Are Human Genetics An Unfair Lottery? - Paige Harden
嘉宾：Paige Harden
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What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Paige Hardin. She's a psychologist and behavioral geneticist, professor of psychology at the University of Texas and an author. The goal of social equality is to give everyone a fair opportunity to achieve in life, but even if advantages and disadvantages in the environment are equalized, all of us are starting at different positions genetically because we get far more than just environment for my parents. Page is trying to work out how DNA can be integrated into social equality. Expect to learn why people are so uncomfortable talking about behavioural genetics, why your
failures might be less of your fault than you think, while hitting puberty early makes girls bad at maths, whether genetic markers for working hard should be accounted for when evening out the playing field and much more. This conversation is so fraught and interesting and conflicting. We like to believe that we are the masters of our own success, right? But genetics have played a huge part, in fact, probably a bigger part than any other influence on what you've achieved in life. And telling you that, no, that's actually not your success, that's actually because of the genes that you've got. It doesn't make people feel very good.
And yet, the social equality implications are really, really interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed this little dance with Paige today. It's very, really interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed this little dance with page today. Very, very cool. Before we get on to other news, don't forget the Modern Wisdom, Local's Community is now available right this very second. Go to modernwisdom.locals.com or there's a link in the show notes below. We'll have a discussion thread today. We can talk about what we think about behavioral genetics and its influence on social equality or you can go and check out the in the show notes below. We'll have a discussion thread today. We can talk about what we think about behavioral genetics and its influence on social equality,
or you can go and check out the exclusive episode with Joni and Yusuf, which I recorded last week, and it's amazing. And the only way you can get that is by joining locals. Go to modernwisdom.locals.com and connect with everybody else that listens to the show. You can post your own stuff, you can make friends, can tell me things that I've got right or got wrong,
can send in suggestions for other stories and threads and creators that I should react to or featuring upcoming episodes, I'll have regular life hacks threads as well. So every couple of weeks I'll get you to submit suggestions and I might try and test them out on myself, John Yineusef, modernwisdom.locals.com. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful
page harden. Hey, John, look at this show. Thank you for having me. It seems like you've had a spicy few years of controversy. Do you think that's fair to say? I don't think I've ever heard the word spicy before to describe it, but I do think that it's fair to say that there's been a couple years of controversy, yes. I'm pretty fascinated by your positioning, because doing behavioral genetics, which, for good or for ill, has kind of been adopted by some are toward the left. So you occupy this sort of very difficult space in between. Why do you think it is that you consistently find yourself in the eye of the storm of these debates?
That is a very good question that I've asked myself on a number of occasions recently. You know, I, I think there are people that walk into things sort of deliberately court and controversy sort of seeing, okay, what can I say that's going to be provocative. And that genuinely has not been kind of my approach or experience that really has kind of felt, but this kind of bewildering, dislocating experience in which I say things that seem just true to me. And then it is only by saying them out loud that I realize that they are controversial. And in fact, almost never controversial when each statement is taken on its own.
It's something about the combination of them, like the package of them that seems to provoke strong feelings. But, you know, like I'm a professor, I'm an academic. I feel like I have this great privilege of getting to think about things that I think are important and thinking out loud about them with my students and in my research papers and then more recently with kind of more public-facing work. And my goal in all of this is just
been to really articulate, like, what do I think is true? Like, what do I think is true from a scientific perspective? And what do I think is true in terms of expressing my own personal, like, political and moral convictions? And it just turns out that if you repeatedly say true things in this space that seems to rile up. Pretty strong feelings, I think on both sides of the political spectrum which is interesting. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with behavioral genetics generally?
You know there's this really great paper by a legal scholar, Doug Fox, where he talks about genetics and to a lesser neuroscience as subversive science. And I love that phrase, subversive science. And what he's arguing is that it can subvert really basic intuitions that we have about agency or equality. I don't actually think it has to be subversive in quite those ways. I think sometimes the perceived subversiveness of behavioral genetics rests on misunderstandings of it. Like if properly understood many of the fears of the ways that genetics will subvert our values of a quality or agency or identity
you know turn out to not be true but we live in a secular age in which people often don't believe in souls anymore and so they've substituted genes as kind of their essence placeholders is the way that some people talk about it and And so when you start talking about genetics, I think ultimately you're talking about people's selves. You're talking about things about themselves that they value or cherish or fear, or things they see in their children. So to some extent, I don't think that you can talk
