Here’s a new slogan “diversity doesn’t matter”*

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Jun 12, 2023

Richard Hanania has a new post out: Diversity Really is Our Strength. (Noah Carl has a reply here, and Seb Jensen has a reply here) His piece is part-troll, part-serious in the usual Hanania way. But he has a hypothesis in the post worth examining with data. He examines a plot like this one:

And notes:

It seems that all advanced nations basically converge on some kind of social democracy, and end up mediocre given their potential. The countries that are major outliers in the positive direction, that is, much richer than you would expect from their IQ, tend to have some weird quirks that hinder this natural process. UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are all monarchies with oil, and Singapore is a kind of soft dictatorship. Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Macao draw in tourist dollars and provide banking services for the globally wealthy.

Interestingly, ethnolinguistic diversity seems to be common among overperformers. Citizens in Qatar make up less than 15% of the population. In contrast, if you look at countries under the line, many seem to suffer from an excess of homogeneity. The worst performing country relative to IQ is easily North Korea. It’s probably the most socially cohesive nation in the world too. Had they had some diversity, perhaps it would’ve been harder to form a totalitarian state based on a socialist ideology that starved its own people. There would’ve been too much discord and instability for one family to turn everyone into slaves.

So it’s a straightforward idea, namely, that ethnic diversity has some incremental positive effect on country wealth controlling for IQ. The theory is not impossible, but consider the basic plot between ethnic fractionalization and GNIpc:

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