Page - The Difference

That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant, at all.
T. S. E LIOT , The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In January 2007, I stood in an upstairs ballroom of the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, preparing to speak to a group of high school administrators. One hundred copies of The Difference lay stacked nearby on a catering table. Officially, the book had yet to be released, so this was, in effect, its coming out party. As I stared at the uncracked spines, I pondered the books reception. Would people get it? Or would I spend the next few years quoting T. S. Eliot?

Happily, Prufrock has been avoided.

Not that I didnt have my moments of doubt. Initial readings were all over the map. Some in the blogosphere characterized the book as Jim Suroweickis Wisdom of Crowds on steroids. Others framed it as a book about affirmative action. Still others said it described a portfolio model of people. My wife assured me that these were proof of my theoryevidence of diverse perspectives in action. I was less certain and dusted off my Eliot to work on cadence.

Perhaps because The Difference takes time to digest, eventually, accurate readings won out. Reviewers recognized that The Difference explores the pragmatic, bottom-line contributions of diversity. It does so using models and logic, not metaphor. The books claims that collective ability equals individual ability plus diversity and that diversity trumps ability are mathematical truths, not feel-good mantras.

Diversity, as characterized in the book, means differences in how people see, categorize, understand, and go about improving the world. I should hasten to add that the books emphasis on cognitive diversity and the pragmatic benefits of diversity does not deny other dimensions of diversity. Those exist, and they matter. In fact, identity diversity and cognitive diversity often go hand in hand. Two people belonging to different identity groups, or with different life experiences, also tend to acquire diverse cognitive tools.

Unfortunately, rather than leverage those differences to our collective benefit, we often allow our differences to impede progress and innovation. When confronted with someone who looks or acts differently, many of us tend to recoil. Soon after the initial publication of The Difference, Robert Putnam released results from a large survey that demonstrated the scale of this negative response to diversity. He found that levels of civic engagement and trust decreased as communities became more diverse. Note that in his case, diversity means ethnic diversity.

His raw data painted a bleak picture. People in diverse neighborhoods not only trusted people belonging to other ethnic groups less, they trusted everyone less. Not good. Reality may not be as bleak as Putnams most publicized graphs seem to imply, however. After he takes into account control variablescrime, income, city size, educational attainment, etc.the negative effects of diversity decrease substantially.

But the media saw Putnams work and mine as contradictory: Putnam says diversity is bad. Page says diversity is good. The juxtaposition was ill posed. Putnam had done survey research. I had written theoretical models. Putnam was asking people about trust and happiness. I was constructing models of collective productivity, accuracy, and innovation. He was asking, do we get along? I was analyzing whether diverse teams make better mousetraps.

Interacting with a large number of diverse people should be more cognitively taxing than hanging out with your close friends, who look, think, and act just like you. Situated in a diverse polyglot, people may indeed feel the need to hunker down (to use Putnams phrase). Even so, they probably do not fully insulate themselves. They cannot avoid having their world view a bit more exposed to new ways of seeing and thinking, and as a result they cannot help but become a bit more productive. Thus, we should expect members of diverse communities, cities, and nations to be more productive, even if they are less trusting.