about genetics and humans without there being some emotion attached to it. And that's probably a good thing that we want to preserve our sense of something, something sacred about our humanness, even in a secular age. Yeah, sacred is the word that I had in the tip of my tongue there as well. You think about the successes that you have, the failures that you have, the things you value in yourself, the idiosyncrasies, your inclination toward playing this sport or not, toward having a family or not. All of these things, we like to consider ourselves as having some sort of agency. And yeah, the
conception that you can be anything that you want to be, that living in a meritocracy, where you get to choose your own route, that your failures and your successes are yours to bear, there's a lot of waves clashes. It's like the Bermuda triangle of awkward title forces all crashing against each other. Yeah, no, I think that's true. There is something that we, I think many modern people resist the idea of constraint, the idea that there is constraint, you know, that we are not just these kind of like disembodied minds that have a free and infinite potential to choose any future for ourselves, but in fact, even many of our choices are constrained by by our embodied biology. I think people find that idea really alienating. And then I also think, you know, people, it's
not just genetics. You know, there's this quote in my book from the novelist in S.A.S.E.B. White, like most people know him from the children's book, Charlottes Web, but he also wrote, for the New Yorker for many years on How's This Book of Essays. And there's a quote from it, which is, you can't speak of luck to a self-made man. And he's what he's getting out there is that when you've had some of his success, there is a lot of our psychology that kind of kicks in to justify it as like, I earn this. Like, look how hard I worked for this. And people can feel enraged actually when you say,
well, you worked for it, but also that work was scaffolded by all of this luck and some of that luck is environmental and some of that luck is sort of your embodied biology. I think people can often feel like you're trying to take their success away from them or take away a source of pride away from them, which is not what I'm trying to do. I think I'm more trying to engender a sense of gratitude that you've been given things that you didn't earn, you didn't
necessarily deserve. And also a sense of compassion for people who haven't had the same luck in certain ways. What are you trying to do with this book then? That's such a good question. You know, I ask myself all the time, like, how did I get myself into this? I think I'm trying to do a couple of different things. So I think I'm trying to, one, just explain what genetics is up to these days, right? Like, a lot of times you hear this phrase, we're in the middle of a DNA revolution. And I think we are from the perspective of science as a ability to measure people's DNA
directly, cheaply, non-invasively at scale. That would have seemed like science fiction two decades ago. So I think that is going to affect people's lives. And there are so many myths and misunderstandings about what genetics can say and what it can't say about psychological differences between people. So part of what I'm trying to do this book is just to explain as a researcher and a professor in this field, like to the vast of my ability, explain it in a way that's clear so that people can understand and clear up some of the myths. And then also, you know, I have realized since I've been doing this work for such a long
period of time, that many people find it profoundly unintuitive to think that genetics matters and also to consider yourself a political liberal as someone who's really invested in the idea of social equality as a political project. And so, whereas those two things feel quite consonant in my mind, they feel like they fit together quite nicely
and I've never you know in an academic paper like you know, it's 4,000 words You maybe have like a thousand words for the discussion you can maybe squeeze in like two sentences somewhere To explain an idea where's a book gives you space to Expound on something that I think is important that I think is counterintuitive for many people that I think, that I hope, changes the conversation. Like, stretches the conversation so that there's kind of new space and it's not running in quite the same tracks that it's been running in for such a long time. What do you mean by social equality? Because that term is very fraught.
Yes, yes. It's always a quality of what. So I actually mean it quite simply, which is what are the ways in which people's lives turn out differently in a society. So if we look at the end of people's lives, we can think there's differences in physical health, how long do you live, how physically healthy are you,
your risk for disease, we can look at differences and psychological well-being, serious mental illness, but also depression and anxiety and well-being. And do you think your life is worth living? And then more economic outcomes. So we can think about income or wealth or labor market participation, levels of education.
What's interesting about those three domains of inequality of outcome now compared to previous times in human history is that in the US and in the UK, they're really bound up with one another and really bound up in particular with education. So if we look back several hundred years ago at the lifespans of Newbility versus Commoners, you didn't actually see that people who were at the top of the pecking order lived that much longer than Commoners. Like the plague came for them all, right? Like there were communicable diseases
where the primary cause of death. And you know, that, you didn't have these huge disparities in physical health. Whereas now what you see is that you know the most educated people, they don't just make more money, they live longer, they live healthier lives, and they enjoy their lives more. And I think when you start thinking about that cluster of inequality in which a very educated slice of the population is getting more of everything.
Those are the types of social inequalities that I'm really interested in. What's the sort of outcome that you would want from this? Because we can't flatten society for everything. You can't just have this homogenous gray sort of top color painted across everything. It can't even n vanilla all the way down. Yeah, I know and I don't want it to be. I mean I think- But there must be some constraints. At what point do you- Where does the boundary lie for what you consider should be something which is within this sort of mandate?
