Genetic confounding
When you hear "privilege" or "discrimination" always think "genetic confounding" or risk wasting billions on futile efforts
1. 80% of today's wealthy Chinese are descendants of pre-communism elites [https://archive.is/Ayoie]: “Virtually every Chinese millionaire or billionaire is self-made because capitalist reforms to the centrally planned communist economy only began in the early 1980s and did not really take off until the 1990s. But the modern super-wealthy often turn out to be descended from an earlier capitalist class [which lost everything when the communists took over].” https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27053/revisions/w27053.rev2.pdf
2. Descendants of 18th-century Hungarian nobles disproportionately held privileged positions throughout 20th century Hungary despite transitions into and out of Communism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8497688/
3. Destruction of parental wealth via the American civil war had only a very weak effect on offspring income (a 0.4% decrease in income per 10% decrease in parental wealth). https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20191422
4. A (gruesome) natural experiment in the Soviet Union shows the inter-generational persistence of educational levels: The descendants of people forcedly resettled to the Gulags are more likely to be educated and areas around camps more prosperous. https://voxeu.org/article/enemies-people
5. Land lottery in Georgia (1822): Family lines of men who won land were no better off than those of non-winners. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436311/
6. Adoption likely has no long-term effects on intelligence [https://archive.md/OtPNx]: “By examining parent-offspring resemblance in a sample of offspring that are among the oldest of any adoption study of IQ to date, we have effectively tested for the presence of parenting effects that would have persisted for more than a decade after the conclusion of the typical rearing period. No such persistence is found to occur in our unique sample.” https://gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-willoughby.pdf
7. “In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization...” https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/131/2/687/2606947
8. “Little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child—that is, among adoptees.” https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2021-ludeke.pdf
9. Parental income failed to predict offspring income in an adoptive sample. https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2002-sacerdote.pdf
10. In an adoptive sample of Korean Americans parental income was unrelated to offspring income. https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2007-sacerdote.pdf
11. After two generations, the descendants of slaves had “caught up” to the descendants of free blacks in terms of socio-economic status. https://gwern.net/docs/sociology/2005-sacerdote.pdf
12. Clear correlation between PISA scores today and literacy rates over a century ago in the regions of Spain and Italy. https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2020-1-page-27.htm
13. Today's rich families in Florence, Italy, were rich 700 years ago. https://gwern.net/docs/sociology/2020-barone.pdf
14. In Mexico, economic opportunity increases the closer your skin gets to white: Those with fairer skin are more likely to have a university education; are more likely to go to college; tend to be in positions of power. https://qz.com/1014257/a-new-study-shows-that-economic-opportunity-in-mexico-increases-the-closer-your-skin-gets-to-white/
15. How social science research is flawed due to its failure to consider genetic confounding. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-42708-001.pdf
16. “We know that people who are more closely genetically-related are more similar to each other. Human behaviour is heritable; all of it. So why do large-scale, longitudinal, social science studies that are not genetically-informative still get funded?” https://quillette.com/2020/08/21/science-fictions-review-begone-science-swindlers/
17. Study finds poverty to not impede cognitive functioning. Studies which find a significant relationship fail to replicate https://www.pnas.org/content/118/44/e2103313118
18. Parenting practices seem to have little or no impact on children's personalities, contrary to some of the best-known theories in psychology. (Longitudinal study; N = 3,880) https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29766/118998/Longitudinal-Associations-Between-Parenting-and
19. UK families have generally stayed in the same place as they were when given surnames- in the 1100s. https://nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26185-z
20. WW2 Japanese internment camps had a positive effect on long-run incomes on the order of 9-22%. https://gwern.net/docs/economics/2021-arellanobover.pdf
21. "Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics." https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/
22. "We report strong evidence of familial clustering of sexual offending, primarily accounted for by genes rather than shared environmental influences." https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/44/2/713/753089
23. Greg Clark documents the inheritance of social status in a dataset of 422,374 people born in England between 1600 to 2022. Clark's modeling implies a very high (0.57) correlation between spouses' underlying genetic components affecting social status. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300926120
24. Counties with historically higher shares of European population in 1914 have higher per capita GDP 80 years later. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12505
