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Born To Be Rich, Born To Be Poor

For somebody like me, economist Gregory Clark’s piece on success and genetic heritability in the NYTimes is one of the most depressing things I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Because I am a strong believer in culture as being the prime factor in determining an individual’s success or failure in life. Clark and his […]

For somebody like me, economist Gregory Clark’s piece on success and genetic heritability in the NYTimes is one of the most depressing things I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Because I am a strong believer in culture as being the prime factor in determining an individual’s success or failure in life. Clark and his colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley studied names and history of eight countries around the world, to see how social mobility played out over centuries. What they found was that your family lineage has far, far more to do with your social status today than any other possible factor.

It’s not that the rich will forever be rich, and the poor forever poor. Everybody regresses over time to the mean — but in most cases, this takes a very long time to happen. In concrete terms, Lord Grantham may be at the top of the heap because his ancestors passed along some genetic inheritance, some combination of brains and character, that allowed them to master the world in their time, and rise to the top. But that is no guarantee that they will stay on top. Indeed, as we see in Downton Abbey, radically changing social, economic, and technological conditions are posing a massive challenge to the aristocracy. They’ve got to use those brains and character to master the world as it is, or they will spiral downward. It may be abrupt and total, but chances are it will be a slow wasting. Nothing is permanent, but some things are more permanent than others.

You really need to read the whole thing before you comment here. Let me say that right now; this kind of research will get many people’s backs up. It got mine up, as a culture-is-dominant person. Here’s what Clark says to people like me:

Culture is a nebulous category and it can’t explain the constant regression of family status — from the top and the bottom. High-status social groups in America are astonishingly diverse. There are representatives from nearly every major religious and ethnic group in the world — except for the group that led to the argument for culture as the foundation of social success: white European Protestants. Muslims are low-status in much of India and Europe, but Iranian Muslims are among the most elite of all groups in America.

Family resources and social networks are not irrelevant. Evidence has been found that programs from early childhood education to socioeconomic and racial classroom integration can yield lasting benefits for poor children. But the potential of such programs to alter the overall rate of social mobility in any major way is low. The societies that invest the most in helping disadvantaged children, like the Nordic countries, have produced absolute, commendable benefits for these children, but they have not changed their relative social position.

The notion of genetic transmission of “social competence” — some mysterious mix of drive and ability — may unsettle us. But studies of adoption, in some ways the most dramatic of social interventions, support this view. A number of studies of adopted children in the United States and Nordic countries show convincingly that their life chances are more strongly predicted from their biological parents than their adoptive families. In America, for example, the I.Q. of adopted children correlates with their adoptive parents’ when they are young, but the correlation is close to zero by adulthood. There is a low correlation between the incomes and educational attainment of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents.

These studies, along with studies of correlations across various types of siblings (identical twins, fraternal twins, half siblings) suggest that genetics is the main carrier of social status.

If we are right that nature predominates over nurture, and explains the low rate of social mobility, is that inherently a tragedy? It depends on your point of view.

Genetics is the main carrier of social status.  Well, from my point of view, that is inherently a tragedy, because it suggests much starker limits to our ability to rise above our circumstances than I would prefer to think. It runs counter to what we as Americans want to believe. To put a fine point on it, it runs counter to what both liberal and conservative Americans want to believe. To generalize, liberals believe that the failure of many people to thrive is Society’s Fault, and can be ameliorated through social programs and policies. Conservatives believe the failure of many people to thrive is the Individual’s Fault, and can be ameliorated through moral instruction and policies requiring people to take more responsibility for their fates. What both American liberals and American conservatives have in common is a belief that the individual’s fate can largely be controlled, either by social or individual reform.

But the research of Clark, et al., indicates that the primary — but not the only! — factor in determining the success or failure of a person is genetics, which is to say, something that is fixed. We have a lot less freedom to determine our fates than we imagine, it would appear, and certainly a lot less than our culture tells us we do. I think this is a tragedy, chiefly because it may teach those on the bottom rung that they deserve their fate, and those on the top that they are entitled to theirs.

If, however, this is true, there is no point in arguing against hard cold facts. I wrote before how much I hate talk about HBD, because so often the people most interested in it are strangely attracted to racial supremacy. I do think, though, that if it’s true, there are some humane and morally responsible policy implications.

One, liberals should quit trying so hard to fight against nature. That is, they should give up believing that all social inequalities are due to discrimination, active or past. This is not to say that they should quit talking about the role of discrimination in perpetuating injustice, nor, certainly, should they stop fighting against injustice. What they ought to come to terms with is the fact that inequality is written into our genetic code, and that a just outcome will be unavoidably an unequal one.

Two, conservatives should quit trying so hard to deny nature. The libertarian doctrines of individual liberty and hard work and ingenuity as the way to success are powerful things, and have been the engine of much uplift. But it’s hard for American conservatives to see that individual failures are not always the fault of moral failings — or rather, if they are, it’s because some people have a harder time mastering themselves than others do. This means that in any society, inequality in terms of the capacity for moral judgment is going to be present. What conservatives ought to come to terms with is the fact that even under the best conditions of opportunity, there will be people who will not be able to progress, not because they are bad, but because they are weak. What about them?

