You should probably read the whole thing before you opine.

Do you have anything shorter I could read instead?

There's this.

Here is the paper:

http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/socialchange/aboutus/news/documents/Putnam2007.pdf

It seems to explain some of the resistance to social programs; it's seen as helping those [insert derogatory set of characteristics] others.

And so much for 'a study like that wouldn't get published!'

Is this going to be on the final?

I suspect it's hard to make sense of what this means if you're part of the lay audience (like me). Nothing reported seems at all surprising to me, or even unfortunate. And, as Putnam says, it's not all negatives, and history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

How are they defining diverse communities?

But I do think, as the article says, that the takeaway for a lot of bigots will be 'this proves we don't need any more Mexicans!'

Haven't we been here before, w/r/t good old social democratic lily-white Sweden?

8: True, but for a lot of bigots that's the takeaway from everything.

"Diversity, at least in the short run"

I don't have the oomph to read the whole article, so how much work is that "in the short run" doing?

I've always assumed that homogeneity was an advantage to the social engineer, regardless of the engineer's purposes, and diversity an enemy or at least an obstacle despite all its other virtues, but it's hard to find in that an argument against diversity that would suit the sort of people who tend to rail against social engineering, like Republicans.

I'll have to read the paper. My experience, in several neighborhoods, is precisely the opposite of what Putnam describes.

11: It seems like a lot. He points out that Protestants & Catholics used to be distinct enough that it was a concern when dating, but not so much these days.

but it's hard to find in that an argument against diversity that would suit the sort of people who tend to rail against social engineering, like Republicans.

They aren't against social engineering, but against govt. or centralized social engineering.

re: 15

They're not even against that when it's engineering for the values they want.

They aren't against social engineering, but against govt. or centralized social engineering.

Are there other kinds?

against govt. or centralized social engineering.

Not necessarily against that, either.

He points out that Protestants & Catholics used to be distinct enough that it was a concern when dating, but not so much these days

When & where I was in high school, for me it was an inhibiting concern in two cases where I think we were very simpatico. It's interesting to see that confirmed, so that my referring to it doesn't seem too alien.

In NY neighborhoods, Irish/Italian/Polish used to be real ethnic divisions, that there was strife over; now, while people certainly identify to some extent with their ancestry, they've all kind of melded into 'ethnic' Catholics.

Similarly in Pittsburgh. Enough so that my grandfather (Italian) intentionally went by an Anglo nickname to pass. Wasn't a problem that neither of his grandkids who have married have married Catholics, or Italians.

What I want is a study of the effects of integrated schooling from K-4 on kids twenty years later.

13: I would say that I'm less involved in local politics than I might be in a less diverse neighborhood. I keep on thinking I should get involved at the Community Board level, but in my neighborhood, things are very factional -- there are local politicians who identify with the Dominican immigrant community, and those who identify against it. And not speaking Spanish and all that, the people I know who are in local politics, who I could use as an entrance point, are in the latter faction. And the way they interact with the Dominican immigrant community strikes me as kind of racist and unpleasant.

I don't know how to get involved without joining up with a team, and I don't really like the team I'd end up on, so I end up staying away.

Are there other kinds?

For various values of "centralized" or "government," sure. Your community church sets morality standards, your local PTA sets education policy, etc.

20: He's the social scientist and I am pretty much the opposite of that, but aren't there kind of two sorts of "diverse" communities. One is like, say, Cicero, IL, whose median income is not, I'd imagine, so very high and whose diversity was a recent and, to the angry white folks who live there, unwelcome phenomenon. The other is, say, Montclair, NJ, a middle to upper-middle class suburb of NYC, whose diversity is a considered by all who live there an enormous asset and the reason so many culturally engagé NYC types are willing to move there.

I don't know how to get involved without joining up with a team, and I don't really like the team I'd end up on, so I end up staying away.

Alright, who's going to move to LB's neighborhood so there can be an Unfogged team in local politics?

I'd do it, but I'm too busy keeping the filthy Czechs out of my nice, safe Slovak neighborhood

Sadly, my girlfriend no longer lives in LB's neighborhood, or I would totally introduce them.

I can't be bothered to read the whole thing, but did anyone who can find out if they controlled for income? Because I'd imagine there's a big difference between diversity as an effect of poverty, and diversity that isn't.

in two yrs i've been here i made good acquintances
with turkish, japanese, russian, chinese, indian, austrian, albanian, dutch, german, iranian people
mostly researchers
not one american, white, black or latin
conclusion: american openness, friendliness is a myth

How are they defining diverse communities?

Right. This is what I'm unsure about, too.

