00:00:30.000hey everybody how's it going thanks for joining me this afternoon i am oren mcintyre before we
00:00:44.320get started today i just want to remind you that one of the ways we keep the lights on around here
00:00:47.740is of course subscriptions to blaze tv so if you want to support this show everything we're doing
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00:01:05.780$20 off your subscription today. Imagine for a moment that you are a Harvard professor,
00:01:14.520perfectly liberal. You have all the assumptions that you'd expect from that type of, you know,
00:01:19.840at least center left professor at Harvard. And as you're doing your research on questions about
00:01:26.420social cohesion and diversity, you find something terrifying, something that ultimately shakes your
00:01:33.260entire worldview. What if you discover as a good academic following the questions where they lead
00:01:39.560that actually diversity is not our strength, that the little platitudes that have been uttered over
00:01:46.600and over again since you were a child that have been echoed in the halls of every school you've
00:01:50.920ever attended, that you yourself have probably taught on a regular basis to the students at your
00:01:55.980prestigious university. It's all a lie. And the evidence you're collecting shows that it's a lie.
00:02:02.440This is what happened to the social scientist Robert Putnam, who is famous for his book,
00:02:09.420Bowling Alone, which talked about the degradation of our social fabric in the United States,
00:02:16.320because we don't have that civic virtue anymore. We don't have that civic engagement. People are
00:02:22.360not out there forming organizations, building the bonds that made small government, Republican
00:02:28.180government possible. But he also did additional research into the nature of that social fabric,
00:02:37.820those social bonds. And when he discovered that, in fact, diversity radically decreased social
00:02:46.020trust he was very worried and he actually delayed the release of that data for six years so that he
00:02:54.740could double check it all to make sure that nothing was wrong with the methodology because
00:02:58.620surely this couldn't be right there must have been some mistake and he was very worried about
00:03:02.880the idea of this getting out there he knew what kind of implications it had he knew what it would
00:03:09.160do to his reputation and yet ultimately he could not escape the fact that the data was the data
00:03:15.580and the facts were the facts and whatever you might say about guys like robert putnam ultimately
00:03:21.640he cared more about the scholarship than he did the politics now he delayed it for a number of
00:03:27.500years so no credit there but ultimately he realized that having the facts out there was
00:03:32.260more important than how they made him feel about those facts and i love using guys like robert
00:03:37.620putnam because they help us to understand a very complicated issue from a source who ultimately is
00:03:43.980hard to assail you know there's a reason that when we talk about national identity i use someone like
00:03:48.700samuel huntington a guy who was a center-left harvard professor himself because even though
00:03:54.380huntington had kind of the priors that would make him work for jimmy carter he said things about
00:03:59.720american identity that often sound radically right-wing today many people on the right many
00:04:05.100classical liberals or you know establishment conservatives would find samuel huntington's
00:04:11.260assertion about American identity and Anglo identity being the center of that as preposterous
00:04:17.660pagan even but ultimately he's not a bomb thrower he's not a radical he isn't even right wing and0.58
00:04:25.880so he becomes a very useful source because if this guy can say it then we should be able to say it
00:04:31.700Robert Putnam has the same air about him obviously this is not a man of the right he was so terrified
00:04:38.940of his own research that he hid it away for half a decade to double check it just in case he got
00:04:44.600something wrong so this is not a guy who is enthusiastic about discovering the truth here
00:04:49.580but it's the truth nonetheless and so that makes him a very useful way to discuss it
00:04:55.600his frame here is very useful because it's obviously not radical it's not a bomb thrower
00:05:00.360this is no you know racialized white nationalist or something like that this is a harvard professor
00:05:06.760who hated the results he ultimately got, but was honest enough to eventually publish them.
00:05:12.880So today I want to go over the research paper where he finally released this information.
00:05:17.580It's called E Pluribus Unum. It was inside of research journals. The whole thing is about 38
00:05:24.580pages. We're not going to be able to go through all of it. I've highlighted the sections that are
00:05:29.280about the difficult findings he had on diversity. Now, he also goes about all the ways which
00:05:34.840diversity might help us. It's all these things about, well, ultimately, the varied experiences
00:05:40.420and all that stuff you'd expect. So if you want to read the whole paper, by all means do.
