Genetics contributes to but does not determine success

It would be easy to alter the initial wealth distribution in the talent-luck simulator. Of course the results will be model dependent but could still be interesting.

Click through to the Washington Post article as there's not much at all on the ritholtz site. Still it feels like it's written backwards though, discussing "high genetic scores" with somewhat eugenic overtones before describing what this actually means. Hence I'm gonna quote it all out of order (which is what I usually do in cases like this, and that's why I'm glad Google has a takeout service...).

A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm: money trumps genes. Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not. The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

Obvious question, how to measure genes that make children "gifted", whatever that even means ?

The Nature Genetics team scanned millions of individual base pairs across 1,131,881 individual genomes for evidence of correlations between genes and years of schooling completed. They synthesized the findings into a single score we can use to predict educational attainment based on genetic factors.

Previous attempts to separate academic potential from the advantages given to children of wealthy families relied on measures such as IQ tests, which are biased by parents’ education, occupation and income. Such tests can’t be administered at conception, birth or infancy — before high-income parents have given their young children a head start by feeding them well, reading to them at higher rates and enrolling them in more activities.

See also : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/ds5WLdjKff4

The analysis doesn’t hinge on a “smart gene.” Such a thing doesn’t exist. Genes interact in mysterious ways. Rather than linking individual lines of genetic code to specific characteristics, scientists seek correlations along the 10 million or so steps on the double-helix ladder which explain most human diversity. They focus not on what each base pair might do, but what they might explain in the aggregate... outside tests have consistently proven the score can predict college graduation rates.

I would hope/presume that these tests account for as many other factors as possible. As the article then describes, there are of course plenty of other variables :

And their work has limitations, in addition to being limited to white people for now. The genetic scores they used are hard to separate from their environment. They reflect the genes that were most successful when and where those individuals were growing up. And behaviour that led to academic success decades ago may not be so useful when pedagogy evolves.

When the genetic index Thom and Papageorge used was tested among genomes from siblings, the results indicated as much as a quarter of the variation in score could be due to genetic code that correlates with environmental factors. There may be genes associated with parenting behaviour that creates an environment conducive to your child’s success. Children with that gene would tend to succeed in school not because that gene directly helped them study, but because they received both the gene and a success-friendly environment from their parents. It’s a reminder that the study’s key finding is also its key caveat: genes aren’t destiny. Most achievement can’t be explained by genetic factors. Environmental factors like parents’ income, on the other hand?

Now we can discuss the results of the study without feeling that some people are just genetically better than other people or anything daft like that. It would be at least equally crazy, however, to completely reject a genetic contribution to success.

First, consider the people whose genome scores in the top quarter on a genetic index the researchers associated with educational achievement. Only about 24 percent of people born to low-income fathers in that high-potential group graduate from college. That’s dwarfed by the 63 percent college graduation rate of people with similar genetic scores who are lucky enough to be born to high-income fathers.

Contrast that with a finding from the other end of the genetic scoring scale: about 27 percent of those who score at the bottom quarter of the genetic index, but are born to high-income fathers, graduate from college. That means they’re at least as likely to graduate from college as the highest-scoring low-income students.

“It goes against the narrative that there are substantial genetic differences between people who are born into wealthy households and those born into poverty,” said Kevin Thom, a New York University economist and author of a related working paper released recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Which is one hell of a horrible narrative regardless.

https://ritholtz.com/2018/10/born-rich-or-talented/