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by scarface74 1237 days ago
I knew I read something somewhere and this is the closest I could find. But I think it’s related.

So when I asked ChatGPT

> Are countries with less racial diversity more likely to have a larger safety net”

because my GoogleFu was failing me, of course it gave me a non controversial generic answer.

But when I asked it for citations it gave me this

> A 2018 study published in the journal Social Science Research, which found that countries with more ethnically diverse populations tend to have less generous welfare states.

Which led me to this link

https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/37/1/89/5934740

> First, vignette experiments established a consistent and pervasive deservingness gap: welfare recipients belonging to the ethnic ingroup are more likely to be considered deserving of welfare support than the ethnic outgroup

1 comments

That's very circumstantial evidence that requires more examination. Is that a direct result of the diversity - or of the history that generated that diversity in the first place?

In most countries that are ethnically diverse, that diversity was created through various forms of colonialism. Often with racial imperialism deeply ingrained in it. Which means those countries have long running strains of racist ideas and ideologies that forms the foundations of the ethnic "in group" and "out group".

Which is not to say that ethnic strife doesn't exist in non-colonial countries as well, but that this line of thinking and examination is a) extremely complex, b) inextricable from the history of the systems under examination, c) inextricable from deep histories of racist thought - often imposed by colonnial or imperialist powers, and d) similar to social darwinism in that it is often presented as common sense, but leads to some very dark places when taken, unexamined, to its logical conclusion.

That last paragraph sound like the same non committal answer I got from ChatGPT at first. That’s not meant to be a criticism, just a random aside.

You do raise a fair point

Yeah, I mean, there's a good reason for that. To do the topic justice requires a lot of pretty delicate work. The only way to give a shorter answer with out tripping into dangerous territory is for it to look something like my last paragraph.