00:05:45.840Very easy to find online. It's not that long. But we're going to be staying laser focused on
00:05:51.800about the 10 pages here where he talks about the actual effects of diversity and the negative
00:05:57.860effects. Because again, if it's coming from Robert Putnam, a source that's very, very hesitant
00:06:02.880to explore this issue or at least share what he found about this issue then it feels like it has
00:06:08.440a lot of legitimacy again not a bomb thrower not a radical not even a right winger just someone who
00:06:13.840is painfully but eventually sharing the research that he did and the conclusions that are unavoidable
00:06:21.700no matter how much he wishes to avoid them all right so starting here about page five of this
00:06:31.160paper immigration and diversity foster social isolation in the theoretical toolkit of social
00:06:38.540science we find two diametrically opposed perspectives on the effects of diversity
00:06:43.260on social connections the first usually labeled the contact hypothesis argues that diversity
00:06:50.100fosters inter-ethnic tolerance and social solidarity as we have more contact with people
00:06:55.920who are unlike us, we overcome our initial hesitation and ignorance and come to trust
00:07:00.940them more. Some of the most striking evidence in support of the contact hypothesis came originally
00:07:05.940from the famous study of American soldiers during the Second World War. White soldiers were asked
00:07:11.220how they would feel about having black soldiers serving in the same platoon with them. As table
00:07:15.520one shows, among white soldiers who in fact had no contact with black soldiers, most opposed the
00:07:20.560idea. On the other hand, white soldiers who had been assigned to units with black soldiers were
00:07:25.320much more relaxed about the idea of racial integration. Evidence of this sort suggests
00:07:31.160to social psychologists, beginning with Gordon Allport in the 1950s, the optimistic hypothesis
00:07:37.760that if we have more contact with people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds, or at least more
00:07:42.800contact in the right circumstances, we will begin to trust one another more. More formally, according
00:07:49.120to this theory. Diversity reduces ethnocentric attitudes and fosters outgroup trust and
00:07:55.700solidarity. If black and white children attend the same school, for example, race relations will
00:08:00.220improve. All right. So we see here he's laying out what is kind of the optimistic, hopeful idea of0.92
00:08:07.720racial integration. All we need is exposure to each other. As long as we just get people in the
00:08:12.620same place at the same time, eventually they'll discover, hey, we're all kind of human. We're all
00:08:17.960kind of the same uh we we can get along it's not that big a deal and your inherent present
00:08:23.080prejudice your inherent ethnocentrism towards your own people that's gonna melt away and as he says
00:08:28.680kind of the the big evidence that people tended to point to for this contact hypothesis was the
00:08:34.700integration possible integration of troops in during world war ii obviously they weren't all
00:08:39.780integrated during world war ii but the possibility of that and you can see the chart that he's citing
00:08:44.340here. If you'd had, you know, a certain amount of contact, if you had already been familiar with
00:08:51.380black soldiers in your unit, you are more likely to not care about the suggestion that they'd be
00:08:57.620totally integrated. And the hypothesis is we can just take this experience from the military and
00:09:03.460you can apply it to schools, churches, workplaces, wherever it is. As long as we are getting this
00:09:09.720exposure to other peoples other races other ways of life this is going to overall increase our0.95
00:09:15.020ability to get along and see each other as equal and more importantly be less oriented towards
00:09:20.440only the experience of our own people of the people that look like us
00:09:24.840this logic and the sort of evidence represented in table one was important to part of the legal
00:09:33.060case that led to the united states supreme court to require racial desegregation in the famous
00:09:37.800Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. So this is not just some random theory. This is actually
00:09:44.660a very important piece of data because it was used in one of the most critical landmark cases
00:09:50.720in United States history, Brown v. Board of Education, that desegregated the schools.
00:09:55.060So this is not just some abstract theory. The fact that this study was conducted and taken
00:10:00.420seriously was then used to make real case law that changed the entire nature of the United States,
00:10:07.620especially starting with the education system but throughout the entire country for progressives
00:10:13.200the contact theory is alluring but i think it's fair to say that most though not all empirical
00:10:17.660studies have tended instead to support what we call conflict conflict theory which suggests that
00:10:24.500for various reasons but above all contention over limited resources diversity fosters outgroup
00:10:30.600distrust and in-group solidarity. So while we want to believe that exposure contact will increase
00:10:40.960tolerance, will reduce ethnocentrism, in reality, all of the data, despite what progressives want
00:10:49.000to believe, what Putnam himself wants to believe, is showing us that actually more diversity,
00:10:55.480more contact with other groups fosters outgroup distrust it makes us more distressful of the
00:11:02.700people we're being exposed to and more and causes to have more solidarity with people who look like
00:11:08.340us who are part of our tribe so the evidence points to exactly the opposite that actually
00:11:15.220the very basis for which brown versus board of education was ruled turned out to be wrong
00:11:21.800and if you've been in a public school you probably are familiar with how poorly that went on this
00:11:28.740theory one uh on this theory the more we're brought into physical proximity with people
00:11:34.200of other races or ethnic backgrounds the more we stick to our own and the less we trust the other
00:11:39.940obviously he lists a number of citations this is a scholarly a scholarly uh article uh so i will
00:11:46.780leave you to look those citations up but they are there if you need them the the evidence that
00:11:52.020diversity and solidarity are negatively negatively correlated controlling for many potential
