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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.
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!”
Education and Society dictate a persons capabilities.
Do you have any supporting evidence of this other than a naive "I wish it were like this so it must be so!"
Want to throw out decades of research that support genetic influence of behavior on such diverse issues as alcoholism, personality disorders, etc...
A simple search of scholarly articles will give you plenty of studies conducted on identical twins raised in diverse social and economic situations, that have a genetic predisposition towards specific behaviors.
According to your point, if I had the right education, in the right society, I could be a NFL linebacker, correct?
Absurd.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
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.
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..."
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.
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.