Yeah, yeah. So I think when we're thinking about like this question of like what should be equalized? Oftentimes people immediately go to resources. Should we equalize income or should we equalize opportunities to go to college? And I think the scale of inequality in income, particularly in the U.S. we could argue is inefficient and a problem. What I'm more interested in is equality of like one kind of basic things
that we owe to fellow humans as kind of a necessary part of reflecting their human dignity. So a huge thing in the U.S. is healthcare, right? That like millions of people don't have access to the healthcare. They can't go to the doctor when they're sick. I think nothing explains America, an American poverty quite so much, just seeing, you know, fill your own dental cavity kits
in Walmart, right? Like those are the sorts of things where it doesn't really matter to me, like whether or not you've not gone foreign school because you didn't have the ability versus you just didn't care about, like you're just bored by it and you'd rather do something else, like you'd rather be a mechanic than a chemist, like go forth in life, there are things that you still are, you think, are owed as part of being just being a human in our society. That right now we really do, particularly in America, structure according to education in a way
that I think is unnecessary. And we don't have to look that far to other high income countries that say, we want people to go far in school. We think it's instrumentally useful to have people who do certain things get paid more. We'really useful to, you know, have people who do certain things get paid more. We're not going to send you home to die if you have cancer because you don't have health insurance, right? Like, I think there's really basic things like that. I also think there's, you know, this increasing, like disrespect and sort of degradation
of prestige for the types of labor that aren't the sort of things that I do. I'm really rotating abstract information in my head and working in a computer that's not manual skill, that's not emotional labor, like a service of retail or weightressing, which was a hardest job I ever had in my life. We have these narratives right now around essential workers who don't have control over their schedule, who don't have access to health insurance, who don't have like the kind of financial stability that allows them to think I could have a family, like I could
own a home. And that's not because their labor isn't valuable to society. It's because we devalued that labor. So those kind of things about healthcare, freedom from financial anxiety, having enough material security so that you feel like you can get married and start a family, not being constantly evicted from your home. We can think about equalizing those,
and it's not some Soviet just hope yet, right? That's not like a gray, like that's like Finland, right? Like I'm describing things that do exist in the world, but that our forms of inequality would really persist in inequality that we justify often, particularly in America, according to these guidelines of like meritocracy in education. Explain for me the link between that and genetics and DNA,
because to me that just sounds like policies that the government needs to sort. We've got the NHS in the UK, so we fix the healthcare problem. You put UBI in, therefore you fix the Income problem the prestige thing is a cultural Artifact of the way that people view particular different jobs. So you'd have to have some sort of retraining So these to me, I don't see the link between that and the genetics Yeah, yeah, no, I mean like this is such a like that's such a good observation because I feel like what you're picking up on is like That's such a good observation because I feel like what you're picking up on is like
part of why I get surprised when people think that I'm a very controversial thinker because like my bottom line on the for many things is You know there should be a floor There should be a social safety net beyond which people can't fall Which isn't hugely controversial in large segments of the population. I think where genetics comes in is in two ways. So the first is, even if we say, regardless of how people do in school, they should have a certain access to a quality of life.
We're still also interested in improving how people do in school. We're still interested in improving how children learn. And a big part of the book is invested in describing how ignoring genetics makes that project harder. Like if we do research that's predicated on the assumption that children are all genetically the same when they're not, like the research base on which we're building our policies and interventions to try to help children to see an education have predictable problems, which is that they don't work. What are the genetic differences in outcomes based on genetic markers?
Yeah, so, I mean, just to back up a second, like if we look at, you know, this kind of two ways to study this. And so one is just looking at twins or adoptive adoptive, adoptive, so looking at family members who differ in their genetic and social relationships in some way. And those types of studies have long suggested that things like intelligence, test score, performance, but also personality traits, like conscientiousness and planfulness, educationally relevant disorders like ADHD
or conduct problems are all heritable, which means that part of the reason why children are different on these things is because they have different genes. And then more recently, there have been studies that identify specific genetic variants. So specific DNA differences between people that are correlated with these different outcomes.
And that science has progressed so rapidly that it's really forced social scientists to pay attention to it, because now these genetic markers are as strongly correlated with, say, the likelihood of going to university as a variables like family income are. So what's the sort of correlation that you find between either parents and children or genetic markers and outcomes in IQ or academics. Yeah, so when we're talking,
so I guess there's a number of different numbers you can throw around. I would say maybe a touchstone is to think about what is the correlation between a polygenic score, which is kind of a summary of someone's DNA information. It's capturing environmental processes, but it's calculated just from their DNA and rates of college completion in the US. And that correlation is like between 0.25 and 0.3, which isn't huge, but is about the
same size as you get between like family SES and going to college. You can make that number smaller by being like, well, what is the correlation sizes you get between like family, SES and go into college. You can make that number smaller by being like, well, what is the correlation when you're looking at within siblings, you can make that correlation bigger when you're like, well, that's not capturing all the genetics, what if you're looking at everything, not just what's measured in a polygenex score. That's like an active area of scientific debate. Like, I think what's important is whatever the number is, You know, that's like an active area of scientific debate.
Like, I think what's important is whatever the number is, it's not zero, right? They're meaningful, genetically associated differences between children and the outcomes that we care about, really at every stage of the educational process. So like Robert Plomin in the UK, who I knew you've had on, has with us with regards to exam scores at age 16,
I looked at it in relation to which math class do you get tracked into in the ninth grade? We can predict whether or not people stay in math even knowing their grades in their previous year from their DNA, right? So like among students who are all in the same school and they all got B's, like the DNA predicts which ones stay in math versus drop out of math. So as soon as we're talking about those types of correlations in the point two to point
three range, they're not large, but none of our correlations for things that we measure in kids, like school going, are large. And we can start to like use them in our studies. So that was, I feel like we've, we've followed a little tangent. I don't remember the original question, but basically we now can, we now can measure DNA and assess its association with outcomes we really care about. Still with a great deal of uncertainty, but with enough certainty that we can see that it is making a difference. And at the same time, most of the kind of work in child development is not paying attention to that, right? So it's continuing to study parenting or school environments or neighborhood environments in relation to child outcomes.