00:11:57.400confounding variables comes from many different settings and he lists a number of the settings
00:12:02.360here across work groups in the united states as well in europe internal heterogeneity in terms of
00:12:08.520age profession professional background ethnicity and tenure and other factors is generally socially
00:12:14.620is generally associated with lower group cohesion. Across countries, greater ethnic heterogeneity
00:12:23.000seems to be associated with lower social trust. Again, lots of citations here, so feel free if
00:12:31.040you need to get the actual studies, the actual numbers, they're all right there. Across local
00:12:37.440areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, and Canada, and Britain, greater ethnic diversity
00:12:42.940is associated with lower trust, lower social trust, and at least in some cases, lower investment
00:12:49.360in public goods. That's going to be really important here. It's not just the trust between
00:12:54.100the groups. It also means each group is less likely to invest in the public good, because if
00:12:59.680the public good is not understood as a collective good, but instead the public good is a place to
00:13:05.020be plundered by different warring tribes, then there's no reason to invest in it. If anything
00:13:10.500i build in the public domain is going to be taken over by my enemy then i'm not going to build it in
00:13:16.460the public domain i'm going to build it in the private domain and we've seen this over and over
00:13:19.440again why do people have more swimming pools and fewer people go to common pools why do people have
00:13:25.220all of these things that they hide behind gated communities why are they all these amenities that
00:13:29.920people no longer want to share with the public but they want them in private you know tennis courts
00:13:33.740pickleball courts, pools, whatever, parks. The reason is because they don't trust them to be
00:13:40.900in the public domain. They believe that other people will show up and ruin them. And so it's
00:13:45.960better to build them in a private place where only the people they want can actually use that social
00:13:50.020capital. So this diversity reduces the likelihood that we will invest in common services, common
00:13:56.900goods. Among Peruvian microcredit cooperatives, ethnic heterogeneity is associated with higher
00:14:08.900default rates. Across Kenyan school districts, ethno-linguistic diversity is associated with less
00:14:15.420voluntary fundraising. And in Himalayan Pakistan, clan, religious, and political diversity are
00:14:21.820linked with a failure of collective infrastructure maintenance. So here we see in Peru, we get
00:14:30.520credit defaults when we have a higher level of ethnic diversity. In Kenya, we have a less1.00
00:14:37.320likelihood to actually be able to raise funds for schooling if it turns out that there are more
00:14:43.300people speaking more languages in the area. In Pakistan, we have the fact that people are0.87
00:14:48.320unwilling to maintain those public goods, that public infrastructure, because they see it as
00:14:53.400being used by their enemies. Again, across American census tracker, greater ethnic heterogeneity
00:15:00.120is associated with lower rates of carpooling, a social practice that embodies trust and
00:15:05.440reciprocity. So again, even just these spontaneous goods, not even the formal ones like building
00:15:11.180bridges or roads or caring for a library or raising money to improve education, but just the basic
00:15:17.100practice of getting in a car with other people who are all heading the same place so you're not
00:15:20.880burning extra gas and putting extra miles in your car and you get some you know extra time with
00:15:25.140people who you like to spend time with that goes down in american neighborhoods where there is
00:15:29.500more ethnic diversity the more diversity you have the less likely people are to engage in pro-social
00:15:35.900behavior within experimental game settings such as the prisoner's dilemma or ultimate ultimatum
00:15:41.940games players who are more different from one another regardless of whether or not they actually
00:15:46.360know one another are more likely to defect or cheat such results have been reported in many
00:15:52.020countries from uganda to the united states so i've talked i talk a lot about game theory uh on this
00:15:57.700show and we know the prisoner's dilemma is you know the one where you have to choose whether to
00:16:02.700cooperate or defect uh for each other's benefit or for individual what you think will be individual
00:16:08.900uh benefit that turns out to be the worst possible strategy and in that game if there's more
00:16:14.620diversity if the two players even if they don't know anything about each other all they know is
00:16:18.400that they're different if the two players are more diverse they're more likely to defect they're more
00:16:23.200likely to cheat there's less likelihood that they will actually cooperate and trust each other for
00:16:28.200the benefit of everyone involved within the union northern army in the american civil war the
00:16:35.020casualty rate was high very high and the risks of punishment for desertion were very low so the only
00:16:40.600powerful force inhibiting the rational response of desertion was loyalty to one's fellow soldiers
00:16:45.920virtually all of whom were other white males across companies in the union army the greater
00:16:50.240internal heterogeneity the higher the desertion rate so this is a really interesting one right
00:16:55.820because the theory originally from that uh you know from that contact theory was because blacks
00:17:01.920and whites had spent more time with each other in different units in the army they were more likely
00:17:06.400to be okay within the full integration of the army right so their exposure increases trust but
00:17:11.840actually what he's showing here is for instance in the civil war if you had a union army company in
00:17:17.780which there was some level of diversity some level of mix between black and white soldiers
00:17:22.140the level of desert desertion rate went way up because you were no longer felt loyal to the
00:17:28.220people around you when everyone looked the same when everyone felt like they were the same they
00:17:33.440were more likely to stick together and hold together in that very tough situation but the
00:17:37.840minute you add diversity the minute you add this difference you don't get strength you get disunity