Once a society deals with an issue and forgets about, it might very well cease to have this effect. So what we would consider a homogeneous black community, for example, might have been a highly diverse group of quadroons, octaroons, etc, 100 years ago.

27: The guy spent seven years controlling for everything he could think of that might be causing the effect.

Ogged's link is good, and Lemmy Caution's is the real thing, which I'm reading.

As you might expect, he addresses these issues, and many others.

A family of plain-bellied Sneetches moved in down the street, but we ran them off pronto. Property values, you know.

30: Thanks.

pwned by Cala, making the point politely.

Your community church sets morality standards, your local PTA sets education policy, etc.

I wouldn't really describe those as "social engineering," but I suppose you could make a plausible argument for it.

oh i forgot to mention my dear polish friend

Yes, the paper in Lemmy Caution's link addresses 29 in the abstract. Good.

Here's the abstract:

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to 'hunker down'. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

not in, but during

read, ask yourself, "Am I adding value?"

I don't have time to read this --- anyone who's had a go at the paper: is he correcting for socio-economic factors? The snippit metions a lot lof things (charity/volunteer, voting, etc.) that have strong negative correlates with low income, and ethnically diverse neighborhoods correllate strongly with low income some places (immigration, particularly) ime.

`for socio-economic' s/b `for other socio-economic'

Your community church sets morality standards, your local PTA sets education policy, etc.

In how many places is this true? Certainly not here &mdash the PTA is primarily a fundraising organization, and the churches don't seem to have influence beyond their specific, small congregations (Oregonians are among the least churchgoing people in the country).

I wouldn't really describe those as "social engineering,"

I'd describe the major, or at least one of the major purposes of all organized religion to be social engineering.

is he correcting for socio-economic factors?

Whatya think?

28, 40: I'm actually wondering. Read, is English a second language for you? If so, I think people are reading your syntax as a deliberate effort to be enigmatically cute rather than to communicate straightforwardly, and are kind of annoyed by it. (If not, I can't help you.)

45: I don't know, that's why I asked --- seems like an extremely difficult thing to do well.

44 addendum: historically they've had varying success at this endevour, but I think it's always there.

anyway, must run.

28: In undergrad, I was sitting with a Pakistani friend one day halfway through the first semester of first year when she commented that our friend X and I were the only two American friends she had made at that point. I hadn't thought about it before her comment, but X had been the only American I knew. But I wouldn't pin it all on the Americans not being open and friendly enough -- it was definitely a two-way street.

I don't really get what the mechanism could be here. I'm so depressed by all those hispanics that I'll stop hanging out with my white friends?

49: See my 23 for one mechanism.

40
apparently, i am not
46
no, my language translates like this

I'd imagine that it has to do with feeling at home, or comfortable in your neighborhood. The more people are unlike you, the less comfortable you feel, and the less you socialize. I wonder if the effect is less pronounced in more racist communities, because there people are more likely to explicitly note that the other is skeeving them out, and hang out with their own kind.

In any case, it's depressing.

I assume that the mechanism is that people tend to feel a little ill at ease around people that they recognize as "different," and that when their living space is heavily marked by difference, they're less likely to be actively involved with their neighbors. Which makes intuitive sense, but it's sad.

Another question based on not having read: I wonder if that effect carries over to the second generation. That is, I would think that (say) white kids who grew up in Dominican neighborhoods would be less likely than their parents to experience Spanish-speaking communities as "different" to the extent that it made them uncomfortable.

I don't really get what the mechanism could be here. I'm so depressed by all those hispanics that I'll stop hanging out with my white friends?

I don't understand the distinction between what Putnam sees happening and an assertion that people trust their own, which seems like a truism. The questions are how "their own" is defined, how that changes, and how long it takes to change.

no, my language translates like this

No, you're not a native speaker of English, or no, you are a native speaker?

Ah, I misunderstood Katherine, I believe. I think it could be a bit the "you can't fight City Hall" syndrome. Even if you trust your white friends, the fact that you have to interact with people very different you to get anything done, and that such is difficult for understandable reasons, might make you less likely to do things with your white friends. You all might be less likely to go out to eat, for example, if you can't find a place with waiters you can understand.

No it doesn't, LB. You explained local politics but you didn't explain how it makes you "withdraw even from close friends....and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

Based on his table he seems to be putting an awful lot of stock in Pollyanna-ish answers to questionnaires about whether you "trust your neighbors" as actual measures of human happiness. Maybe he has other measures too but all I see is a blanket assertion that: "we rigorously analyzed everything & it all held up"--maybe it's not customary to show your work in that kind of article.

This sounds intuitively right to me.

One looks around at the people around him and his brain tells him which ones should be given the benefit of the doubt.

