrying into, say, the Calhoun family, or whomever. So, South Carolina generated articulate, educated spokesmen for extreme ideologies of hierarchy, both racial and class. The white lower class residents in South Carolina tended to be from the most civilized parts of rural England where the class structure was most taken for granted.
In contrast, the highlanders were from the unsettled English-Scottish border region and were used to joining with their kin to fight for their rights, but also with quarreling with their kin and other neighbors. So they were much more fractious and divided over great political questions like slavery. They distrusted the lowland John C. Calhoun-like spokesmen for class subordination, and were likely to light out for the frontier in the Ozarks, Oklahoma, or Bakersfield.
South Carolina was like what would happen to the Highlands if the Hatfields and McCoys got educated and civilized and agreed to share power with each other at the expense of all the Smiths, Jones and Boones. And the Smiths, Jones, and Boones didn't think much of that idea at all.
I'd like to see a historical study of how many whites and which white social classes left the South for the frontier or elsewhere in the antebellum period. But my impression is the Southern economy was at least diversified enough to keep most of the white Southerners there and loyal, for whatever reasons, to the cause of the Southern planters and their cheap-labor/inherited-land economic model.
I believe I read here that according to genetic tests South Carolina is the state in which the highest percentage of self-identified whites have some black ancestry. Not that it’s anything earthshaking; only about 10% of SC whites are mixed in this way, and the percentage of black ancestry is almost always in the low single digits.
Great piece. I have noted elsewhere that there are tons of in-your-face examples from pretty recent history/business that runs totally contrary to the contention that diversity is an essential ingredient to success. In fact, I cannot think of any example of a successful organization that from its founding looked like a delegation from the UN. More likely the core group behind these enterprises either looks like a collection of mostly white high school jocks or the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.
It also seems bizarre how on the one hand economists tend to look at human inputs into the economy as interchangeable to justify mass immigration, but on the other hand also insist racial and ethnic backgrounds provide some essential spice that needs to be carefully calibrated for an optimal economic stew.
Low levels of immigration would allow for selection of foreigners most likely to fit into the WEIRD framework that has worked well for us. High levels means less successful cultural traits are prevalent enough to erode the qualities that not only helped our nation succeed but also American-ness itself. There is a poignant line in Morrissey's song "We'll Let You know" from 1992(!) where he ends with "we are the last truly British people you will ever know." We aren't at that point in the US yet but it's on the horizon.
To be fair, datasets of unicorn founders do look very surname-diverse: https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unicorns-immigrant-founders/
Tech can now sort together extremely high IQ males from all around the world (but still predominantly Northern Europe, Ashkenazim, Indians and East Asians) so I think many people assume innovation must always have been like that. But before say 1900 the world was simply much less sorted for IQ, thus increasing the relative importance of creative minorities like dissenting Protestants.
Well, the Dennis Hopper character in True Romance pointed out how diverse Sicilians are!
My guess is that Sicilians tend to have a lot of genes and culture left over from the Roman Empire's big importation of Eastern Mediterraneans from places like Syria, whereas
Rome appears to have been indigenous Italian in 600 BC, then heavily Eastern in 100 AD, then back to indigenous Italian in 800 AD. Apparently, with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the city folk in Rome left or died, and the city was slowly repopulated over the centuries by the native farmers from the surrounding hinterlands whose ancestors had founded the Roman Republic.
Sicilian immigrants in America "did build that." Their building and craft skills ennobled a great many cities.
For a few centuries (I'm too lazy to look it up), Sicily was ruled by Muslims, presumably Arabs. IIRC, Razib Khan has noted that studies can detect that element in Sicilians' DNA.
Thanks for this, Steve. I guessed correctly before I got to the summary that the paper was going to suffer the same flaw as all of the McKinsey pro-diversity work: they find a correlation between profitable companies and their "diverse" workforce, and assume the causation is diversity->good things without any further investigation.
Fascinating article. Having been in two econ doctoral programs, one on each coast I can assure you that economics is anything but a settled discipline and far from a 'science'.
Never really thought about this. I always attributed this phenomenon to the combination of temperature and humidity. Forced to stay indoors and tinkering when the bible wasn't being read versus sleeping mid day and expending little energy enjoying the easily achieved bounties of food and drink.
Hmm.
> We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. <
No you didn't. Not even by your own terms.
This is utterly foul. This is some of the most slimy, obsequious--and open--lying yet. No iSteve level debunking required. A nanoseconds' reflection: more patents from counties with growing industry that draw immgrants (with different surnames), duh. That whole "industrial revolution thing"--yeah, I think i've heard of that.
I'll never understand the willingness to prostitute oneself like this. I've said a raft of stupid/wrong shit over my life. But I have never--and am just constitutionally opposed to--happily swallowing and spewing bullshit. These guys decided--*chose to*--give "diversity!" a big wet sloppy blow job--deep throat and swallowing. They are pathetic faggotty dick sucking scum. They should be kicked out of America, the West. They do not belong among honest decent people.