And there's this huge flaw at the heart of so much of that research, which is that children get more than their environments from their parents. And that flaw is really holding us back from designing better interventions, designing better policies to help children succeed in school. So to put that together, my argument is kind of too pronged, which is that I think we need genetics in order to do the sort of science to help children succeed and at the same time, knowing that genetics makes a difference is not some huge barrier to the political project of improving people's lives. They're, you know, as you said, like
you have the NHS, like you don't need genetics for that. And both of those things can be true at the same time. I had a conversation after the Robert Pullo Man episode went up and I got to, how would you say, I got to circle the outside of the whirlwind briefly while that one, the one that you sit in the middle of sometimes. And a buddy replied who's very familiar with the behavioral genetics research and he said thousands and thousands of parenting books out there, zero that include behavioral genetics research, one book on behavioral
genetics beats five books on normal developmental parenting. And that sort of really hit it home for me. I was like, that it makes a lot of sense. What I'm interested to try and find out is what, what are you proposing? Okay, we can make some sort of predictions based on genetic markers about a child's predisposition in school. They are going to be good at math, so shit at English, or maybe they're just going to be high-riq, lower IQ, maybe they're autistic, maybe whatever, whatever. Like, what do you propose that people do from their schools, policy makers? Yeah, so I propose, I would say three general things. I think the first is my fellow researchers who are writing the stuff that goes into the parenting books. High-income parents do this and that makes their kids better.
They should be routinely integrating something about genetics into their research. So long as they're trying to figure out what aspects of parenting or school environments or neighborhood environments like actually make a difference for children's lives. It's not that nothing makes a difference. It's that kind of reverse engineering what are the actual ingredients of change in effective schools and effective parents in neighborhoods that foster achievement that are opportunity zones. That's a really hard scientific problem. And we can be making better progress at solving that. If in the same way that researchers routinely control for socioeconomic status when they're trying to say reading to kids matters, like let's make genetics part of like the everyday work day arsenal of social scientists.
I think for policymakers, an interventionist that are doing policy evaluation or randomized control trials of educational interventions, anyone that's like doing an experiment, tinkering with something and seeing if it works, I also think that they should be when they can, including genetic information, so that they can get beyond just seeing does an intervention work on average for the average child, and instead get at,
are the interventions I'm trying, serving the most vulnerable, serving the kids who are most at risk for poor outcomes. So moving beyond this, the focus on the average kid that doesn't exist to heterogeneity of intervention effects, heterogeneity of policy evaluation. And then I think the third thing is like, you know, again, I won't speak to the UK context
because I don't live there, I don't live in that political climate. Like I live in Texas, I won't speak to the UK context because I don't live there. I don't live in that political climate. I live in Texas. I live in a state in which people are often very opposed to any idea of redistribution and very pro-maritocracy and buttress those political beliefs with a really earnest commitment to the idea that any success they have they earned it. And I would like people to consider the role of luck and in a particular genetic luck and their successes and think about if if this is in part because you got lucky rather than because you're good what does that
mean about your commitment to other people? I just want people to consider that question and take it seriously. How would you differentiate between luck and effort? Effort. I mean, it's kind of an impossible thing because I think, you know, what you see is that our gene shape or personality and then our personality shapes, how much effort we put into it. Well, this was a question that I was going to say. So let's say that you had two students in the same school with similar genetic predispositions
for maths and English and stuff. And one works harder than the other. Is that a problem? Well, if conscientiousness has a genetic marker in it, then you go, okay, do we need to somehow control for the child's predisposition at working hard? Like, you know, questions out of the window with regards to free will for philosophical debate. Like, what's left on the table for us to actually bear as I'm around? I mean, you're exactly right. Like, there's a great essay by the philosopher, Thomas Nagle, and it's about this question of moral luck, right?
Which things that are lucky about that we're still responsible for. And it was like, if we take, you know, if we eliminate kind of the role of luck in human lives, like what's left over shrinks to an extensionless point, right? Like, there's essentially nothing left once we start to take into this account that like luck shapes personality, which shapes effort, like there's no getting rid
of luck in your life. For me, what that says, and I'm borrowing this idea from political philosophers, the philosopher John Rol said none of our precess of justice tilt towards dessert, which is basically what he was saying, this whole political project of trying to figure out what people deserve and what people earn
in order to justify inequality is bound to fail, because there is no separating effort from luck. It's turtles all the way down. What we should be thinking about is, you know, what inequality is instrumentally useful, right? Like rewarding some people more for certain types of work is better for everyone if it increases certain types of productivity, yours more efficient in the allocation of certain goods or resources. That's a different argument than saying, I just serve my salary because I'm so clever, right?
Like, so I'm not trying to say, like I'm not trying to disappear agency out of people's lives. I'm trying to get people to consider that if they are quote unquote successful in the sense that they enjoy a certain level of economic goods in our like winner takes all meritocratic rat race that looking to their own lives and thinking about how much they deserve it and earn it might be missing part of the story.
If you as a scientist are struggling to be able to bifurcate those to the person themselves with all of their biases and their self love, it's essentially an impossible task. And there'll be someone who's worked really hard or feels like they've worked really hard and has overcome their demons and they've had setbacks and they've had this and you're there and they've fought their way to the top. My business partner standing on the shoulder of his children's names to try and climb out of the working class and the middle class. And whatever it is that they do to try and get there, and then they think, well, hang
on a second, are you telling me that I should have somehow been pulled further back because I had a starting line head start genetically? This was me. This was my agency. This was what I did. There's a concern that people feel like they're just outcomes are going to be taken away from them. Yeah. So I feel like that's, I mean, that's such an interesting and we've gotten so far
away from genetics, but this idea that it's that by equality we mean leveling down or by equality we mean pulling back or by equality we mean taking things away from them versus the ways in which everyone, even the person, even the person at the top is better off when things are more equal. And this is something that, like, I think can be profoundly counterintuitive. But we see it's true that, like, people who live in more unequal societies are less happy, they're more anxious, even when they're at the top of the hierarchy, because there's this still sense of like felt for clarity I have to maintain like at all times, like I can't let myself fall down or my children fall down.
