Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
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Re: Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
#61 
by SafeAsMilk » Nov 09, 2020 7:50 pm
As usual, you manage to generate something worth reading out of someone trying to take a dump on the forum. The Ratskep alchemist, you are
"They call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it." -- George Carlin
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SafeAsMilk - Name: Makes Fails
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Re: Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
#62 by OlivierK » Nov 09, 2020 8:31 pm
Thommo wrote:The funny thing is that before Rainbow's little tantrum about being called on his deliberate obstructiveness I had found a couple of useful looking avenues to pursue for looking more seriously at the question of how social cohesion varies between nations. I was waiting for him to make some sort of small concession towards moving the conversation forward to post it. Oh well.
I thought this looked promising, regarding Asia-Pacific countries:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver ... 8A8D1AC1B1
I expect there's more to explore in the OECD library there.
This document contains a couple of useful lists of operational definitions that might start to bring light to how social cohesion gets measured in sociology:
https://www.oecd.org/dev/pgd/46935545.pdf
I was thinking of following up on p4.
I am always a bit wary of social science. Perhaps more than a bit these days. Risks of confounding variables, data mining and so on are always high and it's often difficult to match a result to a cause or theory.
I wouldn't be surprised (although I haven't checked at all) if it turned out culture, and language in particular, tended to create some sort of barrier for social cohesion indices. It seems extremely problematic in every sense of the word to equate that with ethnicity though.
I suppose it also wouldn't be that surprising if open racism had some effect on the figures. I can entertain the hypothetical that if a society has sufficiently many racists (for whatever reason) that might affect social cohesion. Not much use speculating without evidence though.
Haven't had a chance to look through your links yet, but will do, they look interesting.
I was also having a bit of a trawl, without having come up with anything particularly worth sharing, around various indices and rankings of various forms of discrimination to see if there were patterns or correlations with degrees of ethnic homogeneity, and there wasn't anything that particularly stood out, beyond the massive levels of sexism, homophobia and transphobia in some homogeneously Arabic countries.
I, too, was wondering if Rainbow Simon would ever actually contribute to his own thread, even if by only showing his colours. He certainly seemed utterly uninterested in the serious reply I gave him in post #8 (although that level of bad faith was entirely predictable from the OP).
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OlivierK - Posts: 9873
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Re: Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
#63 by Thommo » Nov 09, 2020 9:01 pm
I should say something slightly odd happened with that first link, so instead of chapter 8 alone, I've linked a bigger report by mistake, so to get to the relevant stuff (the rest is interesting enough, but not really on topic) you might need to head to p87 or so.
There's probably a more up to date version of the report that I hadn't got around to looking for as well.
I think it's interesting how different factors of the model move countries like Australia or China to very different places on the list. Both of those seem like interesting countries for different reasons - Australia has huge levels of immigration in living memory and a lot of diverse cultural and ethnic influences. China has minimal migration, but covers a huge geographic area and enormous number of people including several ethnic groups, but is mostly united by common language and an oppressive regime that tries to enforce a monoculture on groups like the Uighurs.
There's probably a more up to date version of the report that I hadn't got around to looking for as well.
I think it's interesting how different factors of the model move countries like Australia or China to very different places on the list. Both of those seem like interesting countries for different reasons - Australia has huge levels of immigration in living memory and a lot of diverse cultural and ethnic influences. China has minimal migration, but covers a huge geographic area and enormous number of people including several ethnic groups, but is mostly united by common language and an oppressive regime that tries to enforce a monoculture on groups like the Uighurs.
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Thommo - Posts: 27477
Re: Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
#64 by OlivierK » Nov 10, 2020 2:12 am
Yeah, I skipped forward to Section 8, but the rest looked interesting, too. The second paper less so, but still it had some things that made me think, which is never a bad thing.
China isn't particularly united by common language, though. It has dozens of languages, and even Cantonese and Mandarin aren't mutually intelligible (in spoken form - of course; kanji makes things interesting on the mutual intelligibility front). Of course many Chinese speak Mandarin as a second language, but that's not really the same thing.
As for the Australian experience, it's also odd from up close. Yes, we're very culturally diverse, but also still very white. Yes, there's huge acceptance of immigrants, but also still noticeable pockets of casual racism, especially towards more recent immigrant groups (eg Sudanese or Congolese, currently), or towards indigenous Australians. Like many places in the world, our largest cities are more diverse than our rural valleys. We do well, but we're far from perfect.
China isn't particularly united by common language, though. It has dozens of languages, and even Cantonese and Mandarin aren't mutually intelligible (in spoken form - of course; kanji makes things interesting on the mutual intelligibility front). Of course many Chinese speak Mandarin as a second language, but that's not really the same thing.
As for the Australian experience, it's also odd from up close. Yes, we're very culturally diverse, but also still very white. Yes, there's huge acceptance of immigrants, but also still noticeable pockets of casual racism, especially towards more recent immigrant groups (eg Sudanese or Congolese, currently), or towards indigenous Australians. Like many places in the world, our largest cities are more diverse than our rural valleys. We do well, but we're far from perfect.
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OlivierK - Posts: 9873
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Re: Social cohesion - Homogenous or various ethnicities
#65 by don't get me started » Nov 12, 2020 10:07 am
Yeah, I think the OP was not a credible participant in his own thread. It's funny how these kind of people encode their view that racial/ethnic homogeneity is the foundation of a 'stable' society, i.e. we all get along when we are all (ethnically) the same.
Nary a nod to the notion that non- homogeneity in the economic realm (i.e. extreme and growing wealth gap) might undermine social cohesion. Or, put another way, if we all have the same color skin, then an exploited and impoverished underclass will be happy with their lot.
Anyways, whilst rabbit-holing through YouTube links, I came across this video on stability ranking of countries of the world. It is related, I though to the thread topic so I'll post it here. The author lays out the criteria for the ranking in broad terms at the beginning of the video.
What was interesting to me is recent the dropping down the ranking tables of both the US and the UK. (This video was made before the present farrago of Trump refusing to concede the election, which I can't see as helping the score of the US.)
Nary a nod to the notion that non- homogeneity in the economic realm (i.e. extreme and growing wealth gap) might undermine social cohesion. Or, put another way, if we all have the same color skin, then an exploited and impoverished underclass will be happy with their lot.
Anyways, whilst rabbit-holing through YouTube links, I came across this video on stability ranking of countries of the world. It is related, I though to the thread topic so I'll post it here. The author lays out the criteria for the ranking in broad terms at the beginning of the video.
What was interesting to me is recent the dropping down the ranking tables of both the US and the UK. (This video was made before the present farrago of Trump refusing to concede the election, which I can't see as helping the score of the US.)
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