[MUSIC] Hi there, and welcome back. Last week, we looked at the central idea of trust and diversity in society. We suggested that diversity would make creating bridging capital more difficult, and that this would have a negative impact on levels of trust. On the other hand, in a society with an efficient and impartial government, trust would be higher and group differences would matter less. Well, in this video, we're going to focus on ethnicity, and we'll see why it still remains such a sensitive issue. And then we'll discuss how it's actually measured. Now, we all know what is meant by ethnicity, or do we? Most of us would start with race or color, but after that, it almost immediately spills over into culture. Isn't African the same as an Afro-American? No, but they do have the same race. Is a black American the same as a white American? No, but they do have the same culture, although they experience it differently. Ethnicity, then, is an identifier, but it's also a self-identifier, and this may have several layers. In many places in Africa, you may identify yourself with the dominant culture, or you may emphasize your particular subgroup. Ethnicity may also be how others identify you, whether you like it or not. In the Balkans in the 19th century, ethnicity was a matter of history, dialect, music, dance, and even embroidery. It would all have been quite sweet, were it not that these exercises were linked to claims by Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians to the territories of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. I suppose there was a time in 19th century Europe when the Romantic revival represented a genuine search for an identity and a heritage unspoilt by the Industrial Revolution. But this soon turned into naked nationalism, and any innocence it might once have had drowned in the blood and mud of ethnic conflict. Darwin's theories of evolution also lost their scientific detachment when they were used to propagate the idea of racial hierarchy. And this served to underpin the spread of empires throughout the world in the 19th century, and justify imperial domination and exploitation. And from Darwin's theories too sprang the pseudoscience of eugenics, aimed at improving the genetic features of the human race. Through selective breeding, sterilization, euthanasia, and, later, mass extermination. The toxic mix of racial prejudice that had fueled the anti-Jewish pogroms of the 19th century. And the racial politics of Nazi ideology would culminate in the slaughter of millions of innocent victims, cast a dark cloud over almost any neutral discussion of ethnicity. And if we do need a reminder of the association of ethnicity with mass murder, we have a couple from the 1990s. The Rwandan genocide, for example, or the mass ethnic cleansing that accompanied the wars in former Yugoslavia. So it was quite a surprise when, in 1997, two World Bank economists, William Easterly and Ross Levine, constructed an Ethno-Linguistic Fragmentation Index. So, let's have a look at what that index is. Now, the index they used was a technique formulated by two economists, Herfindahl and Hirschmann. It's very easy to calculate, easier than to actually pronounce. You line up the variables in a line and you count each of them in percentages of the whole. Then you square each one, which means that you multiply each number by themselves. Add them all together and divide by 100, or 10,000, if you want the results in decimals. The lower the number, the more homogeneous or concentrated the country. But note, some authors then deduct the results from one, which reverses the relationship, such is social science for you. Easterly and Levine argued that ethno-linguistic differences explained a significant part of, I quote, low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure. So where did they get their numbers from? Well, the ethnic data came from a Soviet atlas, translated, Atlas of the Peoples of the World, published 33 years earlier, which provided data for 112 countries. However, there's no description of the methodology. A critical appraisal of the atlas in 2008 concluded that it very much underestimates the degree of diversity. For example, it managed to classify Rwanda as ethnically homogeneous, and I don't need to remind you again of the resulting massacre of 500,000 to a million Tutsis. Well, Easterly and Levine's was a pioneering study, but it was hampered by doubts over the ethnic data. Typically, nobody seemed to say much about the other variables. In 2002, another group of economists led by Alberto Alesina, at the time at Carnegie Mellon, returned with a new index. And this one's been widely used in subsequent research, so it's quite an important index. Now, one change they made was to separate ethnicity and language, and we'll be dealing with the linguistic component in the next video. They also expanded the country coverage to 190 countries and they changed the source for ethnicity from the original outdated Soviet atlas to a range of more contemporary sources. These included the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was a data source for 124 countries, and the CIA Factbook, which provided another 25. And a variety of other sources made up the remainder. Okay, so the sources were more up-to-date and more comprehensive. But where did those sources get their data? Well, most of it comes from census returns and other counts. Now we already saw in the video on population that census counts in Africa were deeply influenced by tribal struggles for power, representation, and resources. And that this could lead to over counting, sometimes on a large scale, but it's not just in Africa that counts of ethnicity are suspect. In Western Europe, many countries have stopped holding regular censuses, partly because of the resentment towards some of the questions, and mostly on race and ethnicity. Another problem with self-reporting is a genuine confusion over the answer. In societies where marriages are no longer always within ethnic or racial boundaries, and where the respondent's children have been born and raised in the census country. It may be very difficult to answer what your nationality, what your ethnicity is. Census returns have little room for the phenomenon of shared identities. These questions are often solved by legal frameworks, and this introduces another problem, mainly that of legal definition. We've already highlighted this again in the case of Africa, but the problem doesn't end there. The Netherlands, for example, has a very high proportion of non-Dutch residents. The kingdom even has a foreign monarch, has had for decades, and will have again when the current king abdicates. Why? Well, because Dutch law defines a foreigner as anyone with one foreign parent. A final question is, does it all matter? Does counting the distribution of ethnicities actually say something about their social mobilization or the discrimination they may experience? Does it, perhaps, matter more whether ethnicities live in mixed communities or live in separated groups? Is it fragmentation that matters or is it domination? Which might show up as relative homogeneity when you're counting the numbers. So let's sum up what we've looked at at the moment. In this video, we've explored the phenomenon of ethnicity and we've criticized the attempts to measure the degree of fragmentation. In the next video, we'll do the same with language. In the meantime, we invite you to view a visualization of a world map of ethnic fragmentation.