51: I couldn't quite follow that either. If you meant: "Yes, English is a second language for me, and my writing style reflects translations from my primary language rather than an intentional stylistic choice," then people should lay off hassling you about it, really. And trying to mimic the writing styles you see around here is probably good practice.

Where are you from?

There is of course a YOOOGE </Trump> literature on this, some of which the paper addresses, and the headline finding has been well established (and yes, not in that slapdash "other things equal" but in a more rigorous, "accounting for other proposed variables" way) for a long time.

There is a literature on exceptions to this rule that he doesn't cite. Which is to say, that diversity appears to have promoted certain kinds of social spending, on public health and education in particular, in the United States.

Which see, and here, and this paper, and this book, and that one.

Not all of those are self-links. (And they all moved away from me on the bench, there...)

You should probably read the whole thing before you opine.

Oh, fuck you, Ogged. That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

Oh, fuck you, Ogged.

Racist.

Here's why I would possibly lay low in a heterogeneous neighborhood: I want to be liked by those around me. If the people around me are different, it's harder for me to get a read on whether they like me or not. So I'm more likely to lay low and try to slip under people's radar.

This, from page 151 of the study, addresses some questions:

This conclusion is provocative, but the graphic evidence presented thus far (bivariate, aggregate analysis) is open to numerous objections. The first and most important is that so far I have used community as the unit of analysis, but that approach obscures a crucial issue - namely, is it who is living in a community that matters (a compositional effect), or who they are living around (a contextual effect)? This question can be resolved only by moving to the individual level of analysis, in which we seek to predict an individual's social connectedness from both his or her personal characteristics (race, age, geographic mobility, etc.) and his or her neighbours' characteristics (age, race, mobility, etc.).

Second, the diverse communities in our study are clearly distinctive in many other ways apart from their ethnic composition. Diverse communities tend to be larger, more mobile, less egalitarian, more crime-ridden and so on. Moreover, individuals who live in ethnically diverse places are different in many ways from people who live in homogeneous areas. They tend to be poorer, less educated, less likely to own their home, less likely to speak English and so on. In order to exclude the possibility that the seeming 'effect' of diversity is spurious, we must control, statistically speaking, for many other factors. Our ability to control simultaneously and reliably for many factors, both individual and aggregate, is enhanced by our much larger sample of respondents than is typical in social surveys. Yakima, Washington, for example, is highly diverse, but relatively small, so our sample there helps distinguish the effects of size and diversity.

These first two methodological objections can be dealt with most efficiently in the context of multivariate analysis. In our 'standard model' we have included simultaneously controls at both the individual and the census tract level for:

Age Affluence/poverty Citizenship Ethnicity Language Commuting time Education Residential mobility Homeownership

In addition, we control for region of the country; the respondent's gender, financial satisfaction and work hours; the population density and the Gini index of income inequality in his or her census tract; and two measures of the 28 crime rate in the respondent's county. Obviously, it is impossible here to present the full array of statistical evidence for each of the dozens of dependent variables we have examined, but the multivariate analysis we carried out is illustrated in Table 3.

I take comfort in the suggestion that the harmful effects of diversity are only in the short run. In the long run, I believe, every community will be as comfortably diverse as Unfogged, and...

Oh wait.

This, from page 151 of the study, addresses some questions:

Like, "On which page does this paper become funnel-shaped?"

60: He specifically cites an example from the Costa/Kahn paper you link to.

I don't even like it when POLLS don't show the phrasing of the question, so "obviously showing our tables is too cumbersome but they're awesome" doesn't get very far with me. I can believe that there's a robust difference in the survey results, but I don't know that his survey shows what he says it shows when it's this opaque.

I can't read the whole paper, but from parts excerpted here, the thesis seems unsurprising. Monoethnic communities sometimes have very strong organizing roots -- churches, community centers, civic godparents, who show you the ropes, tell you how to vote, and provide language services. These things all break down when the communities diversify.

Hm. More crime would presumably have a pretty major effect on people's comfort zones.

That said, I don't see why the mechanism seems so mysterious, or why one has to try to explain it by hypothesizing waiters who don't speak English. Surely you all know the difference between feeling comfortable around "different" groups/individuals with whom you have some experience vs. feeling uncomfortable around others who really are totally new to you. E.g., I'm comfortable in poor Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, but not so much in poor black neighborhoods. Filipinos, great; Japanese, a little unsure of myself. Etc.

my native language is mongolian, the second language - russian, the third- japanese, english
and i mix all of them
my own blog reads like a madman's diary because of this mixture, so please excuse my poor english and its messy syntax
i'll use unfogged only as a learning tool

What's the trick to blockquoting multiple paragraphs without funneling and all in the same font?

