Diversity inspires Creativity?

Today I'm going to combine commentary on two very, very bad op-eds that espouse conventional wisdom.

A few days ago Thomas Friedman explained why he "do[esn't] object to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site." In short, he claims that Americans' "competitive advantage" is a product of the "creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together." First, the phrase "competitive advantage" draws him perilously close to an old-age trade myth that economic growth is a zero-sum game: if China produces all the toys and Japan makes all the cars, Americans will have nothing to do. They wouldn't, except for the fact that people are thinking up new things to produce all the time--computers, football games, and convoluted gambling schemes.

So assume Friedman is just talking about growth. His claims are (1) growth is a product of creativity and (2) that creativity is (in-part) a product of cultural and ethnic diversity. (1) is conventional wisdom in economics. Technological progress, captured by the Solow residual, accounts for the vast majority of growth, esp. in developed countries.

(2) is also conventional wisdom, but not among economists. I think it makes no sense. Here's why: Friedman notes, correctly I think, that creativity comes from first thinking divergently and then thinking convergently. You generate a lot of news ideas, usually by making analogies with concepts in different fields, and then refine the best of those ideas into something workable. (Newsweek had a great story on this.)

Then he implies that "great books, iPads [and] new cancer drugs" are borne from mixing cultures since mixing cultures helps think divergently. I don't buy it. All the revolutions in the iPad had nothing to do with culture. Multi-touch is the best implementation of technology that has been in the works for a while. Everything that led to it had to do with computer science and learning engineering concepts. iOS is the first mass-market implementation of a ZUI or Zooming User Inference, a concept Jeff Raskin thought up and popularized before he died. I'm sure the creativity energy at Apple (his employer) in the 80s sparked some of those ideas, but the creative energy at Apple back then surely wasn't a product of ethnic diversity (nearly everyone was white and male). New cancer drugs are, likewise, products of careful research in chemistry and biology, and no one in those fields thinks that familiarity with African music is going to give you much of a leg up in understanding pathways and designing experiments.

I just wish someone would produce a little empirical evidence for the ethnical diversity = technological progress thesis. Is there cross-sectional evidence that the most diverse countries are the richest? Is there cross-sectional evidence that the most innovative companies have the most diverse workforces? I don't think either would be compelling--that innovative companies have diverse workforces is just a by-product of needing to tap all sources of talent to recruit the best of the best and rich nations become rich then draw immigrants from around the world: diversity is a product of wealth.* But at least it'd be a start in thinking scientifically about a suspect claim.

In an old, related op-ed, Jay Mathews, an excellent education writer, writes about the importance and difficulty of learning Chinese. He says seems obvious that more Americans should be studying Chinese:

China is our biggest trading partner, after Canada and Mexico. The country reminds me in some ways of America in the 1870s. It is recovering from horrid domestic events, getting stronger, with the potential to be the most important nation in the world.

He goes on to note that "Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization." I'm not sure if he means that as a fact or his opinion. If the former, he needs to open his eyes to the diversity of tastes in art and food. If the later, why (to be blunt) does he think anyone cares? One piece of evidence he fails to cite is that, if surveys can be trusted, Asian people are surprisingly miserable given their wealth. Hong Kong is, by eyeballing, the largest negative outlier and China, South Korea, and Japan all have negative residuals. That makes me hesitantly question how wonderful Chinese culture is.

He does note a different drawbacks of the Chinese language: "it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters . . . has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove . . . relying on memorization. . . . There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result . . ." (Note the irony there vis a vis Friedman.) I'm a little skeptical of that claim given what I know (very little) of the linguistics literature on the subject. They also say Chinese people have a hard time thinking of counterfactuals because of the structure of the language, but given the importance of thinking up counterfactuals to science and the plethora of good Chinese scientists, I'm skeptical.