00:17:43.740you get people who are fleeing the conflict because they look to the person left or right and
00:17:48.380they say they're not like me i'm not dying for this that uniformity is what drives the ability
00:17:54.160to stay in the foxhole or in you know this case you know stand there uh you know in in uh formation
00:18:00.320and fire when otherwise you would flee because the danger is so high advocates of the conflict
00:18:09.540and contact theories clearly disagree about the balance of empirical evidence but in their shared
00:18:14.800focus on ethnocentric attitudes they share one fundamental assumption namely that in-group trust
00:18:20.460and out-group trust are negatively correlated i believe this assumption is unwarranted and may
00:18:25.780have obscured some of the most interesting and unexpected consequences of diversity for social
00:18:30.880capital in order to explain why i need to remind you of an important distinction how now commonly
00:18:36.800made in the field of social capital that is the distinction between bonding social capital ties
00:18:41.940to people who are like you in some important way and bridging social capital ties to people who
00:18:47.220are unlike you in some important way so we have bonding social capital where okay people who are
00:18:53.340like me where we have a homogeneous society we have a non-diverse society uh that's that's what
00:18:59.760bonding social capital brings people together bridging social capital is one that helps people
00:19:04.640from different communities more diverse communities come together right people who are unlike so many
00:19:10.880so my bonding social uh capital consists of my ties to other white male elderly professors and
00:19:18.180my bridging social capital reflects my ties to people of different generations or different race
00:19:22.960or different gender. Too often without really thinking about it, we assume that bridging
00:19:27.780social capital and bonding social capital are inversely correlated to a kind of zero sum
00:19:33.540relationship as if I've lost as if lots of bonding ties, I must have fewer bridging ties
00:19:40.280and vice versa. As an empirical matter, I believe the assumption is often false. In other words,
00:19:45.700high bonding might as well be compatible with high bridging and low bonding with low bridging.0.63
00:19:50.360In the United States, for example, whites who have more non-white friends also have more white friends.
00:19:55.560This article is not the place for an extended discussion on that empirical issue,
00:19:59.720but the theoretical point helps to clarify the relationship between diversity and social capital.
00:20:04.660So what he's trying to say is just because you have one form of social capital doesn't mean that the other one is gone.
00:20:09.660It's not entirely zero-sum between the two.
00:20:12.320You could both boast your solidarity with people in your in-group and boast your solidarity with people in your out-group.
00:20:19.580that's not entirely impossible, but apparently there's some level of debate inside the academic
00:20:24.960community when it comes to these terms. Obviously, that's going to be more inside baseball, but I
00:20:29.600thought it was worth reading all of the methodology stuff because, again, Putnam is a serious academic
00:20:35.720here, and on the show, we're not just trying to give you the McNuggets. We're not just trying to
00:20:41.220give you the headlines. We're not just trying to give you the slogans. I want you to understand.
00:20:44.820I want you to get a firmer grasp on the work being done here, because, again, this man is going through a painstaking process of admitting something he really doesn't want to acknowledge.
00:20:55.340And so I think it's worth going through and talking about how he gets there and the different methodological basis on which he produces this data.
00:21:04.660For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean, like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds.
00:21:12.520Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow.
00:21:16.840It means their safety and your piece of...
00:24:45.760That is both bonding and bridging capital.
00:24:48.420We might label this possibility constrict theory, a term suggested by my colleague, Abby Williamson.
00:24:56.220I am now present some initial evidence.
00:25:00.240I now present some initial evidence from the United States on the issue of how diversity and by implication immigration affects social capital.
00:25:09.580So obviously this is going to be huge for us right now, right?
00:25:11.640Like this is very important because we are having a debate right now, especially on the
00:25:16.580right in the United States about the nature of immigration and the classic line for the
00:25:22.140Republican Party, for the GOP, for the right, for conservatives for a long time has been
00:25:26.040illegal immigration, good legal immigration, bad.
00:25:37.280You're always going to be a positive contributor to the community, right?
00:25:41.220We have a lot of guys running around saying every immigrant is just as American as you are, and we can have as many good immigrants as we want because ultimately this is not going to have a negative impact on our society.0.64
00:25:54.140So the question of does the presence of immigrants at all, even if they're great people, even if they're the smartest, you know, highest agency, the people who are going to pay the most taxes in the world from around all these countries, India and everywhere else, even if it's the best of the best that we're told, which it's not.0.71
00:26:14.720But even if it's true, even if we grant the premise of this ridiculous argument that we're only getting the most high IQ people, that they really are sending their best, even if that's true, is it actually good for the United States? Does it actually have a deleterious effect on our community?0.99
00:26:29.860That's the question that we have to answer. Because the question of should people be allowed to immigrate to the United States is got to be based on whether it's good for the United States. And if it hurts the United States for any reason, no matter what it is, no matter how much you don't like the facts, no matter how much you cry and call people pagans and call people fascists online, the question is, does it benefit the United States or not?0.83
00:26:52.920And if the answer is no, no matter how ugly the reason why, we have to address it, because we have to care more about our country than our ideology.
00:27:00.900We have to care about more our country than our rhetoric.
