13 February 2008
New Ways of Seeing and Thinking
By Scott E. Page
An important reason for the dynamic success of the U.S. economy is the new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking brought to the United States by waves of immigrants from around the world.
Scott E. Page is professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.
The immigration policies of the United States result in a diverse nation. That diversity -- differences in culture, nationality, ethnicity, and religion -- contributes to the robustness and productivity of the U.S. economy. More directly, that diversity partly explains why the United States leads the world in innovation and scientific achievement.
Immigrants prove more likely to be entrepreneurs. From 1995 to 2005, more than one-fourth of all high-tech startups included an immigrant as part of their leadership teams. In 2005 those firms employed nearly a half million workers and generated more than $50 billion in revenue. Among them are Intel, Google, Yahoo!, Sun, and eBay.
The impact of immigrants on science is similar. More than a third of American Nobel laureates in science are immigrants. These include the 2007 Nobel Prize winners in medicine, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, who both teach at public universities.
As much ability as immigrants possess, they owe part of their success to simply bringing different skills, new ways of seeing, and new ways of thinking. When immigrants arrive in the United States, they bring with them diverse histories, narratives, cultures, and religions. They also bring a determination to succeed. Those two characteristics –- cognitive diversity and desire –- enable immigrants to make such substantial contributions.
Data showing the benefits of cognitive diversity are unequivocal. These benefits exist in the economy: Workers in larger cities with more immigrants are the most productive in the U.S. economy, partly due to spillovers of diverse ideas. They exist in the academy: Research produced by teams of researchers from diverse backgrounds has greater impact than that of solitary scholars. And they exist in the artistic and cultural worlds: Achievements in these areas depend critically on the influx of new ideas brought by immigrants.
Different Perspectives
Economists, sociologists, and psychologists have begun to unpack the mechanisms through which diversity operates. Why does a diverse citizenry produce more innovations, more scientific breakthroughs, and more interesting art? The short answer is that cultural and ethnic diversity translates into more ways of seeing and thinking. Social scientists refer to these as perspectives and heuristics.
“The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men,” President John F. Kennedy said.
Diverse perspectives enable people to reframe a difficult problem and turn it into an easy one. New products, scientific breakthroughs, and new forms of art all arise from diverse perspectives. After seeing a plowed field, inventor Philo Farnsworth realized how to transmit images through air, an insight that led to television. We can never anticipate which perspective will lead to a breakthrough, but we can encourage diverse ways of seeing so that breakthroughs naturally occur.
Diverse ways of thinking produce smaller, more routine improvements than the bigger breakthroughs that can come from diverse perspectives. The members of any society bring and acquire an enormous collection of formal problem-solving techniques and informal rules of thumb learned from experience, education, and families. These diverse ways of thinking enable a society to make consistent, small innovations, be these in the laboratory or on the assembly line floor.
Economic growth and scientific progress depend on combining breakthroughs with sustained innovation. First, someone brings a new perspective and comes up with the idea of the bicycle, the personal computer, or the business that will allow people to run auctions on the Internet. Then others spend decades refining and improving the idea by applying different ways of thinking.
Immigration provides a steady inflow of new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking -- hence the great success of immigrants in business start-ups, science, and the arts.
Leveraging Diversity
The economic, scientific, and cultural benefits of immigration do not arise without the proper political, social, and economic infrastructure. Diverse societies differ from homogeneous societies in three important ways. First, diversity increases complexity. Managing complexity is never easy. This is true in economies, societies, and teams. Interactions within diverse groups and communities can at times be contentious and unpredictable.
Second, communicating different ways of seeing and thinking requires patience and tolerance. Success requires accepting difference. It requires looking beyond the color of someone’s skin and hearing ideas, not accents. Most of all, success demands accepting that someone else, someone different, might have a better answer.
Third, diverse groups of people differ not only in how they think and see but also in their goals and ideals. If people disagree in their fundamental preferences -- for example, if they pursue distinct national goals -- then problems can arise. Diverse people cannot come together to solve a problem if they do not agree on what the problem is. People must agree on their fundamental goals and values. As strong as the evidence may be that diverse ways of seeing and thinking create enormous benefits, equally strong evidence suggests that diverse core values can create large problems.
Proper Environment
In light of these three characteristics, the benefits of the diversity produced through immigration cannot accrue without the proper environment. This environment must include appropriate informal societal norms -– a willingness to listen and to tolerate difference -- as well as formal laws, such as those that prohibit discrimination based on identity. The hoped-for result is a national culture that, while encouraging people to think differently, also achieves broad agreement on core national goals and principles.
For example, in a healthy political system, people often disagree over how to respond to challenges. We see that in the United States in debates about how to fund public schools and how to write environmental policies. But those same people should broadly agree over the ends: the importance of education and a clean environment.
To be sure, open immigration policies create cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. But they also produce cognitive diversity. In that cognitive diversity resides the economic, scientific, and cultural value of immigrants. New ways of seeing result in breakthroughs. A Taiwanese immigrant, David Ho, was the first to realize that while no one antiviral drug could stop AIDS, a diverse cocktail of such drugs might do it. Following through on that logic resulted in new AIDS drugs and his selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1996. He saved millions of lives.
An extension of Ho’s logic explains the value of immigration. People from different cultures bring diverse ways of seeing and thinking about the challenges and opportunities that a nation confronts. No one person can meet every challenge, but the constant influx of new and diverse ways of seeing and thinking produced by open immigration ensures that collectively we can.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