You know, the idea that everything in life is this relentless competition with no margin for error. It doesn't just hurt the losers of the competition. It also hurts the winners. I genuinely think that like Jeff Bezos, in the long term, will be better off if he has like $100 million fewer dollars, but lives in a society in which there's more political stability and like fewer supply chain issues for Amazon because like laborers who unload the boxes are like adequately paid enough and not dying of COVID. Like there are ways in which it's not actually a zero-sum game when we are talking about like equality. And people immediately go to this, like, you're trying to take something away from people
to the top. That's a fear. People to the top of her by inequality, too. Yeah, I got sent to study by Rob Henderson just before I came on. And he said that people in low class, the lower classes are more concerned with policies that raise up poverty, but people in the upper classes are more concerned with policies that reduce inequality. Lower classes want poverty reducing, but upper classes want inequality reducing.
That seemed quite surprising to me. Yeah, and it was interesting. I haven't read that study, but, you know, people have like, you know, I also wonder like, to what extent that's about what aspects of inequality or are most affecting you, right? So, you know, I'm like an upper middle class affluent person who lives in a very unequal city. When I think about what is hurting Austin,
I think about, well, how is the concentration of wealth warping the housing market? How is the concentration of wealth warping like the educational system when people can opt out of public schools and go to private schools. Whereas, so that set of concerns is really focused at like to what extent is a concentration of wealth and like the point of one percent changing the conditions of livability for
all of us, right? That's different from someone who is existing like at the poverty line and is really interested in how can I make sure that I have secure housing and I have secure food and I can send my kids to school at all. Ultimately, though, I think our concerns about both alleviating poverty and eliminating inequality, there's points of political intersection between those, particularly around housing and affordable housing. But I do think that's really interesting. Whether you're more interested in compressing the scale of inequality writ large versus specifically raising the floor,
people have different priorities around that for sure. Getting back to genetics then, what are system of the more surprising correlations that you found? Asura, asura bit about when identical twin sisters have marriages with different levels of conflict that children have equal risk for delinquency, what are some of the other ones like that?
Well, I mean, that project has part of, most of my graduate work, which is attempting to adjust this problem that we've talked about before. And the problem being that most studies just correlate aspects of parenting and child outcomes and then are like, oh, this aspect of parenting is like the secret sauce, right? So, you know, there's eight million studies that are parents who fight more, have more behavior problems. This is why you should learn to get along through spouse more because it's going to help your kids ADHD.
And very few considering that like, argumentative parents might have argumentative children, like for reasons other than just environmental modeling. So my graduate work was a lot on like kind of divorce or it'll conflict age at childbearing like you know, as teenage pregnancy like actually bad for kids. What did that come up with? What did that suggest? It's a just like teenage moms definitely face a lot more like financial problems than mothers usually childbearing.
Like there's you know, there's a penalty to early motherhood in terms of education in the labor market. But the effective adolescent parenthood on kids, particularly they're like common problems in ADHD is a lot smaller than people might anticipate. And, you know, and that's because people do not have children as teenagers at random, right? So like more impulsive sensation seeking moms are more likely to have kids young and they're
more likely to have impulsive sensation seeking kids. So there's just a lot like going back to your, you know, there's 8 million parenting books, which are all like here, all the things correlated with being like a high and high income white lady. Basically, is what they're all saying. And very few of those things are shown to actually have like a causal impact on child development. Like it's just like, let's see what's in fashion amongst people in a certain social class and then like give us, give parents a lot of advice based on that, not really on like tons of solid science. I couldn't believe that girls who hit puberty earlier are less likely to do maths.
Oh, that was surprising to you. Well, you're in a girl, I guess. Yeah, I didn't think that if you're a girl who hits puberty sooner, the boys that are in the maths class are going to hit on you because you're the one that's developing. And it makes complete sense. I don't disbelieve it for a moment, but I was like, oh yeah, but that's because when girls go from being a girl to being a woman, something sort of attractive happens to the boys that are looking at them, when boys go from being boys to men, nothing happens. Like essentially nothing changes. Their voice just gets a bit weird and they get spotty.
So it's so interesting. I just taught my adolescent development lecture because I teach interest psych, which is great to teach adolescent development because they're all freshmen, right? So they're 18 and they just went through this. Some of them are still going through this. And my days are really big online class.
And so I put them into chat rooms all the time where they can talk to each other. And I was like, so their chat prompt was, do you wish you could have gone through earlier, through puberty earlier or later? And all of the girls are like, I wish that it happened later. Like, I was the first one in my class. It was embarrassing.
It was discouraging, men are schemy. Boys start to look at you totally differently. Like, you know, my parents treated me differently, which is true, like the research literature show, like girls go through puberty a little earlier than boys anyways. And so the earliest mature in girls look like women and the boys in their class look
like boys. But that doesn't stop the boys from being creepy to them in a lot of ways. Whereas the boys were like, I couldn't wait. My voice cracked and I was like, when is the rest of this? I still can't grow a beard. I'm still waiting for this. And I think it's actually a great example of like, there's what genes do to your body and then there's how society responds to your body, right? Like going through puberty is very hurtable, you know, like that's kind of like a developmental timing thing. But then you have breasts and hips and your social environment and your teachers and your parents are responding to you differently.