I've finished the paper.

60: He specifically cites an example from the Costa/Kahn paper you link to.

Really? Where? I only see citations to other Costa/Kahn papers.

I don't know that his survey shows what he says it shows when it's this opaque.

Yeah, I think this is the sort of thing that's hard to make sense of if you're outside the field (which describes me). Which is probably true for most interesting things, but it hasn't stopped us in the past.

Katherine, here's a suggestion for a mechanism. It's not 'I won't hang out with my white friends because all these Hispanics are around', but 'there aren't any restaurants in that bad part of town' or 'I don't tell my children to go to my neighbors if they need help because I don't really know them that well' or 'that bar? that's where the townies are. we're not going there' or 'I could get involved in local politics, but I don't speak the language of the people I agree with.' And what community remains for a specific person is more circumscribed.

71: Your English is good enough that I didn't guess it might not be your native language until you mentioned moving 'here', any stylistic peculiarities appeared to be deliberate, rather than being obvious errors. Don't let people chase you away from continuing to comment if you like; this place is probably excellent practice for your English.

I'm assuming you're a graduate student?

No, you're right; Your link would have been 2003c in his scheme.

71: read, don't stop commenting.

72: <blockquote><p>text of first paragraph</p><p>text of second paragraph</p></blockquote>

That should do it.

Your link would have been 2003c in his scheme

Right -- which is where the exception to the rule would happen to belong. I'm not complaining that it's not there, so much; it's a lecture, right? and that's how lectures are. I'm just trying to, er, add value to the discussion.

Don't stop commenting, but do stop the 'make the numbers comment to the other numbers' routine.

82: bah.

76:

That, and --

"I feel funny about going to the church in this neighborhood, because they're all ___ and I'm not";

"I'd like to have a party and invite everyone in my apartment building, except would it be weird to invite So-and-So, because they're older, and don't speak English, and why would they want to hang out with us? But to not invite them would be rude --argh, better not to have the party at all";

"I can't go to pub quiz on the bar on the corner, because I feel kinda unwelcome there";

& c.

84 contains the best examples.

Don't know that it's a lecture, but he'll probably expand it, tabulating what Katherine's referring to, etc. Probably a book.

The final section, where his hopes & dreams are, is worth a look for those who seem to think this is closet reaction.

Or, real life: "Why are you doing your laundry at that laundromat? There are machines [ed. -- that don't work as well and are in too much demand] in the building!" I suspect Mr. Law Student is a little scared of the signs for 'don't put shoes in the dryers please' being in Spanish.

To Read's initial comment -- I don't know that Americans are less open and friendly than other people generally. But I'll bet that language barriers are more of an obstacle here than lots of other places. You can go most of your life without having to deal with someone who isn't a native speaker of your native language, in the US, and I think accented or unfluent speech is something that makes Americans very jumpy and uncomfortable.

(There's a point of English fluency at which an accent becomes attractive, almost regardless of where it's from. But short of that, not being a native English speaker is a huge social barrier.)

it hasn't stopped us in the past

Thank God for that.

Ethnically diverse communities are not necessarily communities with lots of immigrants; neighborhoods in growing cities, say, can become ethnically diverse through high residential mobility without a significant influx of immigrants. What Putnam describes doesn't seem as obvious in such cases (in my neighborhood, social capital went way up and [certain] crime down as diversity increased). Obvs, I've got to read the paper.

Also: don't feel chased away, read.

neighborhoods in growing cities, say, can become ethnically diverse through high residential mobility without a significant influx of immigrants.

The question is, who gets perceived as 'diverse' in a manner that sets off this reaction. My guess, is that in the US, 'diversity' means black/white, or native/immigrants up to the second generation or so. Like, I'd bet that a California neighborhood that was very 'ethnically diverse' in that it was a mixture of non-immigrant white, non-immigrant Asian, and non-immigrant Latino wouldn't show this effect nearly as strongly as with the same ethnic mixture but recent immigrants.

80: Alternatively, just close your blockquote tag at the end of each paragraph.

A recent change in perceived diversity might make a difference, too. An area that's always been lily white might freak out more at suddenly seeing more immigrants around than one where there was more visible diversity, even if the latter has more recent immigrants.

90 -

My neighborhood, in a rapidly-gentrifying part of Los Angeles, is very ethnically diverse, but the first people there were the Latino immigrants. The late-arriving non-immigrant hipster kids (of various races) are the diversifying factor. We're probably destroying a lot of long-standing community relationships and solidarity.

I'm admittedly a strange person, but (anecdatum) I get uncomfortable and less civic minded in homogeneous communities. In my current neighborhood, it's all students and immigrants and I pick up litter. A few years back, when I was living with my folks in Whitebread, MA, I'd piss on peoples' lawns in the middle of the night.

