Diversity's Limits

James Q. Wilson looks at the findings on diverse neighborhoods by the author of "Bowling Alone" and their message that diversity does not always produce positive effects. An excerpt:

“Shocking” is the word that one political scientist, Scott Page of the University of Michigan, invoked to describe the extent of the negative social effects revealed by Putnam’s data. Whether Putnam was shocked by the results I cannot say. But they should not have been surprising; others have reported the same thing. The scholars Anil Rupasingha, Stephan J. Goetz, and David Freshwater, for example, found that social capital across American counties, as measured by the number of voluntary associations for every 10,000 people, goes up with the degree of ethnic homogeneity. Conversely, as others have discovered, when ethnic groups are mixed there is weaker social trust, less car pooling, and less group cohesion. And this has held true for some time: people in Putnam’s survey who were born in the 1920’s display the same attitudes as those born in the 1970’s.