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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

What arguments are those, exactly? What's the significance of a smaller population or homogeneity? Has any such relation been rigorously studied, or is it just speculation?

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Culture drives attitude and perception.

People who look, worship (or not), work and have other things alike then to cluster together and have a sort of herd mentality.

In a place like the US, we have dramatically different groups of people all over the place. In Norway or Denmark, the differences are nonexistent to an American eye.

>In Norway or Denmark, the differences are nonexistent to an American eye.

In Oslo, capital of Norway, 32% of the population are immigrants.

And half of those are Europeans (often other Scandinavians). In contrast, in D.C., the capital of the United States, 52% of the population is of a racial minority that (overwhelmingly) is in the U.S. only because white Americans brought their ancestors over from Africa in slavery.

Sure: here's a recent longitudinal study[0] that covers some of the previous work on correlation between diversity and social cohesion.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcv081

Americans always tend to use homogeneity as an argument when they compare themselves with other countries, like it’s somehow a good argument not to be as good as other countries in some aspects. Like you, I doubt that this is actually relevant. Canada is nothing but diverse, in a very similar way to the US and somehow it’s never used an excuse.

Canada is much less (racially) diverse than the U.S.: 89% white and the largest minority group as asian with 6.7% versus the U.S. 66% white and 14.7% hispanic as the largest minority group. source: data compiled from census reports https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.mx/2011/03/us-vs-cana...

> Canada is nothing but diverse, in a very similar way to the US and somehow it’s never used an excuse.

Less than 20% of Canada is a "visible minority." In the U.S., it's almost 40%. Toronto recently became a majority minority city. Washington, D.C. became a majority minority city sometime in the 1950s. In Chicago, it was sometime in the 1980s. Canada has no majority-minority provinces. Ontario is still 67% European (roughly on par with Connecticut). Our two largest states, California and Texas, are both majority-minority states.

Recency matters too. Much of Canada's diversity is very recent. American politics has in contrast been shaped by these conflicts for decades (really, from inception--we fought a whole civil war over race!).

Where immigrants come from matters too - family-based system vs points-based system.

Are you suggesting that it's not mostly accepted, sociologically, that ethnic diversity is correlated negatively with social cohesion? That was not my understanding. Do you have a citation that suggests otherwise?

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/32/1/54/2404332

Intuitively do you believe it's easier to govern a group of people with very different opinions and very different backgrounds and socioeconomic status, or easier?

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