Across Difficult Country coins a useful addition to the Orwellian vocabulary:

A new Civil War book investigates the effects of diversity within army units. For example, research reveals more loyalty (as shown by lower levels of desertion) among companies with less diversity.

Facts like that are commonsensical, but multicultural ideology seeks to turn reason upside down and convince us that “diversity is our strength” and similar nonsense.

Diversity is a double-edged sword, making individuals less likely to be altruistic than they might be in a more homogeneous setting but also inspiring them to scale new intellectual heights and to explore new horizons, argue two UCLA economists in a new book.

“People enjoy being around people they can relate to, and they are uncomfortable with diversity,” said Matthew Kahn, a co-author of “Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War,” which will be published Jan. 21 by Princeton University Press. “But even though people don’t like being exposed to people who are different, they benefit from the experience in the long run. They learn the most from those who are different.”

While recent research into lower rates of volunteerism and lack of taxpayer support for local projects in diverse communities has reached similar conclusions, the latest findings are based on a surprising set of subjects: 41,000 soldiers who served in the U.S. Civil War between 1861 and 1865.

“Union soldiers, whether in prison camps or in the field, were the most loyal to men who looked like themselves - of the same ethnicity and occupation, from the same state or hometown, or of the same age or related by blood,” said co-author Dora L. Costa, a UCLA economics professor. “We believe that by going back so far in time we’re getting at an effect that’s universal. This reaction to diversity may be hardwired into us.” [United States Civil War Illustrates Costs, Benefits Of Diversity, by Meg Sullivan, Imperial Valley News, January 14, 2009]

Interestingly, the publisher (Princeton University Press) got a blurb from Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame).

“This remarkable book is destined to become a classic in social science. It addresses issues of supreme importance and timeliness–loyalty, betrayal, heroism, cowardice, survival, the challenges of diversity, and the benefits of social bonds. It rests on rigorous statistical analysis of an extraordinary historical archive, and yet it is so readable as to be unputdownable. It deals with a single epochal event in one nation’s history–the U.S. Civil War–and yet its lessons are highly relevant in many other eras and societies, including our own.”–Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

I will be on the Chuck Wilder talk-radio show today 1:30 PM PST, 4:30 EST

Wilder’s show is available online in streaming audio which can be listened  to at this website: http://www.crni.net/

To listen to the show, click the box where it says “now playing, listen live” “CRN1″

There is a toll free call-in telephone number if you want to chat with us:
1-800-336-2225

This is the show schedule:

CRN1 12-2pm PT (live)

CRN6 8-10pm PT (replay)

CRN6 1-3 AM PT (replay)

We will talk about Nancy Killefer who was chosen by Barack Obama to fill a new position called the “Chief Performance Officer” (CPO).

Our gigantic trade deficit must, obviously, fall. It would be a lot nicer if part of the decrease consisted of America exporting more rather than just importing less. How can the government help? Well, one way is for the U.S. to stop being the Dudley Do-Right of international business. From an article by Don Lee in the Los Angeles Times:

When Pasadena-based Avery Dennison wanted to build its road and traffic business in China a few years ago, it hired people like Lily Tang. The Beijing homemaker had an asset the company craved: political connections.

Tang’s husband, Chen Qi, is a senior official at the China Communications and Transportation Assn., a quasi-governmental group led by former ministers. That connection, said current and former Avery managers in China, helped the company win contracts for thousands of dollars’ worth of government projects.

In one case, according to interviews and a copy of a signed contract reviewed by The Times, Avery received an order to supply $375,000 worth of reflective safety products for highway jobs in Tianjin, east of Beijing, and paid a commission of about 8% to an enterprise operated by a friend of Chen’s.

Chen’s friend, Guo Longjun of Beijing, said he had passed the money on to “experts,” whom he wouldn’t identify.

Such payments may be part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether Avery violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Avery reported possible violations on its own in 2005. It characterized them as relatively minor and said it had taken corrective measures. Though it is by no means the only U.S. company involved in a corruption investigation of its business dealings in China, its experience provides a case study of the pitfalls American firms face as they try to capture a piece of the Chinese market.

(more…)

Like I’ve been saying all along, exciting mass transit infrastructure projects have proven to be largely incompatible with the notion of “stimulus.”

Most of the stimulus spending is going toward bailing out state and local governments, spending which I’ve long suggested be renamed “human infrastructure” to make it sound sexier and obscure the fact that Obama’s whole “infrastructure stimulus” idea has turned out to be largely a flop. Liberals have spent the last forty years making it excruciatingly slow to bulldoze anything big in the Blue States. They made their beds and now they are lying in them.

Now that progressives have gotten a bitter taste of the delays inherent in environmental regulation, it’s time for the Obama administration to call for a major review of how those regulations can be made less onerous and time-consuming. Don’t junk environmentalism, but make it more efficient. Mend it, don’t end it!

This review should extend to how can we get the hand of government off the throats of our export industries. We desperately need ways to stimulate our exports to pay for our enormous imports from China and oil producers. We should look at ways to make our exporters more globally competitive by reducing upon them the burdens imposed by environmental, affirmative action, and disability regulations. You can keep forcing domestic industries to subsidize lots of politically favored groups, but let’s not indirectly tax exporters to the same degree.

Also, we should probably lift the American ban on American firms bribing overseas customers, that goes back to when the prime minister of Japan shook down Lockheed for a kickback on aircraft purchases, and the U.S. Congress went into a tizzy about how evil Lockheed was. Let the foreigners police themselves. If they want to arrest American salesmen who are paying kickbacks to get contracts, good for them. But why is it our duty?