25. A new study reveals what actually explains educational attainment (eg number of years of schooling completed, highest degree earned): It's about 51% genes, 10% shared family environment, and the rest is other stuff, including random effects. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-023-00173-y (see also: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1687517745376612367)
26. Study analyzes 15 years of data on Finnish twins and finds that "54% of the variance of men’s lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible." https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/6fecb8ea-b600-4f5a-83a2-273022d11e55/content
27. The IQs of children who had been adopted were much more highly correlated with the IQs of their biological parents than with their adoptive parents — this was true both when they were teenagers and when they were adults. These findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635
28. Parenting practices seem to have little or no impact on children's personalities, contrary to some of the best-known theories in psychology. (Longitudinal study; N = 3,880) https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29766/118998/Longitudinal-Associations-Between-Parenting-and
29. Does poverty cause crime? A methodological challenge is that many other qualities are correlated with poverty, which may explain any correlation between the two. This study analyzes lottery earnings and finds no evidence that it reduces crime. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
See also:
Race Realism: A Moderate's Manifesto https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/race-realism-a-moderates-manifesto
A plethora of evidence for genetic influence of American race-ethnic gaps in intelligence https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic
This one graph is more informative than most sociology degrees.
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0005-6
Intelligence and criminal behavior: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500077X
Highlights:
• Examined a total birth cohort of Finnish males born in 1987
• Lower levels of intelligence are associated with greater levels of offending.
• The IQ-offending association is mostly linear.
• Pattern is consistent across multiple measures of intelligence and offending.
Roald Hoffmann, 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When he was 5 to 7 he was hiding from the Nazis in an attic with his family. He previously lived in a Nazi labor camp.
Walter Kohn, 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. As a Jewish boy, he lived 1 1/2 years under the Nazi regime that murdered his parents. At age 17 he was transferred to Canada where he was held in a detention camp.
Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize in Literature. At 14, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and later sent to Buchenwald.
There are 3 other Jewish Holocaust survivors who went on to win a Nobel Prize and many others, like Alexander Grothendieck and Daniel Kahneman, who later revolutionized fields such as mathematics. Still others, like Roman Polanski, managed to become famous by other means. Indeed, there are more Jewish Nobel laureates than Nobel laureates from Sub-Saharan Africa despite Jews being a comparatively tiny population that has been persecuted for centuries and suffering systemic discrimination that culminated in genocide.
Socioeconomic status or discrimination are not destiny. IQ is.
See also this old article by Scott Alexander about Haiti (quote below): https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http:/squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html
…they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing.
Subscribe to Axis of Ordinary
Links and stuff
https://ft.com/content/a257956e-97c2-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b should be "Persistence Through Revolutions" (?) https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27053/revisions/w27053.rev2.pdf
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110873/1/Working_Paper_67.pdf should be https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8497688/
https://www.eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/AgerBoustanEriksson.pdf should be https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20191422
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/3/1455/2461173?redirectedFrom=fulltext should be https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436311/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635 should be https://gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-willoughby.pdf
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000314 should be https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2021-ludeke.pdf
https://www.nber.org/papers/w7949 should be https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2002-sacerdote.pdf
https://www.nber.org/papers/w10894 should be https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/adoption/2007-sacerdote.pdf
https://www.nber.org/papers/w9227.pdf should be https://gwern.net/docs/sociology/2005-sacerdote.pdf
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-florence should link https://gwern.net/docs/sociology/2020-barone.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/displacement-diversity-and-mobility-career-impacts-of-japanese-american-internment/F63443DE6FA168C2D6708D31D91258AC should be https://gwern.net/docs/economics/2021-arellanobover.pdf
Hey Alexander,
Reached out to you on Twitter some time ago. If you ever have a pitch for an Aporia article, we'd love to hear it.
Keep up the good work.
Matt