This is the key issue. We have a host of people now in the West--some from white hostile outgroups, Jews, Muslims, the Mamdani types, etc. etc. and some utopian, virtue signaling, yard signing, obsequious, diversity deep-throating, lemmings--who are simply hostile to maintaining Western civilization.
We are simply incompatible. Let them have their rainbow hued, surname diverse utopia. But they have no right to drag down and destroy *our* nations, our civilization.
For ourselves and our posterity ... let's get away from them--by any means necessary--and survive.
Your comment reminded me: 95% of modern inventions and processes came from behind the monolithically occidental Hajnal lines.
It's a slippery argument: Enrico Fermi was a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant and Robert Oppenheimer was first-generation Ashkenazi German, therefore Diversity works!
Wow. How do you really feel? :-)
When keeping their jobs depends on spewing crap, most people spew crap. The most disturbing aspect to me is the symbiotic relationship between these kinds of researchers and journalists who want to cite “evidence” that diversity is our strength. I can imagine the articles now saying that “research shows” a diverse population leads to more innovation, when the question at hand is whether ICE should be deporting illegals.
"If having Corleones move into your county doesn’t boost your trust of your neighbors, I don’t know what would!"
I was standing in line for a tea and I actually did laugh out loud
To be fair, Sicilian entrepreneur Michael Corleone made his family business more innovative by increasing its surname diversity, bringing in an Adams and a Hagen.
An interesting coincidence (?), just as Mario Puzo was writing his fiction about the Corleone family in 1968, the Corleonesi, mobsters in the Sicilian town of Corleone, in 1968 set off on a hyper-violent attempt to take over the entire mafia in Sicily by murdering anybody who stood in their way. Before the rise of the Corleonesi, Sicilian mobsters had been fairly restrained about impinging on each other's traditional turf.
The Corleonesi murdered so many other mafia in the 1970s and the 1980s that when the end of the Cold War removed America's need to to keep Italy from electing a Communist government based on its strength in the north by letting the Christian Democrats make get out the vote deals with mobsters in the south, some brave Italian prosecutors, several of whom were murdered, got non-Corleonesi mobsters to drop their traditional omerta code and testify against the Corleonesi in court.
I have an Italian-from-Italy friend who just about foams at the mouth with rage at the cute winky attitudes of Americans toward the mafia. She associates them with Giuseppe Di Matteo.
A longtime commenter at The Phora said the same thing. He grew up in NYC and his godly Italian mother would slap him anytime she thought he had made the wrong acquaintance.
I remember a lot of reviewers grouching about the nihilism of Goodfellas when it came out, versus Puzo's completely fictionalized version of dignified old men in tuxedos.
Mario Puzo did not speak Italian and had no firsthand knowledge of the Mafia when he wrote The Godfather. He was a magazine writer who had gotten deeply in debt and figured that writing a novel would be the way out. This required extensive research, given his lack of firsthand knowledge.
Puzo was lazy. My grandfather would spit when he or Coppola were mentioned. He spent 50 years working in Bed Sty at their government-funded housing, being mugged and robbed by the thugs, then the mafia would take half his paycheck. He had to get their permission to move him and his wife and four girls out, after a terrible incident. The day they released him, he had a stroke and never walked or talked coherently again. So, f**k the mafia and its fan boys. Do you feel the same about other urban crime enterprises? All he ever wanted was a tomato farm. Immigrant warlords always victimize their own. See, the Afghani, Somalis, and Kennedys.
My proudest moment was helping put Dominick DiPaolo in prison for using Union#1, the buggywhip local turned ILGPNWU, to infiltrate southern factories and trade shows and use the bosses to make us pay them money, to keep real unions out (who are little better). I testified in federal court, thinking of my grandfather. Of course I was blacklisted and ended up washing dishes in restaurants. My car tires were slashed. I would do it again. Of course, they just regrouped under SEIU.
I don't think entertainment matters more than human lives.
Similarly, I don't think academic economists, doctors, or lawyers should ever be paid for their testimony. They are already paid by taxpayers, whether their institution is public or private, to do the job of research and teaching. Yet most of the best-known ones do virtually none or no teaching and use our public institutions to make 6-7 figure salaries in addition to their faculty pay every year -- working hours we are paying them. If they were in other types of work, that would be fraud. You want to earn off your insights and inventions? Join the public marketplace and stop double-dipping the taxpayers.
It is an interesting question: when are experts reliable, and when are they not? This goes back to on the one hand political convictions having a religious quality, and on the other that political convictions are ALWAYS informed by "experts". So every different political conviction is informed by different "experts". Economy as a "science" plays a pivotal role in undergirding specific political convictions. So it's not that surprizing to see DEI-adjacent economic "experts".
Usually hard sciences are more resistant to being gobbled up by political religion. But there are tons of exceptions - see the problems Galileo had with his heliocentricity, Lysenkoism in Stalinist Soviet Union, or more recently, the "climate science" and covid-19 mania here in the West.
Another good one, Steve. too bad the rest of taki-mag is failing apart after Cole (and others?) left
Jim Goad was a big loss.