In my new neighborhood, which is traditionally an African-American enclave, the arrival of a bunch of recent African immigrants has made it seem safer for the whitey-mcwhite-whites like me.

90 was sort of what I was getting at, but I would add non-immigrant black to the hypothetical mix.

I was joking with KR about how glad I am he's here to cite Albert Hirschmann and J.K. Galbraith, since I've reached my limit and have fouled-out, but I can't resist pointing out in the context of this discussion how prescient Randolph Bourne's Transnational America was about the vital role organized ethnic communities play over time in acculturating and assimilating to American Culture, despite the widespread —my word of the month—fear that they serve the opposite purpose, to preserve distinctness. They do, they should do, both.

Where's the penalty box?

97: Works the other direction too, `American Culture' being a moving target.

Was it here that we discussed the old article about Joe Dimaggio being described as a real American, who ate Chinese food, not spaghetti and meatballs?

Either Ezra or MY had links to that, but I don't remember much here. He was lazy, Joe was.

We're probably destroying a lot of long-standing community relationships and solidarity.

Especially if you're not, like, actually trying to join the existing community.

94: Presumably because students/immigrants feel *less* "other" to you than affluent white suburbanites.

Mixed Norwegian-German neighborhoods in the Wobegon area become tense, as The Keillor has shown. A blond Egyptian-American director recently made a film about this called "Sweet Land". A fragile peace has been achieved.

101: Lawn urine samples prove that I'm down with la gente.

I'm not at all surprised by this. Almost all organisms see "different" as "threat" and any threat is a signal for both aggression and withdrawal.

It was easy to see it in action on all sides as a Jewish New Yorker arriving (as one of a group from NYC) in Birmingham, Alabama a year after the church bombing.

Especially if you're not, like, actually trying to join the existing community.

Are you being deliberately tone deaf? You've taken a mild, self-deprecating remark and turned it into some kind of accusation leveled against me. What's up with that?

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/a_nation_turns_its_lonely_eyes.php

read's comments look funny. It makes me distrust everyone here.

thank you all for encouraging words
yes, i'm a medical researcher
i'll try to comment in a more contributing manner from now on
a bit self-consciously though

105: I just mean that that's what generally happens.

106: Thanks!

102. The Norwegians and Germans got together to throw the blond Egyptian in the lake and found they made a good team?

Despite my concerns about the definition of "diverse community" here (which were not addressed by the Globe article, though they may be in the original paper), the overall conclusion accords with my anecdotal impression.

107: I call shenanigans. You never trusted anyone here before read showed up, either.

I grew up in a very diverse (suburban) neighborhood of recent Latin American immigrants in Miami, and I can definitely see where these findings are coming from. Community organizations of any kind were nonexistent; mutual suspicion was the norm; families were self-contained social units with few ties to each other; among adults there was little interaction across ethnic lines (Us kids, however, were like kids everywhere, no segregation to speak of).

It wasn't until I moved to Chicago for college -- and lived in some areas where the diversity of ages past had long since fused into a kind of Chicago-ethnic homogeneity -- that I felt like the sidewalk or the street was not this oxygenless Martian desert, belonging to no one, visible to strange eyes, that I had to traverse as quickly as possible.

I'd piss on peoples' lawns in the middle of the night.

I distrust these Others who piss on lawns.

Based on his table he seems to be putting an awful lot of stock in Pollyanna-ish answers to questionnaires about whether you "trust your neighbors" as actual measures of human happiness.

What do you mean by "happiness"? Putnam is republican and perfectionist; he's not trying to design a felicific calculus.

I guess I'm in the minority, but I like read's idiosyncratic commenting style. Like bitzer's, but less affected. It's rather like a spambot went sentient. Don't let the bastards keep you down, read! Comment until they ban you!

To elaborate: I got the sense that the older generation within the Latin American families who formed most of my neighbors and classmates were reluctant to engage in various sorts of 'American' civic participation, because they felt they could not maneuver properly within the system, whether from language skills or bureaucracy or whatever else.

However, nor were they eager to recreate Latin American models of civic participation, because, after all, they were in America, proud to be here, eager to live an American dream, reluctant to give a nod to social institutions they've abandoned.

So the end result is trepidation, fear of engagement in either familiar or unfamiliar ways.

Just off the top of my head, I can come up with at least a handful of confounding factors that would be nigh impossible to control for. The big one that leaps out being whether he controlled for the circumstances of the neighborhoods as well as the populace that dwell in it, which seems like it would be impossible to do without cherry-picking your sources, to the point where that would confound any of your other attempts at control. Gentrification, historical affinity, and intentional diversity of the stereotypical liberal yuppie kind (surely the smallest of the three) seem like they'd leave very, very little room between for populations unaffected by any sort of factor stemming from how their community came to be.