And so it's, we sometimes use a phrase environmentally mediated genetic effects. Like, it's the effect of your genes on your body that then becomes like the gris for the social nil and let the social response that you're getting for people. And so when you see that, like, girls who go through puberty early or less likely to take advanced math classes, is that a genetic effect? Well, like, going through puberty earlier is genetic. But then there's also, like, the social construction of girlhood and of sexual gender dynamics between adolescents that, like, is responsible for that outcome. That highlights exactly what I was saying earlier on that there's two elements at play there.
You can try and control for the culture or you can try and control for the genetics because the outcome or the impact that you're trying to avoid is something which occurs culturally, but there's two ways that we can play around with this. Do you need to have a maths class for all of the girls that are early developers?
That looks like. Looks like. We're just a math class for all of the girls, right? To just not be able to be in STEM education free of men who dominate the conversation, right? Like some people have attempted to, does that matter for girls' outcomes? Yeah. Absolutely. And then think about some of the externalities that you might, does that matter for girls' outcomes? Yeah, absolutely.
And then think about some of the externalities that you might have from that. Then you would have women who eventually end up in the workplace and haven't had sufficiently long to be able to work out how to communicate with men. And men who wouldn't understand how to communicate with women. And from what I know, the men in STEM
could do with a bit of assistance with learning how to talk to women in any case. So, right, what about homelessness? You were talking about Austin, and obviously, there's, I've seen quite a lot of stories about the homelessness problem in Austin, and you also researched that and its links to genetics. Oh, yeah, I mean, so homelessness is a problem
that's exactly, I mean, in many ways, just like puberty, right, which is not like... Homelessness is just like puberty. Pay card, and you heard it, you heard it, you heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You heard it. You know that there are genetic influences on mental illness is like schizophrenia. And we also know that in the US, a serious mental illness is one of the biggest risk factors for being homeless. And there's a long history behind that, right? Like we had a massive de-investment in psychiatric care in the United States. We had a big de-institutionalization movement of like shutting down the inpatient wards
and like getting people out of hospital. We don't have enough psychiatric beds or public housing in the United States. And so what happens to someone who's seriously mentally ill and whose family doesn't have enough resources to pay for psychiatric health care for them, they're very likely to end up on the streets. Austin has been in this terrible, like, we're going to criminalize camping. We're not going to decriminalize camping. We're going to recriminalize camping. And it's like just fudzing around at the symptoms of the problem, right?
Like, it's not, the problem isn't whether or not an unhoused person can use a tent. It's that they don't have a house, and we haven't addressed this as a society. The structural issues that go into them being unemployed unhoused. So, again, we have like, you know, Eugene's affects your risk of experiencing psychotic symptoms. It's our social choice that people with psychotic symptoms are on the street instead of in the hospital.
Like the biggest psychiatric care provider in the United States is the jail system. Like more schizophrenics are imprisoned versus like in hospital. So that is like, we can think about genes to biology and then what's happening to a person in their social environment based on that biology. Homelessness is a great example of that.
There's another element where you're talking about separating characteristics and the difference between how valued some characteristics are and how valuable someone is in society. Can you dig into that? Yeah, I mean, I think when we're talking about intelligence, when we're talking about homelessness, when we're talking about conscientiousness, when we're talking about economists often use the word skilled, skilled labor. There can be this idea that if traits are associated with genes, that that's evidence that some people are sort of inherently more valuable than other people, right, that they're genetically smarter, they're genetically
more moral or whatever. And I don't think that's true. I think what we see is that there's a wide variety of genetic differences between us and also a wide variety of skills and talents and traits. And then we now live in a system that systematically values some skills and traits over others, right? Like going back to you talking about you and your friend growing up working class, you know, why do we think of being a university professor as being a quote unquote better job than being a mechanic, right? Like we can't really function very well as a society
without mechanics, like we need mechanical knowledge, but it is a type of training and a type of skill that's devalued relative to maybe what a university professor is doing, what kind of skills they have. And what I'm trying to call attention to is that that's not some fixed and inflexible like law of nature. That is choices that we've made as a society, right? But to say, like, if you have these skills, you have access to these types of jobs
that come with these types of material conditions. And if you have these skills, you're allowed to hoard all sorts of wealth and opportunity, there's nothing like fixed in nature about that. That is the result of social choices. So I do agree. However, I would struggle to justify saying that the guy that sits on his couch
in his house of three other dudes smoking weed and playing Xbox all day is as valuable as his contribute of a member of society as the mechanic or the university professor or the bus driver or anybody else. Right? Like, I understand that you can say this is genes and environment for most of the way down.
That this person is the nail on the end of the finger of the arm of the position that they were given, of the life that they've been leading that's currently been grown out of the earth. But I can't. What about the freeloader? The rubber has to meet the road at some point. It's like, look, we have to make people culpable for some of the things that they do. Yeah. So we definitely already do that, right? Like would say, in terms of people not being given many chances and people being at high
risk for experiencing a lot of poverty and emisoration if they're not quote unquote contributing. I feel like that's in many ways a defining feature of the American political landscape. And people, you know, that sense of like that, like it's not fair if they're rewarded when they're not contributing is a very like basic moral intuition that I'm not really trying to push against, right? Like my children have that.
