Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.
[1] http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf
ISTR in the last few years seeing similar research that controlled for most typical measures of SES that are associated with positive outcomes (parents income, parents educational attainment, etc.) which found that growing up with more books in the home had a positive impact on a number of outcome measures (leveling off once at about 100 books.)
I suspect that there is some degree in which it is serving as a proxy for as-yet-unidentified socio-economic, genetic, and parenting style and parental personality traits, but I also suspect even once all those were identified and taken into account, simply having books handy has some positive effects.
I'd bet the causation is that wealthy people read.
A lot of written fiction constitutes an intelligent person intently thinking about some subject, drawing upon their experienec and communicating their ideas. This kind of thing happens much more rarely on TV and in video games. And it almost never happens in casual communication.
Now, if you buy the increasingly popular notion that ideas and perspectives don't matter, than you're unlikely to derive anything worthwhile out of any medium. I know a lot of people who can't, and for them all the media does look like vacuous entertainment. They read Orwell's 1984 and simply don't get it. They start criticizing its technology or character development and simply don't see the underlying messages.
It just turned out that parents who had libraries at home were the type of parents who were more involved in their children's academic life.
In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch...
Beyond that, though, it's not merely the case of an individual having time to read. A parent who does not read to their child is raising a child to be less literate or even illiterate.
Where did you get this idea? It's certainly not accurate in the US.
The general phenomenon here is very well known; just searching around for this I found stuff like "UK time use data for the period 1961-2001 do indeed indicate a reversal of the previously negative leisure/status gradient". ( https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2005-... ). But that paper is obviously more concerned with the UK than the US.
Data on this is directly available from the American Time Use Survey, if you want to tabulate it yourself -- while they do collect various data on employment status, they don't publish a summary of time use by employment status.
Economic status only lasts on average 3 generations.
> genetic quality like intelligence (which isn't even a quality commanded to a significant degree by genetics)
Actually quite the opposite. Intelligence is almost entirely genetic.
The reason you think economic status propagates is actually that intelligence propagates, and intelligence is strongly correlated with income.
Gregory Clark's work "The Som Also Rises", "A Farewell to Alms" and his various articles suggest the heritability of socioeconomic status is around 0.7 and is uniform across all human societies he and his team have studied. The upper class maintain their social status if not their wealth.
The same surnames that were over represented among Qing dynasty mandarins are over represented among upper level PRC officials. One in five Swedish prime ministers have had surnames indicative of noble ancestry when holders of said surnames are ~1% of the population.
Evidence?
"Alternatively"? I think the word is conclusively or obviously.
At least anecdotally, I grew up rather poor (single mother household, working as greenhouse manager, 4 kids), but we had a strong culture of literacy in my household.
Knowing how to read difficult material, and by extension self-teach, was a big part of my ability to move into tech.
"We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10. We instrument years of education using compulsory school reforms and find that, whereas individuals in rural areas were most affected by the reforms, those with many books enjoyed substantially higher returns to their additional education. We show that books retain explanatory power even when we select relatively homogeneous groups in terms of the economic position of the household."
There is also going to be a correlation that those who have more books at home and read them are going to be more curious about the world than those who do not and this curiosity, too will lead to a higher income statistically.
My father is a humanities prof. at a major university who had thousands of books in his home office that we would read as children growing up. We would discuss books and ideas at the dinner table. Thus, in effect we children received a liberal arts education at home.
Today, with a $75 kindle people have access to great libraries for many of the classics are freely accessible. Shakespeare, Twain, George Elliot, Dickens, Shaw, ... all free to download and read. Moreover, many ebooks still under copyright can be checked out electronically from public libraries and read.
The studies reported of course were observational. It would be interesting to prospectively perform a study placing books in a number of households and seeing how children develop over 20 years.
If you stock culturally illiterate parents' house with books, it would--to borrow from a Soviet fable--be akin to giving a Rhesus macaque spectacles. (In the fable, the monkey tries everything possible with the glasses, including putting them on its tail. Everything except the intended application.)
The truth is that boys are falling behind academically, I think most normal people would agree that in a well designed educational system, gender would not factor in outcome.
1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12307/abstra...
Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?
If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 and marked it off-topic.
And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas?
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :)
If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves.
Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.
IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder.
The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology.
So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean.
There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions.
But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should.
Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.
A implies B
I don't like B
therefore (not A)
Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful?
Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!
Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Nothing!
I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene. It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available).
Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument.
You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them.
Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0
Again, we are animals. We are subject to the same rules. If we decide to ignore them, our children will pay the price.
1) Prevent brain damage: Ensure that all children receive adequate nutrition, and eliminate exposure to toxins such as lead.
2) Make sure every child is educated up to his or her full potential.
3) Provide access to contraceptives, so that children are born only to people who feel themselves ready to be parents.
And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
Schizophrenia may (or may not) correlate on the phenotype level, but genetically, they are inverses. Genetic risk for schizophrenia lowers IQ in GCTAs, genetic correlation, and family studies. If you select for intelligence, you will get less schizophrenia, and if you select against schizophrenia, you will get more intelligence.
I mean, I'm not a proponent of the (semi-serious?) thought that "aspies are the next step in human evolution", but since I was diagnosed myself recently, I've found myself imagining what such a world would be like every once in a while...
Anyways, I'm all in favor of some forms of 'eugenics' as our knowledge about the effects increase. We've been helping our own evolution along for quite a while now, so I don't see why tinkering with our genes should somehow be completely off-limits.
This means that the choice is not "eugenic or do nothing", it's "eugenic or dysgenic".
The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed.
So one type of person is on the way to extinction, and another type is growing without bound. Currently this means the the total population (both groups together) is shrinking, but that will change.