I concede that I am one of those people who resists this possible truth. It flies in the face of what I want to believe is true, and flies in the face of my father’s experience. His life and life story have been enormously formative of my own worldview. You’ve heard me go on about this before, about how he grew up in rural, Depression-era poverty, but through his hard work and ingenuity made it to the middle class. The key difference is that the changing post-WWII environment — namely, the GI Bill — made it possible for him to go to college. In past ages, no matter how intelligent and hard-working he is, social mobility would have been denied him.

Yet the Clark essay makes me realize that what social policy did was make it more possible for him to use his genetic gifts — his fierce intelligence — to advance himself economically and socially. Was his work ethic genetic, or cultural? I can’t say. I would have said cultural, but his brother, also an intelligent man, did not share my dad’s work ethic. Nor, frankly, do I — but my sister certainly did. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I puzzle a lot over how two kids raised in the same household can have such strongly different ways of looking at the world. I’m more like my mom; Ruthie was more like my dad. The choices Ruthie made in life kept her bound to our home — where her nature was fulfilled. She, like our dad, found her telos here. My nature called for me to do something different, though happily, it allowed me to move back. The long discord between my sister and me was perpetuated in large part by her morally absolutizing something that was not morally absolute, and by her stoic refusal to talk about it — exactly the outlook of our father.

I digress, as I often do. Anyway, I wonder if the American myth of the Self-Made Man is a noble lie, one that goes along with the American myth of Progress. It’s something that’s not true, but it’s something we need to believe in. The alternative is too cruel, if the alternative means a surrender to Fate. There really is a such thing as “mind-forg’d manacles” of those who cannot imagine life being different, or who cannot rouse themselves to resist their unhappy fate. It comes down to a question of free will. It seems that our genes grant us less of it than either liberals or conservatives, for their own reasons, believe. As Clark puts it:

Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No. In modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort. Our findings suggest, however, that the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited.

What do we do with this knowledge, assuming it’s true? Clark believes that a large-scale change in social mobility is impossible to engineer through social policy, because so much of what makes us respond the way we do to outside stimuli is in our genes. Utopia is impossible; the best we can do is to ameliorate the pain and suffering of life’s losers. This means that life’s winners are going to have to suffer some kind of penalty — higher taxes, say, or less freedom than they would like — out of a sense of solidarity and fairness to those who lack the genetic gifts to succeed in our world. There is no fixed golden mean, but we can approximate it — but only if all of us give up our illusions about why inequality persists.

Ross Douthat has written about how our idea of meritocracy has allowed conservatives and liberals, each for their own reasons, to walk away from the idea that they have any responsibility at all for the poor. Along those lines, Clark’s piece brings to mind Jeremy Beer’s case against meritocracy. Excerpts:

A century and a half later, the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röpke insisted on the same point. It “deserves to be stressed,” he wrote, that if everyone is supposed to have

the same chances of advancement, those left behind will lose the face-saving and acceptable excuse of social injustice and lowly birth. The weakness of mind or character of the overwhelming majority of average or below-average people will be harshly revealed as the reason for failure, and it would be a poor observer of the human soul who thought that this revelation would not prove poisonous. No more murderous attack on the sum total of human happiness can be imagined than this kind of equality of opportunity, for, given the aristocratic distribution of the higher gifts of mind and character among a few only, such equality will benefit a small minority and make the majority all the unhappier.

Now, Röpke was no Spencerian social Darwinist who delighted in the social survival of the fittest. As a decentralist and ardent supporter of small-scale and peasant agriculture, Röpke holds much in common with Wendell Berry. But on individual differences and their primary source-nature-Röpke was what I would call a realist.

The same is true, I think, of Berry. In Life Is a Miracle, he assails the meritocratic lie propagated by our schools. In words reminiscent of Burke’s and Röpke’s, he writes:

Young people are told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.

If we are not going to create an economy in which the people who in the past made their livings with strong backs, not strong minds, then we will have to find something to do for these people. Not “with” these people; for these people. To consign them to life on welfare, or a miserable existence pushing a broom at Wal-mart, is unjust, and it will end up destroying the social fabric over time. This is something conservatives have got to face. Similarly, liberals must face that the traditional social prejudices and structures that they are so quick to tear down in the name of personal liberation served to hold together people who desperately needed them.

This could all be a pipe dream. The world coming into being now has no real respect for the morally egalitarian and charitable philosophy of the Christian religion, nor any sense of solidarity based on tribe or nationality. The brilliant and the connected can go anywhere in the world where they can get a top price for their talents and services. A dear friend is a European who left his home country and came to America to create a business, because his home country’s laws and customs frustrated his creative spark at every turn. I don’t blame my friend one bit. He has achieved tremendous success here, and deserves it. Nothing was handed to him; he earned it through innovation and building a business. And yet, the country he left behind had a far greater sense of social solidarity than the one he came to — indeed, that’s precisely why he left it, because that solidarity, in the form of punishing taxes and union regulations, stifled creativity. It really did. It really does. His old country is falling behind. Yet it’s a much easier country in which to be poor. He voted with his feet … but I’m not sure he feels so good about it.

What do you think? Please, readers, before you comment on any of this, read Clark’s essay. It’s important. It is certainly true that bad characters can use this kind of research to justify evil policies. But that doesn’t make this untrue. My growing sense is that the HBD people are right, and that we are going to have to come to terms with the science in time. Given what human beings are, and what we’ve done, I don’t trust us to do a good job of it. This is why I strongly resist it. But it’s starting to seem to me that confronting it is inevitable.

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