Also, there having been history, and it being the future, and all.

The problem with this social capital literature (popularized by Putnam) is that few papers actually control for other confounding effects even when they claim that they do. The particular problem is generally referred to as "social interaction effects" in the economics literature. The problem is that "controlling" for socio-economic variables by including them in a regression does not work in this case. As researchers (e.g. Durlauf) have pointed out, the elementary problem of separating correlation from causation (in this case, whether integration leads to less trust) still remains. For example, one thing Putnam does not control for is whether people who live in diverse neighborhoods may be systematically different from those who live in homogenous neighborboods. Putnam (and a few other researchers) also uses hard-to-quanitify variables such as trust and construct numeric figures for them as if measuring that variable is almost equivalent to measuring the average height of a community.

This is not to say it's not a real phenomenon that diverse neighborhoods have relatively less social cohesion. But it's does not necessarily follow that diversity causes such a social problem. But in Putnam's research, he goes from this correlation to the causal claim that: diversity ->less trust. I would link to many papers that criticize his methodology but unfortunately, the ones I have been able to locate at the moment are all quite technical

OT: I came home for lunch and am watching some of the debate. Chris Dodd is really making sense. I don't know if John Edwards is having problems with his contacts or something, but he is blinking like mad.

120: Technical schmecknical, I'd be interested to see those papers. Could you share, please?

Putnam is the "Bowling Alone" guy. He's been doing this sort of thing for a while now.

Sort of OT: seeing this absolutely made my day.

The equivalent is totally conventional in the Orthodox community, at least in NY. I've dealt with contracts that required rabbinic 'arbitration' (IIRC, the word is a Bet Din), frequently.

I initially was going to suggest that this was an urban-rural problem, with cities already less trusting than smaller places, but then I remembered what a friend of mine said about a mining town he knew of (Cle Elum or Roslyn WA), which was very diverse and had 13 different cemeteries, one for each ethnic group (and all white Christian too, IIRC).

115: I exaggerated for effect. Initially, I only pissed on Bush-Cheney signs. When those became scarce, I pissed where the Bush-Cheney signs used to be. When I visit on holidays, I make a point to drink a lot of beer and take a walk, just to make sure that they remember their shame.

127: Just keep it off the flora.

Original social capital theorist.: It's the state that undermines trust.

125: I submit that is not equivalent.

Fair enough -- a Bet Din is normal in the Orthodox community, and the thing you linked is weird even for pious Christians.

125, 130: Don't knock it. The venue and arbitration rules of the Institute for Christian Conciliation might well be more favorable to the consumer than, say, an NASD Dispute Resolution Panel.

I wonder if this was a click-wrap contract; that would be especially weird.

Christian conciliation could get pretty interesting if they faithfully applied the Gospel to dispute resolution. I'm thinking, for example, of Matthew 5:

Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny...

And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

122: here are 2 quick links to critical reviews on empirical social capital literature:

http://www.econ.ucsd.edu/%7Ejsobel/Papers/soccap.pdf

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/econ/archive/wp2001-03.htm

God, all this choice of law stuff is such an infuriatingly incessant dodge for "no recourse." Consumers signing away their right to sue seems two steps away from Republicans trying to take away the courts' "jurisdiction" to handle abortion/religion cases, and much similar shit.

I know! "This agreement is governed solely and exclusively by Teutonic common law. All disputes must be settled in trial by ordeal. The accused party may choose between trial by combat, trial by water, trial by fire, or trial by iron. All trials arising under this agreement shall be mediated by the Bishop of Saxony."

I think the mechanism is "the Hispanic gangs are racially cleansing blacks, and the black gangs are going after the Hispanics, and everybody is going after whitey." That's the mechanism, at least in LA.

134: Awesome, thank you!

They've got real value between parties of comparable bargaining power -- I'm right now working on something defending an overseas company who entered into a contract with an American company, but bargained for local arbitration as the only means of settling disputes. All sorts of other stuff happened, and finally the Americans sued them in America, and my client ended up defaulting because they legitimately didn't understand what was happening (translation problems, confusion about whether the claim had already been resolved.) I'm working on getting the default cleared now.

I want to take full credit for 136. You're welcome.

what's the chances that 136 accurately depicts much of LA, not some xenophobes wet dream?

136 accurately depicts much of LA Season 4 of The Shield

133: Sounds like the correspondence leading up to my 11th hour settlement...

Season 4 of The Shield != some xenophobes wet dream?

