American society is high trust and diverse. Lots of interesting charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/trust

mikem170 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I just bumped into the idea of "demographic diversity" versus "moral diversity" [1].

Demographic diversity speaks to the differences in sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. A nation of immigrants, for example.

Moral diversity speaks to the differences in culture, the rules a society follows. Erosion of those rules is what leads to a low trust society.

I thought this was a really interesting distinction to make.

It seems that the U.S. is not as high trust as it was 75+ years ago. The book I read used the example of neighbors disciplining children, which was more common in U.S. culture 75+ years ago. Today you'd worry about a parent calling the police for that. In general the idea of character has replaced with personality. Moral diversity. Live and let live.

But on the other hand 75+ years ago women and minorities were more limited. We now have more demographic diversity. Which is a good thing.

I would like to think that demographic diversity and a high trust society aren't mutually exclusive. Conflating the two doesn't help.

[1] The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, Chapter 8, The Felicity of Virtue

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nxor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Look here: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...

	▲	esafak 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		America's diversity has not changed commensurately with the drop in trust, but economic factors have, and the charts I linked to back that correlation in other countries.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> American society is high trust and diverse

Would note that this is almost a prerequisite for great societies. Small and homogenous, or powerful and diverse. There really isn't a middle course.

Rome. China. Britain. Each had empires that were remarkably diverse for their time. (Rome, perhaps, most of all.)

	▲	ux266478 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'll disagree with that on a few points. Britain was inarguably the most diverse, with almost no attempt at creating cultural homogenity (and it really wasn't that great for anyone not Scottish or English.) Rome attempted it to some degree, with attempts to have a unified culture largely decreasing as time went on, being replaced with a Christian identity. China is extremely complicated in this matter and goes to extreme lengths to ensure cultural homogeneity. Minorities exist and the nature of the han ethnicity is also very obtuse, but it's highly rooted in an indivisible homogeneity that you discount. Hanhua is a very basic concept. You also ignore the flagrant existence of powers that were not diverse. The Phoenicians interacted with a lot of cultures and influenced them very deeply, but Canaanite society was highly insular. Viet Nam was a powerful society that expanded continually, but it engaged in aggressive replacement colonialism of peoples it conquered. Diversity in a real sense requires a collection of disparate, conflicting identities. There are no great societies that have any kind of lifespan with widespread diversity in this sense. Almost all of them move towards assimilation, and the ones that don't never last long.