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Geneticists And Economists Clash Over "Genoeconomics" Paper
scibri writes "One side is accused of supporting ethnic cleansing; the other of being intellectually naive. Geneticists and economists are struggling to collaborate on research that explores how our genes influence and interact with economic behavior. Top economists are publishing a paper that claims a country's genetic diversity can predict the success of its economy. To critics, the economists' paper seems to suggest that a country's poverty could be the result of its citizens' genetic make-up, and the paper is attracting charges of genetic determinism, and even racism. But the economists say that they have been misunderstood, and are merely using genetics as a proxy for other factors that can drive an economy, such as history and culture."
Maybe it's the other way around, I would say it's more likely that economic success causes immigration, and therefore diversity.
you see the following:
The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting for myriad factors such as economic-based migration.
Well, I guess scientists had better go back and un-invent and un-discover any empirically verifiable or useful thing they may have invented or discovered that has the potential for misuse.
I thought we already determined that humans were as stupid as Monkeys when it came to economics and assessment of economic risk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html
The stupidz. Itz in ur geenz.
It's ok for genes to predicate athletic ability, but not other abilities or behaviours?
Obviously our genes influence other behaviours. The small minded might not like that, but that's the way it is. Those who cry "racism" do a diservice to humanity in general - the bell curve applies to all populations, and the distribution of genes within a population is widely distributed. Studying how those genes interact is a good thing!
..don't panic
Check out the genetic profiles of those living:
1. In govt run "projects" housing
2. In govt funded Welfare
3. In govt funded food stamp programs
4. In govt funded Medicaid
Adjust for % of each race in the the nation...and see what you come out with?
Regardless of your findings...which if done soundly with regard to the science of numbers...you'd get roasted over a public open fire and branded a racist.
While there is a huge cultural component to this...perhaps the culture also is somewhat genetics based?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Many people learned to read science books because it was first considered important for them to be able to read holy books. Universities started off as not much more than seminaries.
Being someone who has read both holy books and science books, I'd say that the real cause of people having problems with science is either that they are uninterested or unable to read. Holy books don't really impinge too much on my reading of journals.
...perhaps the culture also is somewhat genetics based?
I'll bet you a dollar that it's not
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I have to disagree.
I've lived in Utah, Wyoming, and Connecticut before moving to Texas and I gotta say there is a shit ton of racists in Connecticut.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Pot, meet Kettle.
Sorry, but this is yet another modern version of Eugenics being pushed in to your face. Just like "using DNA to determine future criminals" and "Detecting psychopaths by Tweets".
The people working on these papers expressing opinions like this are dangerous and should be locked up. Yes, it's that simple and yes, the propaganda they are spreading is extremely dangerous. If you don't understand the danger, go read a fucking history book and see what happens when people are convinced that genocide or racial superiority are good things.
Education and Society dictate a persons capabilities. If a person has a good education and ample opportunity, they tend to work for the betterment of the society they received their education in and have the opportunities in. If a person lacks education, how can they better society? If a person has education and no opportunity, what choice do they have other than harming society to survive? (And to usurp any stupid arguments you may have regarding farmers not needing education or some such, you are wrong. Farmers need to know how to be farmers, and need to know how to be content to be the best farmer possible. That requires as much education regarding society as a rocket scientist requires, but of course lacking the sciences required by the rocket scientists.)
This is basic sociology and psychology, with countless historical examples showing both sides of the argument. Hell, Socrates discussed the same thing in "The Allegory of the Artisan" (go read Plato's "The Republic" you lazy bastards!) well over 2 thousand years ago. It's not new, yet we still fall prey to the rhetoric of evil greedy people.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Now, look at the genetic social and family profiles of those who had to start out with less than nothing after being imported as property (but only the young and healthy, not the elders) and treated as sub-human even after being ruled no longer property.
In the U.S. there is a myth that anyone can succeed and that background has no part mostly because there are a fair few very wealthy wastes of oxygen that want to pretend that their great fortune in life is somehow connected to some greatness within them. That and economic oppression is easier if you can convince the oppressed that their own shortcomings are at fault.
The argument of the paper is *NOT* that there is a genetic driver to culture. The argument is that genetics is a useful *proxy* for culture, and one on which there is much clearer data. Most culture is strongly influenced by your family, who also happen to be your genetic influences. If you can track genetics you can also track culture.
For example - immigrants from Sweden to the US are going to have similar genetics to people who remained in Sweden. But they are also going to bring their culture with them as well, which is going to continue to influence their lifestyles significantly.
It is very hard to get data on how many people in the US have similar cultural influences to Sweden, but it is much less hard to find the people who have a genetic link to it, and therefore have an increased probability of having similar cultural influence.