On read and the unfriendly Americans: It's generally a lot easier to meet other expats in a country than it is to meet "natives" - I had that experience in Lebanon, where I have a handful of Lebanese friends but a lot more expat ones, despite that Lebanon doesn't have that big an expat community (all right, my standard of comparison here is the Gulf).

Carrying on: fellow expats have a lot of experiences in common with you right away, even if you're deliberately avoiding the "oh these natives don't know anything" kind of mindset - they're navigating whatever the confusing aspects of local society are to a foreigner and so on.

They've got real value between parties of comparable bargaining power

Right, but since the Supreme Court has ruled that contracts of adhesion can specify mandatory arbitration, companies have a license to deprive the consumer of all recourse. Try getting a cell phone or a credit card without signing away your right to sue.

143: return 0!

Although even so, and it is pretty vile all around, they're not so unrealistic as to try and get away with this "everyone is gunning for whitey" nonsense.

Try getting a cell phone or a credit card without signing away your right to sue.

Yeah, that's fun. All the recourse that's left you is seamlessly trashing their database, or something.

147: god those shows are all bad though.

here's hoping the wire causes a ripple effect. `holy crap guys, look, we can actually make a show involving police without pretending it was written by and for complete idiots!'

You're right, nobody's gunning for whitey. Whitey left the neighborhood a long time ago.

I wouldn't say The Shield is written for idiots, exactly, it just goes overboard in its reaching for "gritty realism" by doggedly making every single character completely unlikable. It was actually kind of refreshing when I started watching, because as much as I love The Wire, it does go a little bit overboard with the lionization of the cast at times. Omar's a great character, but after all the ass-kickery and saintliness, it was great to see a character like Shield's Julian, who had all the requisite inner conflicts of a being a gay black male cop, but wasn't at all made into an otherwise exemplary and ridiculously appealing person.

In an "Everything Bad Is Good For You" determination of cognitive meatiness and complexity, I'd say the two shows are about the same; The Wire just has somewhat better writing, and a more reasonable artistic agenda.

Ok, that was unfair. Cops et. al. is produced by & for idiots; the shield is hung up on `gritty realism' and blows it. As you say, though, it's not like the wire is flawless. And at it's best it's not giving much of a realistic feel for actually living in these neighborhoods. But that's TV.

I've just finished the first article linked in 134, by Sobel. It's very good, and leaves you with substantial skepticism about Putnam's claims and hortatory emphasis, without saying it's worthless. A valuable corrective.

as much as I love The Wire, it does go a little bit overboard with the lionization of the cast at times

Really? I've always thought The Wire did a good job of avoiding having any whitewashed heroes. The distinctive feature of the show has always been that everyone in the cast is kind of an asshole. They're mostly sympathetic assholes, but I think this just makes them more interesting. Marlo is one of the least sympathetic characters, and not coincidentally he's also one of the more boring ones.

146 et al.--Feingold introduced a bill earlier this year that would get rid of pre-dispute consumer arbitration agreements. Not sure exactly how it's doing, but my sense has been there's a fair amount of support.

155: To be honest, I can't really understand why anyone ever accepted the idea these agreements were ok.

Cops et. al. is produced by & for idiots

Cops is awesome.

everyone in the cast is kind of an asshole

But Omar doesn't hurt the innocent directly; the worst that can be said about him is what Bunk said, that he's a parasite and that the kids look up to him. He's got such a heart of gold that his conscience kicked in. It's a small complaint for a show that pretty successfully follows up on ambitious intentions, but Omar is mighty pure for such a major character. Butchie is really good, though.

Cops et. al. is produced by & for idiots

Cops is awesome.

Surprisingly or not, these two things aren't exclusive.

Personally, I find that sort of thing boring. I'm sure it's entirely possible to enjoy it as escapism, understanding the laughably inaccurate messaging for what it is and ignoring that. But then you aren't who it was produced for.

Cops

The opposite of an awesome show is also an awesome show.

160: It is kind of interesting that of these two, a fictional show (the Wire) is a vastly more accurate [*] portrayal of police work than a nominal reality show (Cops)

[*] which doesn't mean particularly accurate.

154: The distinctive feature of the show has always been that everyone in the cast is kind of an asshole.

Not in the same way, though; it happens off-screen, or in ridiculously plot-driven Important Lesson ways, and it's never allowed to affect the likability of the characters. Whereas on The Shield, even though some of the characters are motivated in their assholery by various external and internal pressures that are handled as well if not better than The Wire (I'm thinking Julian, Vic, and Aceveda, mainly), some of them are just unlikable, or at least not very likable. It's also much better about showing the repercussions of the assholishness, on families and so on. Which all seems much more realistic to me, and also kind of a relief vis-a-vis The Wire's strange fondness for Magical Negros of all stripes (although the Magicalness of the white main character in The Shield is just as annoying). It just goes overboard in the opposite direction, leaving you precious little to like about anyone. Which I think is a design choice, in order to mimic the affect the charming-and-manipulative main character has on his subordinates.