00:27:03.720We have to care more about our country than the bumper sticker slogan that you watched that Sean Hannity vomited up.
00:27:10.280You actually have to care about the facts and evidence.
00:27:13.100the evidence comes from a large nationwide survey the social capital community benchmark survey
00:27:20.580carried out in 2000 with a total sample size of roughly 30 000 embedded within the nationwide
00:27:26.720sample is a representative national sample of 3 000 as well as a smaller sample representative
00:27:31.660of 41 very different communities across the united states ranging from large metropolitan areas like
00:27:38.160Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington,
00:27:44.620rural South Dakota, and Kanaha Valley in the mountains of West Virginia. Sorry if I just
00:27:51.780mispronounced your hometown. While these 41 sites vary with respect to geographic scope from
00:27:58.880two inner city neighborhoods to several large rural estates, for the most part,
00:28:04.200they represent metropolitan areas these sites are shown in figure two and table two these
00:28:09.440community sites uh site uh different these community sites differ in many ways size economic
00:28:15.940profile region education level etc but for our purposes it is important that they differ greatly
00:28:21.740in their ethnic diversity for example los angeles and san francisco roughly 30 to 40 percent white
00:28:26.700while among the most most ethnically diverse human uh habitations in history whereas in our rural
00:28:33.300South Dakota County 95% were white celebrating diversity means inviting a few Norwegians
00:28:39.880to the annual Swedish picnic another important methodological feature of this survey is that
00:28:46.120it was conducted simultaneously with the national census of 2000 and virtually every interview in
00:28:53.000our survey has good was geocoded i.e for the vast majority of our respondents we know exactly where
00:28:59.900they live, and thus we know the demographic characteristics of the consensus track within
00:29:05.040which they live. Thus, we know not only the race, education, income, marital status, and so on of
00:29:12.200our respondents, but also the race, education, income, marital status, and so on of their
00:29:17.580neighbors. The variability of the thousands of census tracts within which our respondents live
00:29:23.640is even greater than the variability across the 41 sample communities. Some respondents live in
00:29:29.360neighborhoods that are almost entirely homogeneous, while others live in neighborhoods that are
00:29:33.800extremely diverse in every respect. For our detailed and most sophisticated analysis presented
00:29:38.680below, we use the individual as the unit of analysis, linking his or her attitudes and
00:29:44.140behaviors to the characteristic of his or her neighborhood. For expository purposes only, I begin
00:29:49.540by using the community as a unit of analysis, showing how the diversity of a community is linked
00:29:55.040to the average level of social capital in that community.
00:29:58.560So again, a lot of methodological stuff there,
00:30:00.720but I left it in because I want you to understand
00:30:02.240what he's doing here, why this data is so thorough,
00:30:23.220into like really thorough cross tabs and they're able to compare and contrast this very reliably
00:30:29.160and so you're not just uh entirely uh dependent on like the self-reporting of people as you often
00:30:35.560are in social science they have the hard data about the communities where these people live
00:30:39.820one last method methodological preliminary for present purposes we adopt the basic fourfold
00:30:48.780categorization of race and ethnicity that is used in the current census hispanic non-hispanic white
00:30:54.800non-hispanic black and asian this classification scheme like all other schemes is socially
00:30:59.660constructed that is not god-given or biological or timeless or unchanging or uniquely defensible
00:31:05.680indeed the social construct of ethnicity will be an important part of my concluding remarks however
00:31:11.780this typology has two advantages for present purposes first it's widely used in public private
00:31:17.920discourse in contemporary America. And second, it allows us to treat respondents from our survey
00:31:22.360and their neighborhoods from the census in parallel ways. I begin with probably the least
00:31:28.100surprising, but in some respects, the most misleading finding from our survey. Figure three
00:31:33.600arrays are 41 communities according to their ethnic diversity and the average level of interracial
00:31:41.100trust expressed by our correspondents in those communities. We asked every respondent how much
00:31:48.700he or she trusts whites, blacks, Asian Americans, and Hispanics or Latinos. And we know the
00:31:54.340respondent's own ethnicity. So this measure is simply the average trust expressed towards the
00:32:00.160other three ethnic categories. Obviously, figure three shows a strong positive correlation between
00:32:07.220interracial trust and ethnic homogeneity inter uh see how many i've said that word correctly
00:32:15.920about 15 times but i will mess it up at least five more times interracial trust is relatively high
00:32:21.620in homogeneous north dakota and relatively low uh in uh heterogeneous san francisco or los angeles
00:32:29.840the more ethnically diverse the people we live around the less we trust them
00:32:34.640the more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them.1.00
00:32:42.800That's really all there is there. This pattern may be distressing normatively, but it seems to be1.00
00:32:48.720consistent with conflict theory. Had we stopped our inquiry at this point, as previous studies