You don't have to make any claim at all about genetic influences over cultural ones for this to be a useful line of study.
I have seen as much or MORE racism in the north than I see here in the south. The KKK may run around in the south (but most southerners wish they would go away), but the Neo-Nazis are in the north.
No, you miss the point. I'll illustrate.
Verifiable fact: there are more black people in jail than whites in the US.
Said such a thing one, time, instantly branded racist. But you will note that the statement makes no claims about who commits more crimes, about whether more black people actually get charged or found guilty vs non-blacks where were not charged or found innocent, whether the number is a raw total, or a ratio of population at large.... ...it just states the current state of jail population. no conclusions, no innuendo. just a simple number. (well, quantity comparison anyway)
And if you say it, the first thing people say is "racist".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The authors of the paper come right out and say that they are not arguing for a genetic *cause* to the correlations they measure.
Rather that since genetics and culture are both transmitted along family lines, that genetic diversity within a country is a useful proxy for cultural diversity, and that certain degrees of cultural diversity correlate with improved economic performance.
This has nothing to do with eugenics, and everything to do with a more quantifiable way to study the effect of culture clashes on a country's economy.
Between a pseudo-science and an immature discipline!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
NOT Flamebait!
While there may be a study of economics out there, the field's leading representatives have become wholly wrapped up in politics. Those representatives are so thoroughly beholden to the political powers that be that they will say nearly ANYTHING to support the existing policies even where the supporting theory is obviously non-viable.
Imagine Carl Sagan talking about the beauty of a million epicycles all different with no rhyme or reason and what a fine sort of matter the crystal spheres must be made of to remain undetectable for all this time except in the way they govern the movements of the heavens around the Earth and you'll have some idea of where the public face of economics is at as a science.
When the real economists start standing up and calling bullshit on the political malpractice of economics, people will come to respect it as a science.
No, you're not necessarily a racist, you just don't know statistics.
Verifiable fact: there are more poor people in jail than non-poor in the US. There is a much larger correlation between economic status and crime than there is between race and crime.
So, the fact that you "illustrated" this, shows one of a few possibilities. 1) you were unaware of this tighter correlation. 2) you are aware of this correlation, but don't believe it. (why?) 3) you are aware of this correlation, but don't understand it, and choose to promote the sloppy "more black people in jail" statistic as if it had any meaning by itself.
So you can continue lying with statistics -- very similarly to how people do with the male/female "wage gap" -- or you can adjust your rhetoric to include and account for all relevant data. My guess is you and cayenne8 will both continue lying with a smug superiority complex about how "you're not racist, you're just stating facts".
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Yes. The world's longest-lived and wealthiest societies in all of history prove your thesis. NOT!
Egypt commanded through 3 principal epochs - over 3000 years of culturally continuous and reasonably enlightened civilization, outstripping the dreams of wealth in over that period.
They were able to accomplish this without your revolting melanin-deficiency.
This is but one example. Somehow, northern barbarians - who until a few short centuries ago, slept in the straw, still matted with their own dinner-filth - think they are the center of the universe. The maths and science they inherited from central and south asia have been used to rip the planet to shreds. Then they blame the victim as proof of their moral superiority.
Pathetic.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
East Africa was literate a millennium before Europe.
North Africa and West Asia invented literacy.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
it could also be quite convincingly argued that an economic lens is not really the most appropriate one through which to view history...
The ancient Egyptians had mind-boggling knowledge of astronomy, geometry - they knew pi, zero, the golden section - as well as a highly developed cursive script, and construction techniques that we still can't get anywhere near today.
I'm guess what I'm saying is that economic measures are already biased; the global economic structures currently in force are products of western civilisation which prides economy and wealth over other things which different cultures hold dear.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
You may be unaware, but black people in the U./S. being regarded as somehow too dirty or inferior to use the same water fountain, lunch counter, or school as white kids is still within living memory.
Equal opportunity? You're saying Joe Blow stands just as much opportunity to get a multi-million dollar friends and family investment in his new widget company as Daddy Warbucks kid? I think not.
The U.S. provides more opportunity than a country with an active caste system, but the claim that the opportunity is anything like equal is pure fantasy.
"The US is about equal opportunity for all...not equal outcomes"
Libertarian Core Principle.
myth. libertarians believe in the inheritance of wealth which utterly blows any possibility of equal opportunity out of the water.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Oh, come on, Slashdot! I'm not allowed to use an ordered list in my comments?
You are, but their POS stylesheet hides the numbers. If, for example, I "Disable Styles" in Safari 6's Develop menu, your list magically becomes numbered - the page looks completely like ass, but at least the fucking ordered lists are numbered, not just ordered. At least as I read, for example, the HTML 4 section on lists, "visual user agents" should "number ordered list items". I guess a stylesheet are supposed to be able to override any aspect of presentation in the spec, but it's still really bogus to have a stylesheet that turns off numbering for ordered list items.
