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> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries

Having lived in both continents I can tell you this is absolutely not true, particularly in Western Europe.

Large Western European cities/capitals are usually a huge melting pot of locals, foreign Europeans, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, Central Americans, South Americans, South Asians and East Asians.

Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority, highlighting how multicultural Europe can be.

Go to some of the largest German cities and you'll feel like you're at a UN meeting.

> I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers.

Well, this is unfortunately a human problem and I'm not entirely sure if there's a solution or if it could be mitigated. I like UBI as a concept and I do think it would be enormously beneficial for humanity as a whole, but I'm not sure if it's feasible.

The point about diversity is absolutely true. Notwithstanding London, Britain is still 75% British Germany is still 86% German. No ethnic group in the US make up more than 20% of America. And even if you treat “white” as a meaningful category, that makes Britain (at 80%), one of Europe's most diverse countries, as white as states Americans regard as very white, like Massachusetts. Germany is up there with Wisconsin or North Dakota.

UBI as a concept sounds nice on the surface, but it's second order effects lead to inflation and economy is mostly back to where it was, just with higher prices. It's been played out multiple times as govts hand out stimulus money.

UBI is easy - give people money. It solves demand problem, but not the supply problem.

I'm a much bigger fan of UBS i.e "Universal basic supply". Every legal citizen gets a minimum of supply for food, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity, transport. That requires innovation production and supply chain of goods and services.

Humans can't eat dollar notes to survive.

The supply problem is solved by people wanting more than the basics. Most people would rather have more than just the bare minimum guaranteed by the UBI.

Farmers, construction workers, nurses, teachers, etc. will have more money to spend than people who don't want to do anything at all. They'll be able to afford things that we already know are desirable: travel, entertainment, more diverse foods, etc.

Government should not have to coordinate production of most of those things. Ordinary supply and demand should handle it. UBI just puts a thumb on the scale: it ensures that the "demand" for the basics of life is matched by the economist's understanding of demand (measured in money). That avoids the mismatch of people who have infinite desire for food (because they're starving) but no money (because they cannot work), without having to make arbitrary decisions about who is too disabled to work.

The resulting balance of labor will be very different from now, to be sure. Some people will choose not to work entirely, though probably fewer than you might expect. Some jobs that are currently low paid because they require low skills will increase in cost because they're unpleasant. That strikes me as fair: we need people to clean toilets and it's not a good thing that it's the lowest-paid job.

That will cause other jobs to decrease in salary to compensate. Probably us computer programmers, to start with, along with movie stars and CEOs and other people who basically get to suck up all of the available cash in the system for somehow being uniquely desirable.

I'm utopianizing here, and I don't mean to oversimplify what will undoubtedly be a very complex and different kind of economy. But my point is that plain old capitalism accounts for those "second order effects" to ensure that supply exists for the basics. Even though people's basic needs are met, there is plenty of indication that actual people want more stuff and are willing to work for it.

Unless an economy produces more physical goods and services, adding more money simply inflates the prices.

UBI is a feel good measure with bad second order economic measures. The idea works only if paired with policies that legit increase supply of goods that people want.

For $1000/month, one has to guarantee the quantity and quality of basket of goods are still available to everyone.

If you give a 100 million $1000/month, so a million of them can travel, gotta produce more planes, airports and people working on those airports for the million to effectively travel.

To see inflation gone wrong, look at Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Price doesn't matter. It's just a number. This is about distribution.

Inflation reduces the value of those who already have cash. That is the point of UBI. It says that everyone should have enough to live on. The wealth has to come from somewhere. Inflation takes it from those who have a lot. The actual numbers adjust to match.

The OP's question was whether it would affect supply. And it will, but not as much as they think. Most people will continue to work anyway. But their relative salaries will be different.

> Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority

Citation, if you are able?

For sure London has a majority of people who are not 'White English', but I'd be very surprised to learn that 'White Everyone' is a minority here.

You can google "X white minority", I recall reading some papers on it when I was going down an immigrant assimilation research rabbit hole (I'm an immigrant so it's a topic that fascinates me).

https://bamproject.eu lists some cities along with data (e.g: Malmo, Amsterdam, etc).

> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries.

People in the US keep saying this, but it's never been clear what the basis of it is. I've rarely if ever gotten anyone to get beyond saying that Europe of full of old, well-established nation states, but that's basically assuming things are the same here as they were in the 1950s. Would you care to expand on this?

I agree with your diversity point. As Americans, we don't realize how diverse some other places are. Places in Europe. Places like southern africa and Brazil.

I know it's just anecdata but when I first started traveling when I was younger, I lived in Europe for a bit. I can tell you I definitely thought there were nations that were as diverse, (if not more diverse than), the US. France, for instance, is extremely diverse. Not everyone white is Christian. Maybe because of old colonies? I don't know? Not sure. But the place was so diverse that it was striking to a young American from the upper midwest.

