Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?
I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that there is more money to spread around even with a comparatively large immigrant population.
Yes however the demographic diversity in the US makes it less likely for people to want to "spread it" around.
If your entire country is the population of one large US metro and everyone is the same ethnicity and culture, there are fewer cognitive impediments to being empathetic at scale.
My contention is that median variability of cultural attributes between those cities is signifcantly less than median variability of cultural attributes in US cities.
That is a fair observation. To clarify, you think that makes it harder to find political solutions because people don't feel they are "in it together"?
Exactly. The easier it is to find differences in your group and another group under the same organization, especially with a weak overarching culture, the less likely those groups will coordinate politically and economically.
Ok great. Now segment that further into cultural and lingusitic differences.
The 250,000 "white non-Hispanic" people in Louisiana speaking Creole Patois can't communicate easily with the 200,000 or so "white non-Hispanic" people who speak Appalachian English.
"Race" is a starting point, within which there are so many variances in the US. I've traveled a lot of places, but I've yet to find anywhere in the world as diverse at such a wide scale as that in the US. It's messy, violent, uncertain and magnificent.
Not only is this contention wrong [1], it is completely arbitrary. Ethnicity isn't just how you want to draw lines to prove some point. Sweden has multiple ethnicities within what you call "Swedish white, non-Hispanic". This is observed, most obviously, through different dialects and cultures. Swedes that border Norway are different than Swedes that border Finland.
And white people in the U.S. are also not homogeneous. So what?
The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries. And that's before you even consider the country as a whole.
==The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries.==
Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000). I haven't seen any evidence presented that proves demographic diversity is the reason for increased inequality.
Meanwhile, we can observe political decisions over the past 40 years which have had an impact on how worker productivity turns into wages. Examples are a lower the top income tax rate, a stagnant minimum wage, the explosion of stock-based compensation, weakening the estate tax, the weakening of unions, high healthcare costs, etc.
> Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000).
Not really. Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970. As of 2010, those two groups combined make up only 75% of the population. There have been radical changes in the demography of the U.S. in the last 50-80 years.
I actually agree with you that changing demographics are not the whole story, but the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.
==Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970==
The large immigrant communities from Italy, Germany and Ireland were not considered "white" when they first came to the US. Only later did that occur as definitions of race have changed over time, usually to serve a political purpose.
==the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.==
Have you explored the possibility that people's obsession with this is what has actually undermined social cohesion? It has happened before in American history with the Know-Nothing Party.
==Source for U.S. demographics==
Your own source shows "whites" (72.4%) and "blacks" (12.6%) as making up 85% of the population as of 2010. You have decided to further delineate that into "non-hispanic white" which is not an actual race. Also notable that you don't split out the differences of Southern Italians and Northern Irish. Do immigrants from Spain count as white or Hispanic?
Personally, I believe that rich people will find a way to justify being more rich. If not they'll hire some economists from Harvard to come up with some good excuses.
"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots." -- Richard Rorty [1997]
"Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?"
The USA previously decided three times to explicitly create its middle class. The New Deal, the Homestead Act, etc. Policy choices which were hard fought and narrowly won.
Wealth and Democracy: How Great Fortunes and Government Created America's Aristocracy by Kevin Phillips
Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?
I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that there is more money to spread around even with a comparatively large immigrant population.