Social Spending and ethnic diversity

The core of a David Goodhart's "left-wing" argument against immigration is that racial diversity makes it harder to sustain high levels of social spending. 

I don't necessarily disagree with the point, but harder does not mean impossible. 

The argument is motivated by work by Alberto Alesina and other economists at Harvard. Alberto Alesina is a smart, original, and prolific thinker who does a lot of interesting work. But this particular paper, was never actually published in a peer-reviewed journal. The chart below is the main empirical result driving their argument (from this paper). 

As David is not an economist, I'll break this down for him slowly. This is called a "scatterplot". Social welfare spending as a percent of GDP is on the vertical axis, and an index of racial fractionalization is on the horizontal axis. You can see that there is a negative relationship between the two, but there is also a lot of variation around the fitted line.

A few observations:

- All of the European countries have relatively low levels of racial fractionalization - below 0.2 - but being European actually tells you very little about levels of social spending, which are spread widely between low spending Iceland and Greece, and high spending Belgium and Luxembourg. 

- Removing the European countries would remove the negative trend. Japan (almost no diversity) has almost exactly the same social spending as high diversity Brazil or US. Low diversity Costa Rica has the same social spending as high diversity Mauritius. 

- Looking at the UK - imagine that the UK began to approach New Zealand or US levels of diversity - does that mean we would have New Zealand levels of social spending (higher) or US levels of social spending (lower).

The key point from just looking at this chart is that even if there is a relationship, which it is not even clear that there really is if you consider Europe separately to the rest of the world, diversity is not destiny. Social spending is a policy choice. Diversity might influence this policy choice, but so do a lot of other things. Even if diversity did make social spending harder, it does not make it impossible. Correlation is not causation. Etc. QED. 

I'm English and I love the EDL

The English Disco Lovers.

Our aims are very clear - we want to accumulate more likes than the English Defence League on Facebook as well as outranking them on Google. By doing this in a light-hearted way we aim to show them for what they really are - racist, outdated and the type you wouldn't invite to your disco.

One World, One Race, One Disco. 

Hate Racism, Love Disco.

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David Cameron doesn't care about black people

to paraphrase Kanye, that is pretty much the impression that I got from Lord Ashcroft's interesting new report on ethnic minorities and the Conservative Party.

At the 2010 election, only 16% of ethnic minority voters supported the  Conservatives. More than two thirds voted Labour.
...
by polling white voters alongside those from ethnic minorities, we demonstrated that the Conservative Party’s unpopularity among black and Asian voters is not simply a matter of class and geography. There were sometimes strikingly different results between white and non-white voters living in the same area, and between different ethnic minority groups. Among ethnic minority voters the Conservatives’ brand problem exists in a more intense form. For many of our participants  - by no means all, it is important to state  - there was an extra barrier between them and the Conservative Party directly related to their ethnic background. If Labour was the party that helped their families to establish themselves in Britain, had represented people who did their kind of work, and had passed laws to help ensure they were treated equally, the Conservatives, they felt, had been none to keen on their presence in the first place. Enoch Powell was often mentioned in evidence, as was the notorious Smethwick election campaign of 1964 in which a poster appeared - not distributed by the Conservatives, but remembered as such - saying “if you want a n****r for a neighbour vote Labour”. The failure, on the Conservatives’ watch, properly to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence was also cited. Most thought that if prejudice had been widespread in the party, then  the  Conservatives had changed in recent years, whether through principle or necessity. But significant numbers  - which particularly included people from a black Caribbean background  - felt the Tories remained indifferent or even hostile towards ethnic minorities. Many felt the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, had unfairly blamed ethnic minorities for last summer’s riots. 

Via Rob Ford