This article appeared in Upside (April 1993)
But every time I see diversity in print or hear it fall from someone's lips, I can't help wondering how many Americans truly believe that diversity is good. My mind keeps drifting back to an incident a few years ago, when Japan's then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone ignited a firestorm of controversy in the United States by saying; "Japan is now a highly educated and intelligent society. Much more so than America, on average. In America, there are quite a few black people, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. On the average, the level is still very low."
Outrage spilled from America's editorial pages and nightly news broadcasts. Trade tensions heightened, and a resolution attacking Nakasone was introduced in Congress. Then, as the furor reached a crescendo, the initially unrepentant prime minister pulled the plug on the flap by issuing a "heartfelt apology" and claiming he had been quoted out of context and misunderstood.
But in Japan, before the American reaction came ricocheting in, Nakasone's comment went virtually unreported by the press. What he said wasn't news. To most Japanese, Nakasone was merely restating the obvious -- ethnic diversity creates confusion and discord. Societies function best when people look, think and act alike.
In the United States, Nakasone hit a raw nerve not because most Americans disagree with him, but because deep down most Americans agree yet pretend not to. If his remark was thought wrong or foolish, it would have been laughed off or ignored, like any other idiocy uttered by a foreign leader. But if truth be told, like the Japanese, we believe a homogeneous society works best. It's just that the Japanese have on and we don't. Nakasone's cross-cultural blunder was saying something Americans believe but don't dare admit.
Today's fashionable devotion to diversity merely extends the hypocrisy pricked by Nakasone. We have yet to face up to the core questions raised by that incident. Has America's diversity contributed to our competitiveness problem? More important, will the homogeneity of Japanese society turn into an unbeatable economic advantage as the Information Age unfolds and high-tech products demand even higher levels of communication and coordination?
"No" is the short answer to both questions. We need not fear our polyglot make-up. Indeed, if we knew how to use it, our diversity could become our most powerful competitive advantage, an unmatchable source of innovation and economic vitality. But to tap that potential, we must first acknowledge our deep-seated prejudice and then eradicate it with facts.
In 1988, the same British scientific team which showed that all humans are descended from one woman, the so-called Eve who lived about 200,000 years ago, also proved that people have 99.6 percent of their genes in common. Of the 0.4 percent genetic diversity that does exist, virtually all occurs within racial groups. The genetic distance between races is vanishingly small, just 0.04 percent. Put another way, variance within each race is ten times the difference between races.
Of course, economically relevant genetic differences do exist among individuals. Some kids are born geniuses; others are challenged by the simplest tasks. Yet, despite decades of the most determined research efforts, no one has shown significant differences in the intellectual capacity of ethnic or racial groups.
Even statistics showing a small gap between the median IQ scores of American whites and blacks offer no support for this age-old prejudice. IQ test designers cannot agree among themselves what intelligence is or how to measure it. That a high IQ score is predictive of later economic success tells us nothing more than that IQ tests measure a grab-bag of factors somehow correlated to success in a biased society.
In short, the scientific evidence lends no support to the myth that certain ethnic or racial groups are intellectual inferior. Minuscule genetic differences between groups predict nothing about individual intellectual capacity. Despite their durability, racist assertions, like those Nakasone made against blacks and Hispanics, are nonsense.
But dismissing the bogus race-related intelligence claim does not dispose of the core serious argument that homogeneous societies work better. Grappling with that one takes more thought and a bit of speculation.
Consider the distinct patterns of technical innovation in Japan and America. No one doubts that the Japanese are past masters at refining an existing technology. Examples -- from VCRs to DRAMs -- are too numerous and familiar to mention. But the Japanese are themselves deeply troubled by their seeming inability to come up with the breakthrough innovations that create wholly new technologies. America, by contrast, overflows with new ideas that depart, often quite radically, from the accepted wisdom.
In his recent book The Outnation, Jonathan Rauch offers several intriguing insights into this contrast between the two nations. Rauch argues that despite their shared Asian physical characteristics, the Japanese are not homogeneous. That is a myth. The same astonishing diversity of beliefs, preferences and capabilities is found in Tokyo as in Los Angeles. The difference is that the Japanese are taught to believe they're not diverse, and their "avoid conflict at all costs" social system reinforces the homogeneity myth.
First and foremost, conflict avoidance depends on not making mistakes. Japanese schoolchildren are trained not to make a mistake, even if that means achieving nothing spectacular. There is exactly one correct answer -- the one on the test. At retirement dinners, Japanese executives express satisfaction not by reciting their accomplishments but by saying they made no big mistakes.
Why such fear of mistakes? Because an error compels others to weed out that mistake through criticism and conflict. Open criticism of someone's idea is seen as socially irresponsible. It tears the web of relationships. To avoid conflict, to avoid piercing through the myth of homogeneity, the Japanese learn to self-censor, to be incredibly cautious about the public positions they take. As individuals, they are no more or less creative than Americans, but to support the "higher" goal of conflict avoidance, they suppress that creativity.
Conversely, though Americans are no more diverse than Japanese, we accept our diversity. We have no expectation of avoiding conflict. New ideas, brilliant and stupid alike, spew forth from a people who can't even imagine self-censorship. We depend on criticism, conflict, and competition to sort out the wonderful from the inane.
To explore these hunches, I chatted with Paul Williams, a research manager at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He directs a group of about 20 scientist -- immigrants from 13 different countries -- who are charged with developing major advances in HP's manufacturing processes. Williams attributes his group's success to its incredible diversity and, oddly enough, to the inherent difficulty of communication that flows from this diversity.
Because team members speak English with a variety of accents and use the language in ways unfamiliar to one another, misunderstandings arising from skewed nuances often divert discussions into unplanned and fruitful directions. Miscommunication has its drawbacks, but a little confusion in the creative process opens people up to the unexpected. Truly novel solutions are freer to sprout in an environment where no single culture dominates, where no homogeneity myth need be maintained.
If this reasoning is right, America's crazy-quilt diversity may become an increasingly powerful competitive advantage, as the Information Age progresses. Over the last two decades, as the Machine Age has drawn to a close, Japan's economic triumph was based on perfecting relatively stable products and processes. Perhaps the Japanese conflict-avoiding system and close communication gives them an edge at this form of innovation.
But now, as the Information Age takes hold, product life-cycles are collapsing and entirely new fields of technology are opening up at a stunning pace. We are entering an era when steady refinement will take a back seat to bold invention. With every technology a fast-moving target, nobody knows the "right" answer. If you can't take leaps, if no answer is better than the wrong answer, you can't play the game. In an era of dizzying change, competitive advantage should shift to an unabashedly diverse society, where the freedom to try new ideas is stronger than the need to save face.
Tragically, however, most Americans still buy into Nakasone's racial homogeneity myths. Instead of working hard to educate all our diverse peoples and welcoming them as full partners in the enterprise of innovation, we have written them off as hopeless and, in so doing, written off our most potent competitive asset.