Like my daughter, if I'm like, you both have to go clean up your room and then you can watch TV. And my daughter does most of the work cleaning up the room. She is, I think, outraged if her brother also gets to watch television. She's like, but he just sat there while I did all the work.
Like, why does he get to watch TV? Like that sense of outrageousness over, you know, children are outraged by unfair inequality, but they're also outraged by what they consider to be equality that's unfair to unfair equality. If people get the exact same for a different effort, children get really mad about that, too. There's two things I want to add to that, which is one, what do we owe even the slacker on the couch by virtue of him being a human, right? And like, he probably isn't owed a yacht and a million dollar for one K, but like, are we going to send him home from the hospital? Are we gonna tell him to pull his own teeth, right?
Like, what do we owe people? Even who are slackers, even who are bad, like, even who aren't quote unquote, contributing. I don't think we pay enough attention to that, at least in where I live. In the second is, my colleague's panel heard in Don Winnihan have written a great book on administrative burden, which is like what are the costs of administering social programs when you're trying to separate the deserving applicants from the undeserving applicants.
And basically their research suggests that even though freeloaders bother us, we can end up hurting ourselves and the people who actually need help more by putting in this administrative machinery that like is trying to suss out like, is this person a mechanic or is this person, you know, the video game or honest couch, right? So not universalizing things. Even though it does activate our our very six-year-old impulses of like, but someone might not get something even when they're slacker and they're not doing anything, like not universalizing things can make
programs more expensive and in-depth so that the people who do need them are less likely to get them. And so at the end of the day I'm just kind of a consequentialist about this in which I feel like, I'd rather a guilty man go free than an innocent man be in jail. And I would rather have someone who is undeserving of a social benefit, get it, then have a whole machinery in place that ends up hurting people who have legitimate claims
on a service. So those are the situations of the blind. Yeah, I think that's a really good identification of why people who lean left tend to be compassionate. I think that's like the best summarization that I've ever seen for that. summarisation that I've ever seen for that. Because for me, I think my indignation would overtake my empathy. I think that I would... I don't know if I would be prepared, the guilty man going free versus the innocent man going to jail, like that's a much tighter decision for me to make. It's more difficult for me to work out where I lie on that. What I've thought was really interesting
was you talking about unfair equality as well as unfair inequality. And that's what we're talking about with that indignation, the hypocrisy, the concerns around undeserved. It definitely feels to me, I would be really interested to see where your viewpoints are. Let's say that we get the sort of progress that we're hoping for economically in terms of welfare and poverty levels and so on and so forth. Over the next 20 years, 30 years, I'd be really, really interested to see what your stance would be on this.
Let's say that we raise the floor of welfare so that everybody has basic human dignity, right? Now one of the problems is that we're not rational creatures. A lot of the time were more concerned relatively about opposition within the hierarchy than absolutely. And I'm sure that you've considered this because if you offer someone you can make an extra $50,000 yourself or you can make an extra $100,000 but all of your competitors make an extra $50,000 yourself or you can make an extra $100,000, but all of your competitors make an extra $120,000, people will take the objective lower number so that relatively they gain more status. This is how we are wired. So for me, my concern is that it's status games all the way down now. all the way down now. Yeah. So I feel like this is where, this is a really interesting question.
Like I'm not really interested in changing aspects of our psychology that are probably like pretty deeply evolved. Right? Like are we going to get rid of that? Not getting rid of that. That's how you're competition, like, no, we're not going to. It's more about like, what structures can we build
that satisfy and respond to those psychological needs that also take seriously these other moral concerns, right? And so the economist Robert Frank has a really great book called Success and Luck, which is not about genetics, it's about environmental luck, random opportunities that come to you. And this is a topic that he takes really seriously around like someone's always gonna want a bigger boat. Like it doesn't matter how big the yacht is, like someone's gonna gonna want a bigger boat. Like it doesn't matter how big
the yacht is. Like someone's gonna always want a bigger boat. Like there's gonna be no like undoing of male psychology that like makes them not want the bigger boat at the end of the day. And so he's like so what could we do with that? And he has a whole proposal around like a consumption tax which like doesn't actually really change the utility that people at the top end of an economic hierarchy get out of the status competition around goods, but does redistribute wealth and prevent this runaway inflation of the cost of some things that affect other people's prices, housing markets. That's the sort of thing that I'm interested in. like some things that affect other people's prices, like housing markets.
And that's the sort of thing that I'm interested in. If we raise the floor up, so that the redistribution basically is no longer required, what are we talking about there? If the people who aren't putting the work in, aren't putting the work in, but are living a life which is morally, how would you say, respectable,
by the particular values that you've given, I don't know what we're achieving there other than reducing the imperative or the incentive for those people to actually do something. This is one of the concerns that you have, like the free rider, free load of problem, right? The tragedy of the commons is one of the things that comes out of it. Yeah, so I mean, I'm so interested to me to hear you talk because I feel like, I mean, you're bringing up like is iniqual, like, I think this is a really fun and old
debate, like to what extent, like is iniquality itself a bad thing versus like we're just concerned about the minimum, but also like to what extent is like, is inequality itself a bad thing versus, like, we're just concerned about the minimum. But also, like, to what extent is a work, a good thing? Like, a lot of your comments are predicated on this idea that, like, work, work, qual, work, productivity is better than leisure, which is just, like, I'm not necessarily sure I'm even, like, taking that, like, as an assumption.