00:32:53.880of conflict and contact theory have done, we would have rejected contact theory, at least in the
00:32:58.760simplest form, and accepted conflict theory. However, as we shall see momentarily, the story
00:33:03.280is actually more complicated. So yes, we do understand that people who are in more diverse
00:33:10.020communities are less likely to trust people of other races. However, the story, as he hinted
00:33:16.100previously, is more complicated. That's true, but it's not the entire explanation for what's going
00:33:22.000on here. Figure four is directly comparable to figure three, except that here our measure of
00:33:30.720social capital is trust in people who live in your neighborhood. Because of de facto residential
00:33:35.900segregation, most American neighborhoods are of the same race as their own. And yet figure four
00:33:41.680shows virtually the same pattern. The differences across 41 sites are very substantial in absolute
00:33:48.320terms. In the highly diverse Los Angeles or San Francisco, for example, roughly 30% of inhabitants
00:33:54.040say that they trust their neighbors a lot. Whereas in ethnically homogenous communities like North0.90
00:33:58.760Dakota or South Dakota, 70 to 80 percent of inhabitants say the same. In more diverse
00:34:03.480communities, people trust their neighbors less. So again, the more people of diverse backgrounds1.00
00:34:11.440are in the same community, the less likely they are to trust each other, and not by small degrees.0.96
00:34:17.62030 percent of people in LA or San Francisco trust their neighbors, as where 70 to 80 percent of
00:34:25.280people in south dakota trust their neighbors now to be fair um putnam does go on to say later in
00:34:32.560this essay that obviously that's not the only factor involved uh obviously places like la and
00:34:38.380san francisco are also uh you know metropolitan they have a lot more people they have a higher
00:34:43.260density therefore they're going to have more interactions they often have higher crime rates
00:34:48.060all of these things now you could say that's because of the diversity but either way the point
00:34:52.060is there are factors beyond just racial diversity that are involved here. Cities are always more
00:34:58.180likely to be more dangerous and therefore drive down social trust. That's just how it operates.
00:35:03.580So it couldn't be that diversity is simply one of the factors contributing to that and not the
00:35:09.460entire story. So that's worth considering. But still, we see here that the impact of diversity
00:35:14.840is not just lower trust, but drastically lower trust, like less than half the amount of trust
00:35:21.320in your neighbors so how are you going to have a high trust society in a diverse area it seems
00:35:28.860like you can it seems like by definition diverse societies are low trust again this is not something
00:35:35.560that robert putnam wanted to say this is not something he wanted to discover
00:35:38.480figure five repeats the story but with uh one important difference now we ask about uh trust
00:35:50.740in people of the respondents own race how much do whites trust other whites blacks other blacks
00:35:56.520Hispanics other Hispanics Asians other Asians this figure charts an entirely unexpected correlation
00:36:03.340or it shows that in-group trust too is lower in diverse settings so this is the twist right this
00:36:10.600is why he was warning that it's more complicated that you can't just say well higher trust or you
00:36:16.520know more diverse communities just have more hostility to uh other you know peoples other
00:36:22.520races other communities other tribes because that's true it's true but it also means they0.99
00:36:27.740have lower trust in their own community which is a fascinating outcome right that in a more0.87
00:36:35.540diverse society it's not just that you become hostile to the other it's that you become hostile0.84
00:36:40.940to your own. You become less interested in your own. You don't trust your own community. You don't
00:36:47.640trust your own tribe. You don't trust your own people who look like you when you increase1.00
00:36:51.600diversity. Diversity reduces trust across the board, not just towards the outgroup.0.99
00:36:59.520So diversity not only increases hostility to your neighbor, makes you less likely to cooperate
00:37:05.300it with your neighbor. It also demoralizes the people who are there inside their own group.0.72
00:37:12.980They're less likely to trust their own group. They're less likely to socialize with their own
00:37:17.060group. So diversity does two things. It creates a more hostile environment. It lowers trust,
00:37:22.660but also creates an environment in which even the tribes themselves, the separate peoples,
00:37:28.600the different peoples who make up the diverse group, they become less likely to cooperate.
00:37:33.820And so it causes a failure of social capital, a meltdown of social capital across all possible domains.1.00
00:37:42.460Diversity isn't just a destroyer of communal strength because it introduces different people with different skin colors or different backgrounds or different religions or different cultures.0.96
00:37:53.960It melts down the will of even the people who share the same culture, the same religion, the same race to interact with each other.0.84
00:50:57.920Except apparently church attendance.1.00
00:51:00.440Diversity destroys everything about communities.0.89
00:51:04.320And again, you know, Robert Putnam did not want to write this.0.99
00:51:08.360You know, this was not the news that Robert Putnam wanted to deliver.
00:51:11.840This conclusion is provocative, but the graphic evidence presented thus far,
00:51:17.440bivariate aggregate analysis, is open to numerous objections.
00:51:23.780First, okay, and then he gets into his own concerns.
