Nature vs Nurture: Rich parents have rich children, but not if they adopt
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
- Race plays a part. This study was done with Korean Infants adopted around 30 years ago when race played a much greater role in success
- Age at adoption plays a part. If there’s one thing that gets hammered into American parents it’s that nutrition during the infant years has an impact on a child’s life. If someone is, for example, malnourished during their infant years there can be severe physical and neurological consequences.
- Genetics certainly play a part. Let’s be realistic here, Intelligence is at least part genetic. I got As in High School without even trying while friends with more affluent parents struggled. Is there really anyone who doesn’t believe intelligence is at least partially genetic?
There are probably tons more if I spent some time thinking on it. Bottom line: The study proves nothing. Moreover I suspect the question of whether adopted kids can be as successful as biological ones is far too vast to really have a definitive answer.
My sister and I are both adopted, and she was adopted from Korea at around 6 months. She was an honor student every year she was in high school in Maryland, and she was just one of the girls; she was never treated any differently than anyone else because of her race. (At least, not that any of us noticed.)
We moved to Colorado, and her school performance took a hit. This was partially due to her being one of the only asians in her school, and standing out because of it. A wonderful example is how a pair of her peers bought her a bag of rice for her birthday. (I wish I was joking.) The social effects of her race impacted her school performance.
In my case, I've found out that my birth brothers aren't as successful or as educated as I've been. All three of us have ADHD, and all the problems that come with it, so it's not just biology.
In my (very biased) experience, we start out with a baseline derived from our genetics; our chemical imbalances and natural aptitudes. The positives and negatives of those are modified from the baseline by our upbringing, parents, and education. Then our social experiences shift that even further in one way or another.
Anyway, this study is useless on its own. If they did a comparison against Korean families adopting Koreans, and compared that to white families adopting whites, they'd have something useful. They MIGHT be able to successfully identify how much of the difference is related to adoption, and how much is related to race.
As is, it's an interesting but worthless data point.
The question is, "how much of that correlation is due to biological factors, and how much is due to environmental factors?"
Note that both age at adoption and race were constant across the entire income sample. I.e., rich parents and poor parents all received infant korean children. So they can't really explain the difference in the graphs (which is not constant across the income samples).
Also, I don't buy the "there were several different income level" argument. Sadly I can't find a reference on the web right now but I remember several studies from my anthropology class which said lower classes are more apt to adopt other races into their social structure (largely by necessity though it's alleged that upper classes have a subconscious desire to maintain their genetic line and hence shun those who seem different or inferior)
Your hypothesis that richer people are more racist does increase with income, so perhaps that is the explanation.
In any event I have a lot of suspicion that most of the discrepancy comes from trust fund and other inheritance income or nepotism. Adopted kids very rarely get any trustfunds. The test kids are in their 20s and 30s and usually at that age trustfunds and inheritances are contributed by people other than the parents (grandparents aunts uncles, etc.) and those people did not adopt the kids and usually do not have that much involvement with them.
Furthermore, people that live large inheritances to their kids tend to be of the selfish gene type and those people rarely adopt. Rich people that do adopt tend to spread the wealth more to charities, etc. and do not give kids (whether adopted or not) huge inheritances. Large inheritances are rare but only a few of them could scew the data a lot.
Similarly nepotism goes a long with gene selfishness. And will have similar effects to inheritances.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10894
but didn't see much there that would help me check for warning signs in experimental design and interpretation,
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
which I generally like to do. Does anyone have access to the complete NBER working paper or to a more thorough description of the underlying study?
"The survey measure of family income is much higher for the non-adoptees than for the adoptees: $61,000 per year versus $42,000 per year. But this huge difference narrows to $1,600 when I control for age, education, and gender. "