Must-Read: Andrew Gelman: That controversial claim that high genetic diversity, or low genetic diversity, is bad for the economy
Must-Read: Andrew Gelman (2013): That controversial claim that high genetic diversity, or low genetic diversity, is bad for the economy:
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, wrote a paper… [that] is pretty silly and I’m surprised it was accepted in such a top journal…
Economists can be credulous but I’d expect better from them when considering economic development, which is one of their central topics. Ashraf and Galor have, however, been somewhat lucky in their enemies, in that they’ve been attacked by a bunch of anthropologists who have criticized them on political as well as scientific grounds. This gives the pair of economists the scientific and even moral high ground, in that they can feel that, unlike their antagonists, they are the true scholars, the ones pursuing truth wherever it leads them, letting the chips fall where they may…. [But] the chips aren’t quite falling the way Ashraf and Galor think they are….
What went wrong, and how could Ashraf and Galor have done better? I think the way to go is to start with the big pattern they noticed: the most genetically diverse countries (according to their measure) are in east Africa, and they’re poor. The least genetically diverse countries are remote undeveloped places like Bolivia and are pretty poor. Industrialized countries are not so remote (thus they have some diversity) but they’re not filled with east Africans (thus they’re not extremely genetically diverse). From there, you can look at various subsets of the data and perform various side analysis….
Exploration won’t get you published in the American Economic Review. Instead of the explore-and-study paradigm, Ashraf and Galor are going with assert-and-defend. They make a very strong claim and keep banging on it…. I don’t think this lets you off the hook of having to think carefully about causal claims…. High-profile social science research aims for proof, not for understanding—and that’s a problem…. Incentives… favor silly causal claims…