Current mood:	awake
Current music:	Tea In The Sahara - The Police
Entry tags:	philosophy

What price diversity?
Simplicity and efficiency are generally held up as virtues. So is diversity, which tends to breed innovation and harbour flexibility. But diversity exacts a price in the form of decreased simplicity and efficiency. Are the benefits of diversity worth the cost? Let's consider a few systems where this has been an issue.

For a long time the US population was racially stable with a ratio of about 8 whites to 1 black where the most powerful and wealthy elements of society were almost exclusively white. Under this environment there evolved a system of higher education where the best schools were attended by those who were either exceptionally brilliant or considerably wealthy. It allowed the powerful to maintain their position while simultaneously providing a way for the most naturally gifted individuals to contribute to society. And then the country began allowing Asian immigrants in.

Over the next few decades, these Asian immigrants steadily pushed out the predominantly white students in top schools, giving rise to the perception that Asians are somehow smarter than Americans. What most people failed to see was that this strange effect was simply the result of a system that hadn't evolved with this sort of diversity in mind. Immigration, you see, is a harsh filter. The Asians who enter the US legally are generally well-educated and extremely driven - it takes a special sort of person to leave behind everything they know and tough it out in a strange new world where everything is a struggle.

This meant that the relatively microscopic segment of the total US population represented by Asian immigrants was also possessed of a disproportionately high motivation to succeed and placed a disproportionately high priority on education. Like the Jews, who had been forced by centuries of ethnic discrimination to prioritize education and financial acumen - leading to the popular stereotype of them being professionals (mostly lawyers or doctors) - Asian immigrants first hit the fields where merit mattered more than social connections and cultural knowledge: science and engineering. Business followed suit but now even the humanities are starting to see an Asian influx. And this phenomenon isn't restricted to higher education: in Cupertino, which is one of the very few Californian cities with good public high schools, Asians have settled in droves to the point where you don't see that many white people any more.

Not surprisingly, all this has created some resentment among those who got pushed out by the Asian immigrants, sometimes leading to racial tensions. At the same time, the Asian immigrants have had a hard time integrating into mainstream society's melting pot because the disproportionate focus on education and financial success left little attention available for high-risk careers like professional sports, professional entertainment, politics, etc - the things around which American culture seems to revolve. Interestingly, these areas are also the ones most often criticized for being stagnant. Those who care frequently bemoan the blandness of Hollywood and the music industry as well as the declining interest in national politics. The same could easily be argued for having more women in technical fields. Well, how might we address this by making these spheres more open to diverse participants and is that really such a good idea?

I'd actually argue that change is already beginning to occur: the surging popularity of soccer and animé are both striking examples of this. Will we see Asians make headway in politics too? Intuitively, that seems less likely, although I'm not quite sure why.

Anyway, let's revisit the matter of diversity's cost on simplicity and efficiency. In a closed system, it might make sense to optimize for efficiency via a simple design. But we do not live in a closed system. In order to thrive in a globally competitive arena, innovation and flexibility are absolutely vital. And since flexibility supports diversity, which promotes innovation, it makes sense for both businesses and "new world" countries like Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand to foster an environment that is diverse in many ways. Furthermore, it actually makes sense for regions with mutually hostile ethnic populations to celebrate their diversity instead of striving for the red herring of ethnic purity, no matter how much it may appeal to those in love with simplicity.

Going down this line of reasoning some more, it actually makes sense to artificially preserve sectors of society that would otherwise be driven to oblivion by the harsh pressures of myopic competition. Failure to do so may favour simplicity and efficiency at the cost of flexibility until we create a situation with a single point of failure and disaster strikes. Consider the case of the Cavendish banana that dominates global production but is now in danger of extinction because it lacks genetic resistance to a disease that hadn't been much of a consideration in the past. Therein lies too the dangers of GMO crops. Good design works extremely well in the short term but the flexibility of an evolutionary system will always trump it in the long term. And evolution works best with immense diversity.

Take the hi-tech industry, for instance. In areas where there is fierce competition (databases, search engines, webmail, blog-hosting, instant messaging, VoIP, smartphones, home theatres, 3D graphics accelerators, videogame consoles, etc.) there is also steady innovation and a focus on customer delight, although consumers must put up with the pains of fragmentation. Conversely, in areas where there is a single dominant entity (desktop CPU architectures, office suites & Unix windowing systems, for instance) there's more consistency and a stable user experience but much less groundbreaking innovation (AMD's 64-bit extension to the x86 and Intel's multi-core chips being counterexamples born only of the fierce competition within the x86 CPU market itself). While IE was the unchallenged king of the Web browser market, Microsoft ceased working on it entirely and it took a strong assault from Firefox to force them into competing again. X11's entrenchment has meant that graphics on Unix systems (except for Apple's Quartz) suck. Nevertheless, people crave simplicity to the point where they will myopically relinquish the innovation that diversity delivers in order to hang on to simplicity. And in an environment where the barrier to entry is high, diversity is hard to reintroduce once lost. This is the danger posed by corporate mergers chasing economies of scale.

[Disclaimer: any opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily represent my employer.]