I've come over time to realize that our diversity in non-normative, but nowhere even close to unique. There are more diverse places out there.

Diverse in comparison to the upper Midwest is a very low bar. France is a monoculture.

If you lived in France, you would know how off target that comment is. The entire cultural issue in France is that so many of the people are not living as a monoculture.

Maybe many Americans aren't appreciative of the subtle differences between a Colombian, a Pole, a Costa Rican, someone who is Jewish, and a Spaniard. But in France, all of these they dump in the same bucket. White. But they will all live in France inside of materially different cultural contexts within their homes and communities. Just like the US.

Only difference is they are counted as white in France. In the US, the Colombian, the Costa Rican, and the Spaniard are "other" so to speak.

I did, for years. This is the type of viewpoint I would expect from someone who has never lived in an actually diverse country.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222

About half of Americans (59%) are not white and it’s still becoming more diverse.

Quick Google search shows Italy to be 92% white, Sweden 86% (80% Swedish!), France 85%, and England 82%.

So the word "diverse" is another word for "not white"? Is this a subtle way to state that "non-white" has big effect for overall productivity?

"not white" isn't a race or demographic. african americans aren't the same as african-africans, and those are different from mexican, indian, asian, native american, etc.

and given how indians and east asians tend to be the overall wealthiest demographics, plus the "hispanic paradox", suggests that this is a way more complex issue then you're framing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox

I called out several ways the US is more diverse, and ethic is one of them.

Yeah, it can be a challenge to integrate every cultural background into our society and it is something we fail to do with equal success.

But that's exactly the difference. In Europe, the idea that a white Spaniard or white Costa Rican is not white is considered laughable. In the US we don't count them in that stat you gave. That's how we do things and that's fine. But they do count them as white in Europe. So the white population seems larger, because in Europe it is not segmented the way we do in the US.

Wait, a native Spaniard emigrating to US is not counted as "white" there? Are you sure?

Nope. Not if they put themselves down as hispanic or latino. Which they are free to do. There is no check or validation on the whole process either. Which is another part of the problem.

You're from Brazil or Spain, but you're white as the day is long? No problem. You can mark down hispanic/latino and be entitled to all the benefits that a white Uruguayan or Venezuelan are entitled to once you get citizenship.

Personally, I think it's all ridiculous, and none of them should be entitled to be considered anything other than white. But I don't get to make that call.

In any case, yes. All of these people will be counted as latino rather than white in a census for instance. Whereas in Europe, they would laugh if anyone tried to pass themselves off as hispanic/latino but not white.

> Personally, I think it's all ridiculous, and none of them should be entitled to be considered anything other than white. But I don't get to make that call.

The wording makes it seem like it’s a privilege to be considered non-white, and by extension that it’s worse to be white.

Isn't that the case? There are plenty of initiatives (both public and private) which favor non-whites, while I don't think there's even one which favors black people. So, people who get to put non-white in their papers are privileged by the system.

Diversity goes beyond skin color.

It definitely does go beyond skin color.

There’s also the issue of definitions.

The concept of “race” as defined in the US is not used in Europe to begin with. Instead often times what is used is “ethnicity” and even that typically boils down to one’s “origin” and doesn’t take skin color into account.

A lot of European countries prohibit the government from registering skin color, ethnicity, religion etc. out of fear of a repeat of the 1940s. So you won’t find US-style self-report questions on government forms w/r/t “race” or “ethnicity”.

In fact many go as far as limiting themselves to “citizen” and “non-citizen”, with the exception of immigration services maintaining the necessary information until naturalization of course.

So according to American race definitions most people in Europe will be white, but that doesn’t say much about diversity.

In fact the US definition of White is very broad [0]:

> White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report responses such as German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, and Egyptian. The category also includes groups such as Polish, French, Iranian, Slavic, Cajun, Chaldean, etc.

So for example people from Morocco, Turkey and countries like Iraq and Iran (arguably some of the bigger sources of non-European immigrants to Europe) would be considered “White” implying a lack of diversity, even though there are significant cultural differences between those people and, say, native Germans.

0: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625222

This is an important point.

Take a look at Switzerland with four different official languages (five if you include English for many official settings), something not found in the US.

I bet that sounded good in your head, but if your country is +80% people who have lived there for generations you are lacking in diversity.

I’ll make sure to let India know that they’re not diverse despite their 23 official native languages and their massive religious divisions.

You’re basically trying to define “diverse” as “amorphous immigrant melting pot”, a society that only exists in the new world where the native population was nearly wiped out.