Mathews gets to the crux of the issue later in his essay, though he never asks the key question. He cites a source that says learning Chinese fluently takes 1,300 hours but notes that a more realistic estimate is probably 2,200 hours. That is a massive investment of time: the average top-tier (UC, Duke) college student spends about 2,250 hours to earn their degree, and at MIT students at expected to spend about 12 hours per class a week (on average they spend about 9) and it takes about 14 classes in computer science to get a B.S. from MIT. In other words, if you spend 2,352 hours studying computers you've probably learned about as much as an MIT grad (well, not quite since MIT-people learn fast).

So here is the trade-off for policy-makers and students: what is a better use of time, learning Chinese or leaning computer science. Friedman think the next iPad will come from throwing different colored people in a room and practicing vodoo engineering. I think it will come from teams of techno-wizards hammering out code and designing circuits. You decide which path is better for our growth prospects.

* - This is my guess for the source of the confusion. Being open to immigrants and tolerant of different religions is probably correlated with institutions that promote new ideas in art (e.g. movies) and technology (e.g. computers).

Should we be impressed by Hispanics who ace AP Spanish?

Jay Mathews discusses this on his blog.

I think the key point here is that AP test are meant to signal intelligence and effort. Most kids don't learn calculus, physics or Latin at home, so if they ace they test it signals to college their aptitude. AP Spanish doesn't have this effect for native speakers because all the work was done in the distant past, and because it is so easy for children to learn language it wasn't hard work.

Cultural Imperialism

I'm puzzled about all the excitment over the World Cup.

Isn't it just the legacy of colonialism? Soccer's historical roots in England are weak (the game is less than 200 years old) and in the rest of the world it's a legacy of the British Empire and cultural imperialism.

Economists and other sensible people would have us believe that soccer is popular because people like to play the game. The rules are simple; all it requires is a ball, some rocks to mark the goal, and a field; and everyone enjoys a little exercise and competition--especially kids.

But this belies the truth. Every people has its own historical set of games and recreational activities, just as it has its own language, music, and culture in general. Soccer is popular because it was imposed through imperialism and globalization. The fact that Africans love soccer isn't something to celebrate--because it provides some joy in what is for many a short, drab life--it's something to protest. Africans should play African games, just as they should wear African clothing and speak African languages.

If Africans don't like that, too bad. If we allow soccer to become the "world's sport" and the World Cup to become a semi-annual ritual sucking up the time and talent of countless billions of young men (and, one day, women), everyone will suffer from the lost diversity. Everyone has a stake in ensuring that languages, sports, and musical traditions don't die.

Links:

Has American Pop Music Displaced Local Culture?

Kwame Anthony Appiah with relevant thoughts

Network Externalities

I knew the model of language learning I described in post below must have been formalized by someone. I finally found the paper that did.

We develop a model in which the benefit of language acquisition is increasing in the number of individuals who speak the language. This gives rise to a network externality, and if language acquisition is costly, the language acquisition decisions by individuals may be inefficient. If the available policy instruments affect all members of a language group homogeneously, then policies that effectively subsidize language acquisition are warranted only for the majority language.

There are a few things the model doesn't capture. Namely:

1. Some argue that learning multiple languages may have positive cognitive benefits in young children. I haven't found much credible evidence of these effects. Also, this is irrelevant in the U.S. since we teach teens languages, not kids.

2. Some think that learning languages (mostly just Spanish) will make people more culture and less racist. I don't know what to make of that. Why not just teach culture and the philosophy of tolerance? And most "cultured" people are bigots (see: Cambridge, MA).

3. This model applies to one country. Maybe someone could think of a reason international integration is only possible by unifying under like 5 languages, common to everyone. The model, at a world level, suggest that would be a wasteful strategy. But perhaps there are gains the make up for those costs from integration. (Europe seems to be doing fine with just English, though. And in the short run this seems irrelevant.)

Also, these results are for general equilibrium for teaching large numbers of people. Of course people who plan to move to Japan should learn Japanese. And Mexicans who plan to move to the U.S. should learn English (wait.... maybe that isn't so obvious?). Individuals can still gain from learning languages, but society as a whole will lose if lots of people do this. Gains to individuals are more than cancels by losses they cause for other people.