From Genetic Fortune: Winning or Losing Education, Income, and Health by Hyeokmoon Kweon, et al. By no means definitive. In fact, more of a skirmish line to roughly map out the terrain than a detailed examination producing useful facts. A building block. From the Abstract:
We study the effects of genetic endowments on inequalities in education, income, and health. Specifically, we conduct the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) of individual income, using data from individuals of European ancestries. We find that ≈10% of the variance in occupational wages can be attributed to genetic similarities between individuals who are only very distantly related to each other. Our GWAS (N = 282,963) identifies 45 approximately independent genetic loci for occupational wages, each with a tiny effect size (R 2<0.04%). An aggregated genetic score constructed from these GWAS results accounts for ≈1% of the variance in self-reported income in two independent samples (N = 29,440) and improves upon the variance captured by a genetic score obtained from previous GWAS results for educational attainment. A one-standard-deviation increase in our genetic score for occupational wages is associated with a 6–8% increase in self-reported hourly wages. We exploit random genetic differences between ~35,000 biological siblings to show that (i) roughly half of the covariance between our genetic score and socioeconomic outcomes is causal, (ii) genetic luck for higher income is linked with better health outcomes in late adulthood, and (iii) having a college degree partly mediates this relationship. We also demonstrate that the returns to schooling remain substantial even after controlling for genetic confounds, with an average of 8–11% higher hourly wages for each additional year of education obtained in a US sample. Thus, the implications of genetic endowments are malleable, for example, via policies targeting education.
This is both interesting and troubling. My interpretation or rendering into plainer, though less precise, English is that: We looked to see to what extent life outcomes are associated with specific genetic endowments.
They found multiple candidate genes (or, rather, genetic loci) which influence income. Each individual effect is tiny but can be material in aggregate. "Roughly one half of the covariance between our genetic score and socioeconomic outcomes is causal" is an interesting tentative claim. I think this means, in plainer terms, that half of outcome differences can be attributed to genetic differences.
The other findings, that higher incomes are associated with better health outcomes and that education attainment is an independent variable affecting outcomes, reflect other research.
The claim that the returns of schooling are substantial independent of genetic confounds is interesting but to be taken with caution. Fifty years ago, in most OECD countries, not more than 5-10% of the population received college education. Education access has been expanded dramatically in most Anglophone countries as well as some others. Will the same robust return on education attainment independent of genetic contribution remain once you move from a 5% college attainment to a 50% college attainment scenario. Possibly. But there are certainly plenty of studies indicating that the returns on education attainment are declining which might also weaken or vitiate the genetic association.
The troubling aspect is not the research or findings per se but the possibility that this is motivated research. And motivated research almost alway contaminates the findings.
Specifically, there is a tradition within certain strands of philosophy and/or economics, which argues that if life outcomes are randomly determined by fate, specifically that if an individual's success or failure in life is substantially determined by randomly allocated genetic endowment, then that argues for State intervention.
The argument is that if everyone's success is substantially determines by the random chance of gene allocation, then outcomes should be mitigated by the State through social policy intervention. This cascades to universal basic income policies, free education, free healthcare, etc. or variants of the sort.
I don't wish to overstate the case, there are moderate forms of all these policies but the predicate philosophical grounds are that all outcomes are substantially randomly allocated based on luck of the genetic draw.
Most crudely of all, there are some who make the argument that most life outcomes are determined by blind luck of that genetic lottery, that free will does not come into it, that no free will means no need for freedom, that the State is best positioned to design, implement, and manage social interventions which can then rectify the randomly allocated deterministic outcomes arising from genetic inheritance.
Just as critical theorist/social justice adherents argue that all variances in individual life outcomes can be attributed to power imbalances and discrimination, so to do genetic determinists argue that all variances in individual life outcomes can be attributed to the unearned privilege of genetic endowment. And for both, the answer is a State solution shaped by Philosopher Kings. Say hello Plato.
And we cannot ignore that such genetic determinism is the foundation for eugenics. If all life outcomes are due to genes, then there are actually two restorative strategies. State social policy interventions to equalize outcomes or State biological interventions to manipulate the genetic conditions to ensure equal outcomes. Communism, eugenics, or both.
It is an argument. I did not say it was a good argument. But it is one with a powerful emotional appeal to certain aspiring intellectuals. It is seen as the next stage of societal evolution after the muckiness of Classical Liberalism, chance, uncertainty, religious faith, emergent order, etc.
