Genes & the left

Does intelligence or schooling matter? These are two questions raised by the recent furore over Toby Young’s now-rejected appointment to the OfS. Good people have fiercely opposed Young’s “progressive eugenics”, and rightly so. But I fear they haven’t sufficiently acknowledged the germs of truth in what he says.

One such truth is that IQ is heritable. One survey has found (pdf) that:

Correlations of IQ between parents and offspring range from 0.42 to 0.72.

These aren’t the words of right-wing nutjobs. They’re those of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two of the greatest leftist economists.

The question is: so what? It’s here that people like Young go wrong.

For one thing, as Bowles and Gintis show, these correlations explain only a minuscule fraction of the intergenerational transmission of wealth, income and status. One reason for this is that plenty of things other than IQ explain earnings such as effort and social skills, which might or might not be inherited. Another reason, of course, is that rich parents don’t only give their children higher IQs: they also give them role models and networks.

This, though, is a minor point. What’s more significant for me is that higher IQ does not justify inequality. Young writes:

All things being equal, a country’s economy will grow faster, its public services will be run better, its politicians will make smarter decisions, diseases are more likely to be eradicated, if the people at the top possess the most cognitive ability.

That phrase “all things being equal” is doing too much work. Cognitive ability is no assurance of better policy. In fact, it’s possible that high IQ is a drawback as it might make one less able to get people on your side and more willing to pursue tricksy complicated policies than simpler ones. We’d be better off today if we’d had basic first-year undergraduate macroeconomic policy implemented by dullards rather than austerity implemented by cleverer people*. And many of us would prefer a simple basic income to Gordon Brown’s complex tax credits.

Leaders -in politics or business – must justify themselves by their day-to-day decisions and not by their score on some abstract IQ test. Intelligence is context-specific: the world is full of people who are brilliant in their fields but daft outside.

Above all, though, differences in IQ do nothing to justify inequalities of income, status or power. In any unjust hierarchical society men with high IQs might well do better than others; you needed cognitive skills to climb the USSR’s bureaucracy or to pass the civil service exam of medieval China. Maybe the correlation between IQ and status was higher in the USSR than it is in western societies today. But that does nothing to defend the USSR’s social structure.

Con-men are probably smarter than their marks. But that doesn’t justify fraud.

There’s something else Young says that’s plausible:

it is naïve to think schools can do much to ameliorate the effects of inequality. I don’t just mean socio-economic inequality; I also mean differences in intelligence.

Here, though, is another great leftist economist, John Roemer:

increased school spending is associated with, at best, rather small gains in adult earnings.

But what political ideas flow from this? Yes, this rules out “blank slate” romantic notions that every child is a potential Einstein if only they get sufficiently good education. And it tells us that equality of opportunity is a utopian sham.

But many of us lefties have never much believed in those ideas.

In fact, all this evidence actually strengthens one sort of leftism. To the extent that some people are poor because they’ve lost in the genetic lottery then their poverty is due to circumstances beyond their control. And equally, the success of the rich is beyond their control. Luck egalitarianism then mandates that these inequalities be eliminated.

To luck egalitarians, the more true it is that inequalities are due to genetics rather than to people’s own efforts, the stronger is the case for redistribution. In this sense, a belief in the importance of genetics actually strengthens some leftists’ positions.

The issue here is the validity or not of luck egalitarianism, not of genetics.

My point here is a simple one. Maybe it is the case that some people, by virtue of their genes, have more chance than others of being at the bottom of the social heap**. How unpleasant life is at the bottom of that heap is, however, a political choice.

* I leave aside the question of Osborne and Cameron’s IQs as utterly uninteresting.

** This is not to say they are destined to so be: the correlations are less than unity.

Comments

[Carol]

Recent research shows that many human factors and traits are affected by the effects of poverty-induced stressors, so all other things being equal, regardless of initial IQ at birth, we stack the deck against poor people. An argument for greater distributional equality.

[Anon.]

>differences in IQ do nothing to justify inequalities of income, status or power

Sure they do. If differences in income, status, or power were arbitrary, that would be a very good argument against them. But when they are merit-based and earned, it's a different story.

[Staberinde]

Hi Anon, if we follow your argument then a 'just' wealth and income distribution should mirror the distribution of IQ. In which case, a standard deviation in IQ should be reflected in a standard deviation in prosperity, no?

Given that Mensa members (IQ 132+, top 2% of the population) are only two standard deviations from the norm, presumably you wouldn't want them enjoying an income more than two standard deviations from the mean annual salary for full time workers?

In 2012/13 the standard deviation was £133. So if I understand you correctly, you'd like to see people with Mensa-level IQs earning roughly £270 more than the average? Martin Sorrell must put Einstein to shame, then.

[e]

Couldn't agree more Chris. The only thing interesting about TY and so, so many others, is the context/political arena within which they thrive.

[J]

Hi Chris, long time reader, first time commenter. I don't know if you saw or would even care to devote more time to the topic but Frances Coppola had an excellent post that engaged with Young's arguments and is certainly worth a read http://www.coppolacomment.com/2018/01/toby-youngs-repugnant-eugenics.html . Thankfully recent reaction would make it seem that eugenics is still beyond the pale of social acceptability but with developments in genome sequencing I fear this is going to be fertile ground for many spurious arguments from the right in coming years.

[B.L. Zebub]

@Chris

"Another reason, of course, is that rich parents don’t only give their children higher IQs: they also give them role models and networks."