(And Slashdot should allow titles to be a bit longer, assuming this isn't some unfortunate interaction between Slashdot and Safari - the box in which to type the title has some extra space at the end even with my longest-I-could-type title which, alas, required me to abbreviate "rendered" as "rendered".)
It's been about 147 years since the thirteenth amendment. That puts the era of slavery outside living memory, true. However, if we consider a lifespan of about 80 years, that means that there can certainly still be people alive today who are only one generation removed from slavery. So, the era of pre-thirteenth amendment slavery may be history, but it's a long way from being dead history.
Add to that the fact that the thirteenth amendment hardly fixed everything. For starters, it didn't actually ban slavery. The amendment quite clearly left the door open for slavery as a punishment for crime. This does stop hereditary slavery, but otherwise leaves pretty much every other element of slavery open to continue (except for the nebulous protection of the eighth amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause) for anyone convicted of a crime. Convicting poor, black, illiterate (nearly always, since it was a crime to teach slaves to read in most slave states) former slaves of crimes was pretty easy in the former slave states. For example, most former slaves were pretty much instantly guilty of vagrancy. Chain gangs and forced prison labor persisted well until... well, now actually.
Then there's the civil rights situation. Despite the passage of the 13th amendment (ratified by Mississippi in 1995), Jim Crow laws persisted until 1965 and anti-miscegenation laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967 and weren't all repealed until Alabama finally did so in 2001. So, there are plenty of people alive today who experienced active legal discrimination in their lifetimes.
Given all that, it's ridiculous to claim that the past racial discrimination of the US is just a "crutch or excuse" for social problems. The kind of effects that sort of thing produces can persist across numerous generations.
As for people starting with nothing then rising to great success, that certainly is possible, but those are statistical outliers. If you're going to consider people en masse then those born to disadvantaged circumstances are going to stay disadvantaged and pass it on to their children and their children's children.
It is a common error to attribute Achaeans - and the Dorians, too, really - to "Europe". One may do so, based on the southeastern-most hump of that continent, surely.
But the intellectual world in which they were grown, and the tradition they embellished and elevated was not indigenous to the Balkans. It was rather a part of the Indo-Aryan world, which acquired a unique synthesis of Egyptian, Levantine and Mesopotamian influences.
"Greece" as it was understood as the Hellenic world? As much a part of Asia Minor as of Europe.
Sparta and Athens become important after Ionia - which was the real incubator of Doric civilization and passed the legacy to Attica. Given the proximity to Phoenica, this is the natural route for an alphabet to move from the Levant to the Greeks.
Later, despite the ahistoric and anachronistic term Graeco-Roman - the Romans did almost nothing to transmit and develop Greek science and culture. This was left to the Persian and Arab world - who became the first society to cultivate both Platonic and Aristotelian schools - and were the causal for their living preservation and transmission to Europe in later centuries.
Yet this crucial - and golden age - of "western"or "European" tradition is discredited. Again, by the descendants of illiterate tribesmen and petty war lords, who appropriate a history, and call it their special, providential inheritance.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In 1955 90% of black families had a father in the house. That was after most of the bad things you list but before some idiot decided that not having a man in the house was a good requirement for families to get aid. Facts cannot be racist.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you convince the downtrodden that they have no hope to get ahead in a country where gun ownership is a right, you get an armed revolt. If you teach them that they can get ahead if they keep themselves too busy to think about revolt, you get a bunch of worn out poor people who aren't quite ready to give up yet.
Scratch the surface of those rags to CEO stories and you'll usually find out the rags were designer originals. With a population over 300 million, you will find a few statistical outliers that actually made the rags to riches transition, but it's not actually a statistically likely outcome.
Upward mobility is generally much more modest. Rags to slightly better rags. Until you get over the threshold to actually being rich, downward mobility is also a factor.
As for people starting with nothing then rising to great success, that certainly is possible, but those are statistical outliers. If you're going to consider people en masse then those born to disadvantaged circumstances are going to stay disadvantaged and pass it on to their children and their children's children.
I fully agree.
And for the "equal opportunity": The social mobility (which is a direct measure for the aboundance of 'from poverty to wealth' stories) in the U.S. is not higher than in the oh so socialist european countries. And in Europe, the most common from poverty to wealth story is 'has won the lottery'. So how's the "equal opportunity" going, if playing the lottery gives you better chances than hard and steady work?
No, the wealth on both sides of the Atlantic creates an aristocracy, and with it an ideology to preserve the aristocracy by blaming the non-wealthy for not being wealthy and at the same time reducing the chance to overcome poverty on your own to less than random chance (e.g. lottery).