00:51:29.600And he'll talk about, again, this is where he talks about the fact that,
00:51:33.260like in LA is different from South Dakota because it's a city and there's more crime in cities and
00:51:38.960more congestion. It's more metropolitan. And so trust would naturally be lower even, you know,
00:51:43.300without the diversity. How much can we, you know, is it diversity? How much of it is the
00:51:48.200metropolitan nature of LA? It's hard to know. So it brings up all of these reasonable contentions,
00:51:53.640but still concludes that basically this data is overwhelmingly correct. So like I said,
00:52:00.680this paper is available online you could easily find it if you want to read the whole thing he
00:52:05.180does make take a swing at trying to say okay in the short term diversity is actually like uh poison
00:52:11.240and destroys your community but in the long term you know the people are different and they have
00:52:16.260different experiences and that brings in you know different factors so you know if you want to read
00:52:20.200the whole thing by all means go for it but i think we understand that ultimately uh you know this is
00:52:27.340a really, as he says, very provocative set of data, something that the author, the researcher
00:52:34.400did not want to believe, did not want to find, but nevertheless could not avoid the realities
00:52:39.660of. And so when we're discussing the role of immigration, when we're talking about American
00:52:45.540identity, we have to understand that it's not just some abstract discussion. It's not just
00:52:52.040that we reason ourselves into the idea that diversity is good, and therefore we should
00:52:56.880commit to it no matter what. If we care about the United States, if the purpose of our policies
00:53:02.760is to care for the people of the United States first and foremost, then we have to admit that
00:53:08.160under this research, it is clear that increasing diversity voluntarily hurts our society. And it
00:53:15.660doesn't just hurt the race relations of newcomers. It's not just that, you know, the Haitians or
00:53:21.120the Somalians or Indians who are coming in, we're going to have like more hostility towards them.0.99
00:53:26.880It's that actually we have more hostility to ourselves. That as those groups come in, even if they do nothing, their mere presence makes relationships inside the existing American polity more hostile. It makes Americans less likely to want to participate in public life.1.00
00:53:45.280And that's the key here. That's what Putnam is ultimately discovered throughout his work, that the reduction in public life is what's destroying the United States, that our form of government, our way of life was predicated on the idea that people regularly went out and formed associations, right?
00:54:01.920Alexis de Tocqueville talks about this in Democracy in America, that the reason that America is going to overcome its individualism, and he said that was a bad thing, American individualism, but he said the reason that America is going to be able to overcome individualism is because they have this drive for civic participation.
00:54:19.320They're always founding fraternal orders and unions and debate groups and, you know, churches and just these mutual aid societies that are constantly working to bind the people together in a way that otherwise wouldn't exist.
00:54:33.200But everything that Putnam is discovering is that diversity destroys that impulse.
00:54:37.600The more diverse America becomes, the less likely America is to be governed like a republic, which is why we're not governed like a republic anymore.0.92
00:54:45.560and that's why we're not going back to being a republic unless we understand this doesn't mean0.98
00:54:51.500you have to be mean to anybody doesn't mean you have to be hateful to anyone but this is a truth
00:54:58.240this is a verifiable sociological truth that the more diverse a population is the less likely it
00:55:08.900is create the conditions which allow for our very american system of government to function0.99
00:55:14.860so if you're trying to figure out why our government doesn't work if you're trying to
00:55:18.780figure out why it feels like everything is more expensive and you can't trust your neighbor
00:55:23.940and the politicians don't listen and things are only getting worse it's literally diversity1.00
00:55:29.180that's it it's not the only thing i shouldn't say that's it but it is the major contributing factor
00:55:36.120the higher the diversity gets the worse social cohesion gets the less likely you are to sacrifice
00:55:42.220for your neighbor, even if they look like you, even if they're not diverse, even if they're not
00:55:46.500from another country. You get less likely to sacrifice for the people who are part of your
00:55:53.560tribe when things become more diverse. And that's why it's so dangerous, because it impacts everything.1.00
00:55:59.640It destroys everything we need to make America what it is. It's not our strength. It's literally
00:56:05.720our weakness it creates weakness and the people pushing it well they're ultimately calling for
00:56:13.520more weakness in the united states whether they intend to or not that has to be first and foremost
00:56:18.100what we think about when we discuss immigration and american identity all right guys let's take
00:56:23.860a look at the questions of the people here real quick before you knew what a stock was you traded
00:56:30.420snacks cards turns that instinct to trade didn't disappear it just grew up with no minimums no
00:56:37.780monthly fees and 100 free trades td easy trade taps into that instinct because you are made
00:56:43.640to trade and td easy trade is made to help uh nikes says i oh and thank you very much generous
00:56:53.680donation he says i know trump's second term has been pretty disappointing but i still find it
00:56:58.320hard to believe that they're still on track to beat us in the midterms. If the U.S. is just
00:57:02.620experiencing mass amnesia, what these demons are trying to do to our country. Yeah, I mean,
00:57:08.040democracy is an incredibly high time preference system. People vote on what is happening to them
00:57:15.320right now. So yeah, I agree. Like, obviously, Trump is way better than Kamala Harris.
