Note that this article is from 2007 about a book published in 2000. I think it’s safe to say that whatever Putnam observed in the 90s is largely irrelevant today.
Edit: it may actually be referring to a study published in 2007. I can’t tell because the article doesn’t link the study.
The article itself was from 2007, per the copyright notice. I was really confused by all of the time elements until that came into specific relief. The data are from 2000, meaning before 9/11, so I’m not seeing much utility for how this pertains to life 25 years later.
What has me confused is it seems to be referring to some “new study” but doesn’t cite it, and I can’t find that study online.
Even if the study existed, and even if it were somehow accurate, that would have been 18 years ago and wholly irrelevant today. And those are big "if"s.
I don’t really know what the post is trying to discuss. Unfortunately, the poster seems to be completely silent on the subject beyond posting the link to the article.
diversity causes people to withdraw from society
…
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam – famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement – has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.
when you read this, there should be a 100 ft tall flashing red neon sign in your brain that immediately lights up saying “correlation is not causation”.
if you don’t have a neon sign like that, you should put some effort into getting better at media literacy. because this is like, importing lemons from Mexico causes fewer highway fatalities in the US level of bad analysis.
as one example, you might have a community with low civic engagement (for whatever reason). people tend to dislike living in such a community, so they move somewhere else. this drives down housing prices. that means people who are less wealthy move in to the community. those less wealthy people are more likely to be non-white, or recent immigrants, etc.
that’s a plausible explanation for the correlation, but with a causation that is in the exact opposite direction of what’s being claimed here - low civic engagement causing increased diversity.
There could also be an effect of loss fatigue at play. If a community is homogenous, it’s likely that elections are handing more people ‘wins’ each time, than if it’s very diverse and the minority groups whose priorities never win start to feel that civic participation is pointless.
Or it could also be an effect of the dominant group in a diverse area intentionally throwing up barriers in order to discourage civic engagement by minorities, i.e. voter suppression.
Both of those are things we’ve directly observed in US society, and neither is an argument against diversity, it’s an argument against winner-take-all government.
Shameless plug for Spurious Correlations … the latest is Amazon’s stock price plotted against the popularity of the name Stevie.
I would believe there was a correlation for charity and volunteer work by well-to-do white people, but seeing as most of the volunteers in my community appear to be minorities, and as a white person who volunteers, I can’t say I care about preventing this “issue” while red-lining is effectively making a come back.
Let those gated community schmucks fail to up-keep their privatized infrastructure while Karen embezzles their HoA funds and breathes down their necks over every little thing. Their presence often makes other volunteers and people in need un-comfortable anyways.
This article is old enough to buy cigarettes. Others have cogently gone into issues with the study, but the data themselves are a quarter-century old. This is more of a historical question mark than politics.