Going to the Discussion section of this paper, it becomes reasonably clear that indeed this research was substantially influenced by just such a mindset.
Genetic predispositions have relevance for all branches of economics that are concerned with differences between individuals (Harden & Koellinger, 2020). The rapidly growing availability of genetic data and improvements in computing power and statistical methods now allow us to investigate links between genetic and environmental factors, human behaviour, and economic outcomes directly. This new type of data now permits economists to use genetically-informed study designs that enrich our empirical toolbox and that allow us to ask new questions and to gain new insights on core questions of our discipline. Our results here are illustrations of this.
This is a reasonable description but it is equally reasonable to be skeptical that, depiste increases in genetic knowledge, computing power and statistical methods, that we are anywhere near deriving useful, replicable knowledge about such a complex system (of life outcomes).
Since our GWAS results are derived from a sample of elderly inhabitants of the UK who all have European ancestries, there will be limits to the transferability of our results to other populations: The genetic associations with income we report here are conditional on the social and economic context of the White, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Weird) sample we studied. Different contexts (e.g. discrimination against some groups in society) may imply different genetic architectures that would limit the external validity of our results (de Vlaming et al., 2017; Mostafavi et al., 2020). In addition, genetic associations also depend on the frequencies of genetic variants and their correlations with each other in the samples studied. This dependence generally limits the transferability of GWAS results and polygenic scores across groups that differ in ancestries (Martin et al., 2019; Rosenberg et al., 2019) and implies that our results cannot be used for comparison across groups. Our results cannot be used for predicting individual outcomes for the same reasons and for the limited statistical accuracy of our polygenic score (R 2~1%). (See FAQ sections “Can your polygenic score be used to predict how well someone will do in life?” and “Can your polygenic score be used for research studies in non-European-ancestry populations?”)
Another position that is reasonable but also somewhat troubling. Where are the boundaries for group shared heritage? If they are going to go down the road of group differences, then what are the empirical group boundaries. Are Swedish results sufficiently overlapping with Finish results despite their distinct genetic heritages?
Conceptually, genetic endowments are a form of luck — they are one-time, irreversible, exogenously given, individual-specific endowments that result from the natural experiment of meiosis that randomly mixes the genotypes of one's biological parents. We have shown here that genetic fortune for high income, in the form of random genetic differences between siblings, contributes to inequalities throughout the life course, influencing the education people attain, which occupations they pursue, how much they earn, the quality of the neighborhoods they live in, and the type of health outcomes they will tend to experience in late adulthood. Our 38 results illustrate how tightly health, skills, work, achievements, and genetic luck are coupled: the idea that human agency in the form of choices and effort could be neatly separated from luck is unsubstantiated in light of the life-long consequences of genetic effects that influence behavior and achievements. The inequalities due to genetic luck that we showed here clearly violate the principle of equal opportunity. They also raise questions about how much credit and responsibilities society can or should attribute to individual's socio-economic and health related outcomes in life (Rawls, 1999; Roemer, 1998). If inequalities partly result from a genetic lottery, the case in favor of a social contract that provides insurance against unfavorable outcomes is strong (Alesina et al., 2018; Alesina & La Ferrara, 2005; Cappelen et al., 2013; Gromet et al., 2015).
This is the passage where it becomes clear how motivated this research was. Genetics contributes to life outcomes. That is indisputable. That they are determinative is completely disputable.
What they appear to have wanted was a quasi scientific finding that would justify state control or eugenics in an effort to undermine classical liberalism, freedom, and emergent order.
They found just enough indications to loosely support that proposition. But they have by no means proven much at all, other than that motivated research leads to motivated findings.
For the time being, we are still left with the pragmatic reality that the emergence of classical liberalism based on Christian ethics (or their comparables from other religions), human freedom and emergent order have been far more contributive to human progress, prosperity, health, well-being and equity than any other package of values.
It is worth restating that all systems seeking to reject free will, accept genetic determinism and eugenics, and repair all decision making and authority solely in the State (under the control of Philosopher Kings) and reject natural law and social law (in Locke's sense) have failed but failed with spectacular loss of human life, impoverishment, and collapse of equity.
A lot of time and money was spent to produce a "study" which merely supports what was already known. Genetics contribute to outcomes, with patterns to those outcomes, and that individual and even group outcomes are materially attributable to path dependence, random events, sequential cumulation, and individual choices.
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