If I'm not mistaken, that study doesn't take into account how similar ethnic groups are. It would assign the same diversity index to a 50% Catalan, 50% Spanish country, as to a 50% Finnish, 50% Ugandan country.

Precisely.

Measuring purely the number of technically different ethnicities is a silly way of calculating diversity. You need to look at the delta between the ethnicities if you want to talk about diversity that isn't purely on paper.

I probably should've just said "racially", but oh well.

Yeah probably US is most racially diverse

Well it's going to depend on your definitions. By American categories, India is 100% asian, and almost every sub-saharan country is 100% black. Of course local definitions vary.

But that aside, GP has a point that contemporary American culture spends a lot of energy worrying about this. The energy expended is a poor measure of the size of the problem.

==By American categories, India is 100% asian, and almost every sub-saharan country is 100% black. Of course local definitions vary.==

But the claim was about "ethnicities", not races. People frequently refer to their ethnicity as Irish, Sicilian, Catalan, etc. Rarely have I heard someone say their ethnicity is white.

==The energy expended is a poor measure of the size of the problem.==

Who gets to be the judge of the size of the problem? If a certain race or ethnicity is spending a lot of energy on this, maybe it is incumbent on everyone else to re-assess the true size of the problem.

I'm not defending that the US is the "most ethnically diverse", I think that's far from true, but pointing out that this isn't an unambiguously defined question. I'm not sure I've never heard anyone state an ethnicity, but have heard the same people state belonging to multiple groups in different contexts. The dividing lines between what's an ethnicity and what's a race or a language group tend not to translate accurately between different places.

Judging the extent of racial prejudice is also hard. But only crazy people think the US is more racist now than 100 years ago. 100 years ago the NYT did not devote many pages to white self-flagellation. Nor does China today. Nor does Liberia, for that matter.

Why would we compare the US today to the US 100 years ago? Should the Jim Crow-era really be our North Star?

Categorizing it like this could be viewed minimizing today’s prejudice by comparing to prejudice of 100 years ago. I think the goal is to get to zero prejudice, so let’s compare against that.

“Women don’t have it so bad today, 100 years ago they couldn’t even vote.”

I write pretty carefully, kindly try not to put words into my mouth.

My reason for comparing real things, not utopias, is that we can learn things from them. Because they exist, or existed. And what you learn here is that the volume of argument about a bad thing is a poor indication of the prevalence of this bad thing. Quite possibly anti-correlated.

Here's an easier example for you. The Guardian is full of articles of a feminist bent, decrying the wage gap, etc. Literally every day there are half a dozen. The Saudi newspapers are not like this. There are no snarky comments about the princes all being men of the same racial group. This difference in the volume of discourse does not indicate that women have it worse in London than in Riyadh. And observing this simple fact does not indicate approval of the situation in either country.

The easier example involves comparing a single, privately-owned British newspaper in a democracy to all newspapers in an absolute monarchy?

==This difference in the volume of discourse does not indicate that women have it worse in London than in Riyadh.==

This is a strawman, as nobody has ever claimed they have it worse. However, the wage gap in England effects women in London directly and they have the ability to change it through voting. Do you see how that is different from state-sponsored/controlled media in a country that makes no attempt at equality?

==And observing this simple fact does not indicate approval of the situation in either country.==

But using one country's scenario in an attempt to diminish the plight of people in another is implying that we have to choose one. It's a false choice because we can work on improving Saudi Arabia from the outside while actively voting for improvement in England from within. To clarify, I don't live in England, but this applies to any comparison of what another country is doing (specifically, a non-democratic country).

Um, there was this thing called Apartheid in South Africa, and it wasn't between 100% black people. Yes, America has some terrific difficulties with race, but no, its not the only country with these issues. Saying America is the most diverse is ignorant.

  *almost* every

The US is more racially diverse than SA.

Sure i am responding to africa being 100% black which SA certainly isnt

Right, except iguy didn't say "South Africa is 100% black" or "every subsaharan country is 100% black".

He said "almost every subsaharan country is 100% black".

Africa is a continent while India is a country. India is indeed much diverse than almost other countries.

The World Atlas link shows 16 African countries more ethnically diverse than India.

It's not surprising that a continent is more diverse than a country.

Sure, but that’s not what I, or the World Atlas, said. There are 16 individual African countries more diverse than India.

1 Guinea 2 Tanzania 3 Democratic Republic of Congo 4 Uganda 5 Liberia 6 Cameroon 7 Togo 8 South Africa 9 Congo 10 Madagascar 11 Gabon 12 Kenya 13 Ghana 14 Malawi 15 Guinea-Bissau 16 Somalia

Fair enough. I was thinking more in terms of the delta between the different ethnic groups, not in terms of the sheer number of technically different ethnicities.