Afternoon Must-Read: Andrew Gelman: Troublesome Inheritance critique: Nicholas Wade’s Dated Assumptions About Race, Genes, and Culture

Andrew Gelman: Troublesome Inheritance critique: Nicholas Wade’s Dated Assumptions About Race, Genes, and Culture: “The racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true…

…but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous…. Wade… writes about the big differences in economic success between whites, blacks, Asians, and other groups and offers a sophisticated argument that racial differences arise from genetic differences that are amplified by culture…. Wade’s argument… racial groups have genetically evolved to differ in cognitive traits such as intelligence and creativity… “minor differences… invisible in an individual, have major consequences at the level of a society”… his views are uncomfortable truths that have been suppressed by a left-wing social-science establishment….

Wade is offering… a theory of economic and social inequality…. His explanations seem to me simultaneously plausible and preposterous: plausible in that they snap into place to explain the world as it currently is, preposterous in that I think if he were writing in other time periods, he could come up with similarly plausible, but completely different, stories. As a statistician and political scientist, I see naivete in Wade’s quickness to assume a genetic association for any change in social behavior. For example, he writes that declining interest rates in England from the years 1400 to 1850 ‘indicate that people were becoming less impulsive, more patient, and more willing to save’ and attributes this to ‘the far-reaching genetic consequences’ of rich people having more children, on average, than poor people….

Had this book been written 100 years ago, it would have featured strong views not on the genetic similarities but on the racial divides that explained the difference between the warlike Japanese and the decadent Chinese, as well as the differences between the German and French races. Nicholas Wade in 2014 includes Italy within the main European grouping, but the racial theorists of 100 years ago had strong opinions on the differences between northern and southern Europeans…. If Wade had been writing his book in 1954 rather than 2014 would we… be hearing about… Korean values?…. [No.] The poverty of East Asia… an inevitable result of their genes for conformity and the lack of useful evolution after thousands of years of relative peace. We might also be hearing a lot about Japan’s genetic exclusion from the rest of Asia, along with a patient explanation of why we should not expect China and Korea to attain any rapid economic success….

Racial explanations of current social and economic inequality are compelling, in part because it is always natural to attribute individuals’ successes and failures to their individual traits, and to attribute the successes and failures of larger societies to group characteristics. And genes provide a mechanism that supplies a particularly flexible set of explanations when linked to culture…. Wade could be right in his conclusions—maybe it’s true that Afghans and Iraqis are genetically distinct, compared with people of Western European decent, as a result of their adaptation to their “tribal societies.” Maybe East Asians really are, on average, intelligent but not creative. Maybe the famous cultures of poverty in the United States and elsewhere are associated with genes involved in impulse control, violence, and short-term thinking…. Wade’s arguments aren’t necessarily wrong, just because they look like various erroneous arguments from decades past involving drunken Irishmen, crafty Jews, hot-blooded Spaniards, lazy Africans, and the like…. One might imagine a multiverse of possible Nicholas Wades, writing in all possible epochs and for all possible audiences, dividing up humans into groups at different levels of coarseness and focusing on different economic and social outcomes. The racial explanation tuned to our social group and our time period will look oh so reasonable, while all the others will just look silly, like either historical relics or desperate attempts to shore up the status quo…