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America was founded on the notion of freedom, self-reliance, and the "pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap" mentality, right? Subsequently, there is a general antipathy towards big government programs and a reluctance to fund a safety net for those most vulnerable. Or as this article by Eduardo Porter summarizes:

Many Americans are skeptical about government spending on social programs, and they cite a litany of familiar reasons: big government programs aren't effective, they are vulnerable to waste and abuse, and they run counter to the libertarian, self-reliant spirit of the nation's founders.

Yet there is a growing body of evidence that says the reluctance to fund a proper safety net comes not from this ideal of individual freedom, but more from an aversion to helping those who are different from us. In short, our ethnic diversity prevents us from caring more for the downtrodden and those in need (unless they look like us):

Recent studies by economists and other social scientists have found that this mix tends to undermine support for government spending on "public goods" of all types, whether health care, roads or welfare programs for the disadvantaged.

"Racial divisions and ethnic divisions reduce incentives for people to be generous to others through social welfare," said Alberto Alesina, a professor of economics at Harvard. "This is very unfortunate. But as social scientists, we can't close our eyes to something we don't like."

This fact clearly summarizes our state of caring:

In America, government spending on social transfers - everything from food stamps and unemployment insurance to health care and pensions - is about a third less than it is in Italy, France or Belgium, when expressed as a share of the economy, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it is about half the level of Sweden's. Moreover, Americans pay less in taxes than the citizens of nearly every other wealthy nation in the O.E.C.D.

Essentially what is going on is best articulated this way:

In their 2004 book, "Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe," Mr. Alesina and Edward Glaeser, another Harvard economist, applied statistical regression techniques to correlate data on government spending with data on racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity in Western Europe and the United States. The professors concluded that about half the gap between Europe and the United States in public spending on social programs could be explained by America's more varied racial and ethnic mix. (They said that much of the rest resulted from stronger left-wing parties in Europe.)

As William Julius Wilson suggested in his 1996 book, "When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor," many white Americans turned against spending on welfare during the 1970s because they thought that it mostly served blacks. "White taxpayers saw themselves as being forced, through taxes, to pay for medical and legal services that many of them could not afford for their own families," Mr. Wilson wrote.

Another study in the Journal of Political Economy, which supports these assertions, was published in 2001 by Erzo F. P. Luttmer, an associate professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He reported that the percentage of people who say they support welfare spending decreases as the share of local recipients from their own racial group falls. His report was based on data from the General Social Survey, a social-attitudes poll conducted across the United States nearly every year since 1972.

The list of studies supporting this thesis goes on and on:

In a 1997 study, Mr. Alesina, along with Reza Baqir, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, and William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, looked at the relationship between social spending and ethnic diversity in 2,700 cities, counties and metropolitan areas across the United States.

They found that in more diverse cities and counties, the share of local government spending on public goods - in this case, roads, sewage treatment, trash clearance and education - was generally lower than it was in more homogeneous localities. "Our results are consistent with the idea that white majorities vote to reduce the supply of productive public goods as the share of blacks and other minorities increases," they wrote.

How do these trends play out over the years? Professor Alesina does not portray an optimistic scenario:

"One can expect public support for public goods to erode further," he said. "Public spending in law and order might not go down. What would go down is spending on redistribution."

Human nature or is this strictly an American Phenomenon?

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