IDENTITY IS THE ENEMY:

One of the big questions Alesina tackled was why the U.S. doesn't have the generous welfare benefits of advanced countries in Europe. His answer, along with co-authors Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, was twofold. First, U.S. institutions -- the Senate, the electoral system, the legal system -- were designed much earlier than their modern European equivalents, and are thus more oriented toward protecting private property above all else. But in addition, the economists found evidence that racial animosity was a source of American exceptionalism:

Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies...Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.

Listening to conservative talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, who derided Obamacare and other Obama administration social programs as "reparations," it's hard to argue with Alesina's conclusion.

Alesina also believed that racial and ethnic divisions could inhibit a country's economic growth. With co-authors Reza Baqir and William Easterly, he found that U.S. cities with more ethnic fragmentation were less effective at building roads, picking up trash and spending money on education -- all things that contribute to economic growth. And with Easterly and Janina Matuszeski, he found that post-colonial states with boundaries that cut across ethnic groups tended to do worse economically than those with more natural borders like rivers and mountains.

To some, this might seem like a confirmation of right-wing ideas that diversity is bad for a country. But although it might help explain the success of homogenous countries such as Sweden and South Korea, Alesina's theory is much more subtle than it might appear. As he explained in a 2003 paper, the key isn't how similar the inhabitants of a country might appear on paper, but how much they see themselves as one people; fractionalization is in the mind, rather than in the genes. That implies that the way forward for the U.S. and other diverse countries, to become more equal and prosperous, is to de-emphasize racial and ethnic divisions and promote a shared identity.

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