The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes

It is seven years old but this is the first time I am seeing this. From The Paradox of Diverse Communities by Richard Florida summarizing some model simulation on diversity and cohesiveness.

My observation has been that there is much confusion and fuzzy thinking in this area, driven more by ideology than analytics. Diversity itself is a difficult issue to pin down. In most policy conversations it defaults to crude racism, indeed is a resurrection of failed affirmative action policies. It is something loved by central planners and irrelevant or despised by ordinary free people.

At best, diversity as actually used in policy circles covers race, ethnicity, and sex. I.e. it is racist and sexist. It rarely takes into account religion and rarely takes into account class. Almost never takes into account education attainment or profession. Class, education, and employment being the most frequent factors in residential location choices.

Consequently, diversity as used in academia is institutionalized racism and sexism and ignores the actual drivers of residential location choice.

In addition, we know that location preferences are strongly driven by minor differentials in priorities. You don't have to have much of a preference for living next door to people with a college education to end up very quickly with neighborhoods strongly segregated by education.

So, much of the research is driven by racial and sexist ideological positions, ignores the range of actual choice preferences and ignores the strength of small differentials in emergent order outcomes. It is easy to see why it makes sense to dismiss most this type of research.

The research being reported by Florida is one more nail in the coffin of the preferred Mandarin Class bias that the whole nation is driven by inherent and deeply structured racism.

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

In other words - you can choose a race-based imposition of diversity or you can have strong communities. Not both.

After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive. As they write, “The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community.”

Which makes perfect sense. Homogenous communities share values, preferences, priorities, assumptions, etc. Communication is easier, confusion less, risks of miscommunication lower, it is easier to anticipate without analyzing what the counter-party is going to do or believe. Homogeneity fosters efficiency. Efficiency is the foundation for prosperity.

Homogeneity is not a singular goal though. Too homogenous and you lose some degree of the innovation and creativity that comes from diversity. You face a trade-off between the efficiency that comes with homogeneity and the effectiveness that comes from some modicum of diversity which fosters evolution towards better outcomes.

The question is incorrectly framed when you put it in racial terms alone. The real question is "what is the optimal level of diversity, taking into account all the degrees and priorities of self-identity (age, education, professions, class, family structure, race, religion, stage of life, familial status, income, etc.) which yields the best balance of efficiency (arising from homogeneity) and effectiveness (arising from the evolutionary requirement for diversity in order to increase innovation)?

Socialist authoritarians ask the wrong question because their assumption is that everyone else is as obsessed by race as they are and to the exclusion of other identities.

But the fact of the matter is we sort ourselves into communities of similar, like-minded others. And this sorting process appears to be built into the very structure of our social lives.

On a more positive note, it may be possible to have such sorting by neighborhoods and still have diverse cities. I asked Neal whether he thought that cities that were made up of a federation or mosaic of distinct neighborhoods were more likely to succeed than ones comprised of several more fully mixed neighborhoods. He told me that his model essentially predicted that, regardless of size, more segregated areas – be they neighborhoods or cities – will be more cohesive. He added in an email, “Or even, a more segregated earth will be more cohesive, and a less segregated earth will be less cohesive. Putting diversity and segregation together - you could have a metro that is cohesive and diverse, but it would also need to be highly segregated.”

Cohesion, diversity, segregation - pick two.

I usually have a lot of caveats about Florida's work. He is the emblem of faddish coercive central planners, trying to impose on everyone but without the understanding and expertise that everyone else shares. If they believe it to be true, it must be true. Or not.

For this reason, urbanists and local policy makers might be better off refocusing their efforts away from the unachievable ideal of diverse and cohesive neighborhoods and toward creating cohesion across the various neighborhoods that make up a city. In his watershed book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam distinguished between two types of social capital: “bonding,” which occurs within like-minded groups, and “bridging,” which occurs between them. If, as the Neals’ study shows, we can’t make our neighborhoods more diverse and cohesive at the same time, perhaps the primary, over-arching, and achievable objective is to reinforce the bridging ties between them. Given the growing economic, cultural, and political divides within our cities and across the nation as a whole, working to strengthen the “bridges” between communities may be a far more realistic approach than attempting the impossible task of trying to make everywhere more diverse.

I agree. Abandon arrogance, and technocratic coercion, and the central planners delusion of their own competence and recommit to freedom, democracy, individual agency, emergent order, respect for individuals and their decision-making and focus on fostering openness and communication.

We can most of us get on board with that.