[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.
But this would have 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.
Is an 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 sub-group.
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.
We'd all have been quite sweet were it not
that these exercises 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 unspoiled by
the Industrial Revolution.
But this soon turned
into native 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 profligate
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 spread
the pseudoscience of eugenics, and
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
fulled the anti Jewish programs of the
19th century, and the racial politics of
Nazi ideology which culminated 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 the wars in former Yugoslavia.
So, it's 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 as a whole.
Then, you square each one which means that
you multiply each number by themselves,
add them all together and
divide by a hundred or
10,000 if you want the results in decimal.
The lower the number, the more
homogeneous or concentrated the country.
But note, some authors then
deduct the results from 1,
which reverses the relationship,
but such is social science for you.
Easterly and Levine argued that
ethnolinguistic differences explained
a significant part of, I quote.
Low schooling, political instability,
under developed financial systems,
distorted foreign exchange markets,
high government deficits, and

insufficient infrastructure.
So, where do 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 classified
when it's ethnically homogeneous.
I don't need to remind you again of
the resulting massacre of 500,000
to 1 million Tutsis.
Well, Eastlian Livings 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.
Index.
Now one change they made was
to separate ethnicity and
language, and we'll be dealing with the
linguistic components 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 C-A Fact book,
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 do 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 overcounting.
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
toward 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,
where the respondents' children have been
born and raised in the census country.
It may be very difficult to answer.
What's your nationality?
What your ethnicity is?
Census returns have little room for
the phenomenon of shared identities.
These questions are often shared,
sold by legal frameworks.
And this introduces another problem,
namely that of legal definition.
We've already highlighted to this
again in the case of Africa.
But the problem doesn't end there.
The Netherlands for example is a very
high proportion of non 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 match up more whether
ethnicities live in mixed communities, or
live in separated groups?
Is it fragmentation that matches or
is it domination?
We might show up as relative homogeneity,
when you're counting the numbers.
So let's sum up all we've
looked at in 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.