There's another much better and important reason, Chris: rich parents give their children lotsa mulla. So, mon and dad are rich, they gotta be smart; their kids inherit the mulla, boy they must be geniuses.

[B.L. Zebub]

Come to think of it, a very recent example to illustrate that: Isn't Donald Trump a regular original very stable genius?

[Dipper]

Mrs Dipper had our children eugenically screened for (lack of) intelligence whilst they were foetuses. As do nearly all the pregnant population of the country. Not sure what the big issue is here really other than a free pop at a controversial figure.

[William]

It's worth keeping in mind that even good twin studies can only measure "heritability conditioned on growing up in our current system". If we found a way to educate people starting with lower IQs that narrowed the gap, and made it available to half population, heritability of IQ would decrease. Also if we made it available to everyone heritability might stay the same while the overall range of IQ was reduced.

[toby1kenobi]

You make a big jump in this article from the correlation you initially mention to he causation (genes). I think it's still the case that intelligence is still much less well understood than you imply, and that while a genetic link is accepted to exist, its importance in relation to other (environmental) factors has not been determined.

I didn't have time to read the study you cite, but in the conclusions they actually say:

"The results are somewhat surprising: wealth, race and schooling are important to the inheritance of economic status, but IQ is not a major contributor and, as we have seen above, the genetic transmission of IQ is even less important."

I really enjoy your writing, but this piece seems to be on ground as shaky as that on which Toby Young positioned himself doesn't it?

[chris]

@toby1kenobi - You're right. But for me not much rests on it. Let's say the transmission mechanism is via environment. This suggests a case for improving the environment in which the children of low-IQ parents grow up. The obvious way to do so is to raise their incomes. But I'm arguing for this anyway. I guess the distinction between the genetic and environmental mechanisms matter for some, but not me.

[Dipper]

Just to make a point, people on here are discussing IQ like it's a proper measure of something. It is not like weight or height, and those measures are dependent on things such as diet which reveal various social factors as well as genetic ones. There are all sorts of problems with IQ such as, for instance, repeat measurements that converge to the mean, and it is not clear how much of a measure is cultural, how much is to do with other social factors such as taking abstract questions seriously, self image as a clever person who does well in exams etc etc. My general view is that anyone trying to use a measure of IQ to prove anything is up to no good.

[Alex]

From the very first point here, surely there's something seriously iffy about any statement when the correlation "varies between 0.42 and 0.72"?

To put it another way, "the chance of being as intelligent as your parents is somewhere between quite a bit and less than evens and we're not sure which". Or "the chance of inheriting a parent's IQ is roughly a coin toss".

Or "we're not really measuring anything but there is enough noise in the system that...oooh, look! a cloud very like a whale!"

[toby1kenobi]

@chris - ok, thanks for the clarification.

[SimonB]

Clearly for Young and his ilk it's not about merit or fairness, he just wants to justify the status quo and legitimise sneering at the less privileged.

You mention economists, shouldn't you be looking to geneticists when trying to understand eugenics? Look at Dr Adam Rutherford and Prof Steve Jones' response to Young and you'll see his ideas have no basis in truth.

Finally, isn't what we're aiming for the chance for more people to live better lives? All the focus on IQ, merit and career is missing the bigger picture.

[Handy Mike]

If my job were not quite so busy I'd have a go at trying to unpack the following irony:

IQ is the issue on which intelligent people most reliably say stupid and ill-informed things.

And BTW, I don't mean Toby Young. I mean almost every comment above.

But not Mr Dillow's, who I suspect has also spotted this but has not descended BTL to intervene because he knows how much more stupid things can get when you try.

[Bonnemort]

"it means that equality of opportunity is a utopian sham"

Not at all. We should have equality of opportunity, so that my electrician's kid has the same opportunity to get to Oxbridge as the Marxist professor's.

We're nearly there, as the electrician's kid with 4 A grades gets in (he got a first), as well as the Marxist professor's kid with 3 B's and a D.

But alas, the electrician's kid, bright as he be, didn't get a Kennedy Scholarship, or nice jobs on quangos, or research jobs with senior politicians.

[Fredrik deBoer]

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/04/10/disentangling-race-from-intelligence-and-genetics/

[Fredrik deBoer]

Alex above - IQ becomes more heritable over the course of life. Also, the more that you equalize the environment (which most everybody here claims to want) the more genes assert themselves. You can argue how you'd like, but to dismiss the strong heritability of intelligence is know-nothingism. I would argue that that connection is among the most well replicated and robust findings in the history of social science.

[chris-Iq160]

you can apply your policy of equalisation of genetic luck with IQ, to other unfairly distributed traits which a have genetic or family-cultural basis - things like industriousness & conscientiousness.

Combine IQ, industriousness & conscientiousness, and you get Competence. And why should the most competent get ahead?

[Ryan]

This seems odd to me. This essay seems to admit to genetic unfairness, in that some people are smarter, more hard working, etc. making them more likely to achieve high wealth and social status. Correcting this unfairness at a genetic level (I prefer "Going Gattaca" to "eugenics," but whatever) is condemned as a terrible evil. But right afterwards comes a case for social correction, wealth redistrubution/luck egalitarianism.

Is there reasoning for this beyond bias? Regardless, here's my counter-argument:

If given a choice, the presently unconceived children of this universe would prefer to be genetically engineered to be smart, conscientious, agreeable, etc. and thus able to do well in society. That would be much better than being dull, hapless, off putting, etc., and getting a monthly check from rich people.