00:57:21.480Obviously, Trump is way better than every Republican of my lifetime. Anybody disputing
00:57:27.420these facts is insane like that's obviously true do i support donald trump over any democrat yeah
00:57:34.540100 but i don't get to vote for everybody i'm not dictator let me know if you figure out how
00:57:41.520to make that happen so that means we have to take voters behavior into account and that's why you
00:57:49.200should have never started this stupid war in iran and that's why you should have ended the one in0.72
00:57:53.140ukraine because they were inevitably going to lead us to this place which is why everybody warned0.99
00:57:59.660trump and all the people who told you to shut up panicking that this was going to happen and yeah
00:58:05.140now all those people have to pretend they were against the war because it's so obviously a
00:58:08.720disaster that it's just an indefensible position but the truth was they were running around telling
00:58:14.380everybody to shut up not because we were wrong but because they just could not think for themselves
00:58:21.120if you have somebody who's making a mistake the thing to do is to prevent them from making the
00:58:27.300mistake tell them no don't do it or get out of that as soon as possible this is a terrible idea
00:58:32.420it's not just if you love your child you don't just say yes i know you think you're superman
00:58:37.640run off the building i'm sure you can fly you run and you say stop stop no don't do it it's not that
00:58:44.660you don't love that person it's not that you a traitor to your child because you tried to stop
00:58:48.680them from running off the edge of the building. It's because you love that person. That's why
00:58:53.300you tell them to stop. That's why you force them to stop if you need to, because you care about
00:58:57.760them. The people who were warning Trump, don't do this, weren't traitors. They weren't panicans.
00:59:05.740They didn't stop being faithful. They were more faithful because they actually cared about the
00:59:10.660outcome and what was going to happen in the United States. So yeah, I'm with you. Like,
00:59:15.140it's insane. Like we can't, we can't pretend that Democrats are in any way going to be better.
00:59:20.200Like that's stupid. If you're telling people to go vote for Democrats, you're in, you're, you're1.00
00:59:24.780nuts. Like you've lost your mind. No, don't vote for the people who are going to bring 10 million1.00
00:59:29.180more people into the country in a blink of an eye. No, do not do that. Are you an idiot?
00:59:34.960But at the same time, that doesn't ultimately somehow absolve the Trump administration and1.00
00:59:41.920the people who egged it on to make a disastrous decision. Like this was very obviously going to
00:59:47.980be something that the public was going to vote on. Nobody wanted new wars. Everybody, including
00:59:53.220Trump, J.D. Vance, and Stephen Miller said, we're not going to this war explicitly.
01:00:00.300And then we did. And then gas prices exploded and people noticed. So yeah, don't go vote for
01:00:07.900democrats obviously go vote for republicans but i don't feel bad for these republicans i don't feel
01:00:14.260bad for the people who made obvious mistakes and now are paying the cost i feel bad for my country1.00
01:00:19.720that the consequences will come but if these idiots won't stop fighting wars in the middle east then1.00
01:00:26.420this is going to keep happening you can't keep going to war in the middle east especially after1.00
01:00:30.120you run on not doing it and then expect to get elected you can't create five dollar a gallon0.90
01:00:35.540gasoline right before a midterm and then expect there to be no consequences and anyone telling
01:00:40.360you that this is like tucker carlson's fault or you know the online rights fault or the black
01:00:45.300pillar's fault i mean there's just lying like it's it's it's it's insane it's the it's bunker
01:00:51.400mentality it's biden is sharp as attack right before he gets on stage and looks like he's
01:00:56.620gonna just fall apart because he can't put two words together like turning yourself into a0.88
01:01:03.060sycophant who is incapable of giving any kind of honest advice that makes you useless it makes you1.00
01:01:09.160useless who cares about your own pride forget that it makes you useless to the people you are1.00
01:01:14.300advising useless to the people you are leading because they can't trust you because you just0.99
01:01:19.180say whatever you think is going to be popular and not what you think is actually true and when you
01:01:24.380do that you discredit yourself and you make it impossible for people to trust your judgment in
01:01:28.660the future. So again, yeah, I'm with you. It's insane. It's insane that anyone would go out and
01:01:33.740vote for a Democrat because gas prices are higher. But you know what? Gas prices are higher. And it
01:01:39.560is because of the decisions Republicans have made. There's simply no way to avoid that. It's not the
01:01:44.820only reason. These issues were already in play when Trump came back into office, but he clearly
01:01:51.620made decisions that made all of this much worse. And while I think you should absolutely avoid the
01:01:57.520Democrats coming back into power at all costs, I'm not going to sit here and lie about the fact
01:02:02.420that the people who are voting were always going to do this and that it was entirely predictable
01:02:07.160and people who told you otherwise were misleading you in a way that is disastrous for the future of
01:02:12.940the country. That's really all there is to it. All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap
01:02:19.100this up. Thank you, as always, for coming by. If it's your first time here, make sure that you
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01:02:41.840well and if you'd like to get my book the total state it's over on amazon it's in paperback with
01:02:45.900new chapters so make sure to check that out thank you for watching and as always i'll talk to you