There is no need to be condescending. Plenty of visibly white people living in a given European country are immigrants. There are flows of people within the EU as well, it’s a big place with a lot of different countries. Quantifying cultural differences is a bit of a fool’s game, but to me it’s not obvious that e.g. Poles or Hungarians are much closer to Spaniards than Moroccans are to the French. Skin colour is just an indication of actual diversity, which includes many other factors.

Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity. That was the leading and unifying cultural force in Europe up until the XX century (with common philosophy, Latin as the lingua franca, obviously with shared religious beliefs etc.). Moroccans and the French don't have anything that ties them that strongly.

> Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity

Not at all. That's a mirage in which some people want to believe.

Spain went through the gothic kingdoms, the emirate of Granada, the Reconquista, the Habsburg dynasty, to name a few. Poland saw nothing of that, and was not even part of the Roman Empire in the first place. They went through various wars and conquests with theirs own neighbours, some of the various bits of the Holy Roman Empire, the various baltic and Russian states, and Sweden, but there is almost no overlap with what was going on in Spain. Hungary was a very fringe frontier province in the Roman Empire and the cultural consequences are very different. And again, they were in very different situations, being much closer to the Ottoman Empire for a while and having to deal with the various bits of what is now Romania. Russia is a European country, but again the local culture looks very different.

On the other hand, Spain has a couple of centuries of history in common with North Africa. Ties between Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia on one side and France on the other are strong because of the shared history and the number of binational individuals and families. This is the same everywhere: countries have strong ties with their neighbours, and this does not stop at the EU's boundaries.

Even the supposedly close religious beliefs created a deep chasm in most of Europe. Large regions of Europe are muslim, there always has been a Jewish minority across the whole continent, and even amongst Christians, how many wars fo religions were fought over the centuries? Europe makes no sense from an ethnic point of view. It is a collection of very diverse people even though there are some cultural and historical aspects in common, and a belief that the future is better if we stop fighting each other. This is why European nationalism is not a thing.

Sorry but that is not true. Morocco and France have a very close connection, while Spain and Hungary do not.

According to the census:

59% are non-Hispanic and white.

75%, if white-hispanics are included.

In short, immigration has been a big part of the US since it was born while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. Sadly, I don’t feel a large portion of the European population realizes this given all of the backlash. Tbf most people in the US and Canada don’t realize that the age depopulation bomb is happening either or they would also be more open to immigration.

> while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration.

This is plainly wrong. There were always migration waves within Europe depending on conditions and political changes. Borders that you cannot cross are a very recent invention, and even since then there have been waves out of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece to name a few.

Even if you somehow consider the EU as a single country, there was significant immigration after WWII, during the reconstruction. That’s when you got the Gasterbeiter in Germany, the Windrush generation in the UK, or a lot of African immigration to France (also resulting from the war of Algeria and decolonisation).

Immigration is not a new thing anywhere.

That still doesn’t compare to the sheer size and scale of immigration to the US where immigration started at the very beginning in the 18th century, and not just in the modern era. Immigration controls were also just as terrible as Europe in prior decades in the US, and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism and assimilation. Looking at the data, it looks like the EU didn’t even really start ramping things up until around 2010.

I’m not even sure the EU can even beat Canada’s rate of immigration. Your populations are still largely homogeneous

> and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism

And yet you’re still far behind?

Not on racism. We’re more or less even if we’re being honest. We’re just not hypocritical about it. we also clearly do a much better job with assimilation.

Western Europe is about 85% white. The US is about 60% white. It’s not even close.

I think diversity is much more than just the color of someone's skin. People from Sweden and Spain are very different even if both would be considered white, and if you have a 25%/25%/25%/25% group of Swedes/Spanish/Ukrainian/Icelandic, I'd still consider the group diverse even though all of them would probably be called "white".

That’s a pointless argument, by that metric everywhere is infinitely diverse.

Not everywhere, but certainly Europe is. I think you're focusing too much on the ethnicity and ignore the really important things like cultural and thought diversity.

Huh? Would you consider both Iceland and Spain as infinitely diverse and on the same level of diverseness?

Poland is literally 95%+ ethnic Poles (many of whom have their ancestral roots outside of Poland, but that was centuries ago - they consider themselves Poles now). It's not diverse at all, not "infinitely diverse".

> I don't think PPP is a great measurement of productivity.

Of course there is a fluctuations, but I don't think that statistical value (per country) is meaningless.

> In the US we work more hours.

And this is an issue of this particular study because... ?

> Growth is a weird factor in economies. It's easy to grow when you aren't at the top.

Are you really sure? Does poor people or poor countries tend to grow significantly faster than developed one?

> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries.

Citation needed.

For better or worse, econometrics defines productivity as GDP per hour worked. Then, PPP-adjusted GDP per hr is not much of a leap, and arguably mildly better.