LRock, I think you have an overly expansive definition of the concept "Magical Negro". No need to appear as if you're implying racial prejudice when you're really only implying stupidity or some other sort of laziness.

Basically, some of the bad people on The Shield are just bad people, while not being written off as primordially sociopathic evil in the way Marlo is. Well, that's not true - there are a few of those amongst the villains-of-the-week, and they're equally boring as he is. But, like, the Hauk counterpart is about a zillion times more interesting, because he's not just a lovable lunk with some disciplinary problems who's mostly got a heart of gold and a token black buddy, he's an actual outright racist with sadistic tendencies, and kind of a jerk on top of that. Maybe it's just personal preference, but I definitely take that as a mark in The Shield's favor as a matter of "artistic integrity" or whatever you want to call it.

Maybe it's overly expansive, but Omar and Brother Mouzone, and to a lesser extent Lester and Stringer Bell seem ridiculously over the top in their competence, in ways that seem weirdly tied to their moral characters.

165: It's not Magical Negritude until they open Whitey's eyes with their urban Zen wisdom, allowing Whitey to self-realize and take his rightful place as Conquering Hero.

O'Malley, or whatever his name is on the show, is pretty competent, though without moral overtones. The Greek was too. Stringer is not always successful, at all. Given elliptical presentation, the writers need some very capable characters to make interesting things happen-- if everyone is a fuckup, there's a lot of repetition and boredom while nothing much happens, just like real life.

166: Yeah, well, consider the dynamic between Lester and McNulty.

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

On ethnic I diversity I love pointing out the neighboring town of Alhambra, named for a Muslim palace in Spain by midwestern transplants, probably of northern european ancestry, that is now transitioning from mainly Hispanic residents to first generation Chinese.

Feingold introduced a bill earlier this year that would get rid of pre-dispute consumer arbitration agreements. Not sure exactly how it's doing, but my sense has been there's a fair amount of support.

The trial lawyers are pushing hard for it. They're pissed about mandatory arbitration clauses.

Without mandatory arbitration, frivolous rape and wrongful death lawsuits from Iraq would bankrupt the US Treasury.

Why do trial lawyers hate America -- and freedom? Without mandatory arbitration of these frivolous lawsuits, our daughters and granddaughters will soon be wearing burkas -- and nothing else.

http://files.blog-city.com/files/aa/2370/p/f/christian_islam_burqa.jpg

For JE

Oh hell yeah, Lester's a Magic Negro. Omar and Brother M are just anime characters.

135. All trials arising under this agreement shall be mediated by the Bishop of Saxony.

But that puts us back to square one. Stupid 4th Lateran Council. Took all the fun out of the law.

171: hott.

I think you mean 172. At least I hope so.

Oh hell yeah, Lester's a Magic Negro

No, he's not. He's a wise old cop, and because it's Baltimore, he's black.

I agree that Mouzzone was off as a character, but I think Omar is fine. It's not as if the show is actually totally committed to realism, it's much more novelistic than that, and Omar, as someone standing outside and between institutions, is something of a mythical figure. That said, Simon has said that he knew guys in Omar's line of work who survived.

oh, teo.

I love pointing out the neighboring town of Alhambra, named for a Muslim palace in Spain by midwestern transplants, probably of northern european ancestry, that is now transitioning from mainly Hispanic residents to first generation Chinese.

Arcadia High had more east Asian than white when I graduated over ten years ago. San Marino's the same way. They're willing to pay big to go to those high schools. I don't know how anyone affords to live down there anymore.

Incidentally, anyone who watches The Shield should read a bit on the Rampart Division. Crazy stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_Scandal

Read, I have a suggestion about dealing with strange languages from the father of one of my school friends. He was a translator all through the Arabian peninsula and beyond back in the days when a lot of tribes were still much more independent, and when decolonization was in full swing, so that really different cultures were in contact all the time. He said that the most important thing for written communication was the basic grammar: what to capitalize, when to use commas and other punctuation marks, and how to close off sentences and paragraphs. As he told it, at least, if those basics look good, natives will pass right on by all kinds of slip-ups in vocabulary and the rest of the language and never realize they did it.

I don't know if it's always true, but it did seem to help me in my language studies, so I pass it along for anything it might be worth.

i puzzled a while over what "frivolous rape" meant, exactly

patrick buchananan is on the TV right now talking about this study!!