We have to be resigned to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth I do not wish to accuse my readers of being economists, sociologists or anthropologists, but I am willing to bet that some of you think that the way your parents brought you up, and the schools and community you were raised in, had a big influence on your later achievements in life.
A reasonable belief, but probably a mistaken one.
In fact, it is likely that all that matters is who your parents were, by which I mean your blood parents. Furthermore, conceiving you was the big step, and the rest was due to your being kept alive, and little more.
Here is a discussion paper, written for a conference-attending professional audience, which gives a technical account of the preliminary results of a large study still in progress. I will concentrate on some of the main points, and will leave discussion of some other matters (like assortative mating) to another later post.
http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf
For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes
Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis and LSE (March 1, 2021)
Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.
Greg Clark says:
It is widely believed that while social status – measured as occupational status, income, health, or wealth – is correlated between parents and children, this correlation is driven by parental investments in children, or by cultural transmission. This belief has profound influence on peoples’ perception of the fairness of social rewards, of the need for government intervention in the lives of disadvantaged children, and of the social value of education. In this paper I test whether culture/human capital or genetics offers a better explanation of the inheritance of social attributes, using a lineage of 402,000 English individuals 1750-2020. To do so we have to specify both a general model of cultural/human capital inheritance, and one of genetic inheritance. There is already a well established model of additive genetic inheritance, formulated by Fisher in 1918. This I test against the data below. Specifying a model of cultural/human capital transmission as an alternative is more difficult. The ways culture/human capital has been hypothesized to operate are many and varied.
So, Clark offers us a straight fight between a simple genetic formula and the more amorphous, all-encompassing but vague cultural explanations.
The genetic formula was proposed by Fisher, but since putting a formula in the text cuts readership in half I will eschew it, and instead describe it in plain English: most complex human traits are influenced genetically by the additive effect of many locations in the DNA where there are variants in the base pairs (none, one, or two positive variants), where each location itself has a very small effect on the trait in question. So, you just add up all those small effects to get a total score for the trait in question, which is the additive inheritance. That’s it.
For example, Galton noticed that parent’s height was passed on to their children, though the precise mechanism was not known. The long run intergenerational correlation should be close to 0.5.
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