Like, you know, the dream of technology was it was going to make work easier so that we all had more time for leisure. The way the next boss. I want to, you know, that we could all be Iceland and be like, okay, we now have a four day work week. Like that's, you know, the vision that I have of like, what world would I want my children to enjoy? You know, in this utopia that you've described where like poverty no longer exists and like people have like, you know, a basic income and access to healthcare is not one in which there are still pressures to work 70 hours a week as part of being part
of a prestigious off the occupation. Like, at what point do we start to value leisure in addition to work? That's a fucking fascinating question because so much of our self- worth, especially if you're industrious and conscientious, so much of your self worth is tied to the work that you do. And you can actually even shortcut the outcomes and the output of the work. And it can just simply be that like the Puritan work ethic, like I take pleasure from the sheer suffering
that is a part of the work that I do. You can imagine these priests and the middle ages, they're hoeing, hoeing the garden outside of the church and the sun's beating down on their backs, but they're doing it in service to God. And this is us. We're doing it in service to Mollock, right? Like that's, that's what we're here for. Here's one for you. I mean, I, like, I find this so fast. Like, why do we have, I mean, the theory about the quote unquote Protestant work ethic is like, well, the Calvinists were like,
well, you were predestined before the John of time to be either in the elect or not in the elect. And you're working a no, but like one way to show yourself and other people that you were in the elect, like that you weren't gonna go to hell is that like your sign of God's blessings, which is that you're cruel the elect, like that you weren't gonna go to hell, is that like your sign of God's blessings, which is that you're cruel of wealth, right? And so, and then we've moved into secularism
and just like taken the God part out of it, but haven't taken the like, I spend all my time working in a cruel and wealth as a sign that I'm somehow good. Like, why are we, we need to be interrogating that more, a lot more, I think, in terms of like, where our sense of self-worth comes from, because it's not coming from the church anymore. Here's one for you. If we could, should we go into the genes and flatten them so that everyone has
the same genetic opportunity? Because we're trying to achieve this socially, so why not try and achieve it genetically? So I, there's a great line from Jybsansky, who was a evolutionary biologist in the early, I mean in the mid 20th century, and he wrote in science in 1962 that genetic diversity is mankind's most precious resource. And I believe that, like I don't, what I want is a society that is more like a meadow than a lot of grass, like in where we have many different people with many different talents, which a lot of diversity that are working in cooperation and it's beautiful and not homogenous, right? That is equality of thriving, not equality of genomes, right?
Like, whereas alone is a monoculture. Like I'm not, like monoculture is an agriculture and never work out. Like they're never, they're never good. Bad things happen when we have monocultures and I don't think that there's, you know, the problem with society, in my view, right now, is that we have so narrowly defined to skill
that we have kind of a monoculture of skill and talent amongst viewers considered like the top of the, like a, or a status hierarchy of an income hierarchy. Whereas you know, one phrase that people use for it is like a pluralistic opportunity structure where there's many different genetically influenced talents that can all like different roots to success. Those are the sorts of social structures that I think are good. I'll never forget this meme.
It's so useful. I've never been able to find it again. There's this guy, this really big guy, and he's sort of, maybe about my age, I early 30s or whatever, like, pretty good looking dude, and he's got a shirt and tie on. He's stood at the front of a bedbath and beyond.
And he's just sort of welcoming this woman. Welcomeing this woman in the department store, and there's a thought bubble going out of his head. And it says, 500 years ago, I would have been a strong warrior. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm a woman and I'm raising a nine-year-old but I'm not an expert on min and mass-killingly-be, but I do think just for my observations of my undergraduates when we look at rates of college completion, when we look at like political disaffectation amongst young men, the sense
of, I do have something to contribute. I don't want to be the person that's like sitting on my couch playing video games, but there isn't an opportunity structure for me to feel like the skills and talents I do have are valuable, are prestigious, are going to like create a life for myself in which I can have a family. And that I think is a huge problem. From a gendered perspective, I'm going to guess that boys on average tend to sit still with more difficulty in classes, higher rates of ADHD, so on and so forth, more anti-social behavior. Yeah, I mean, that's all true. And then I think particularly, when we're talking about male adolescents in male puberty,
this is a period of all lifespan in which adolescents generally, but male adolescents in particular, are really developmentally primed for risk for feeling like things have stakes. And we put them in high schools that are the most boring things ever. And then they all say, I've never been more bored. I know we have closed off all opportunities.
Unless we're talking about military service when they turn 18, for people to experience a pro-social, positively, socially sanctioned forms of risk and adventure taking. And then we wonder why male adolescents drop out of school and go to college at lower rates and female adolescents across the board. Like we don't take their developmental needs seriously. Like we just actually are kind of terrible to teenagers
generally in terms of taking, like we treat them as like deficient adults rather than like this is a unique period of the lifespan that has its own developmental needs. Like how would we design a school if we actually didn't hate teenagers? Like I think it's a really good point because we mullie cuddle children and they're still cute and there's still this level of protectionism around them. And yeah, you bestow on teenagers the responsibility and the standards that you expect from an adult
with all of the resentment of a child that has agency not behaving the way that they should do. Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. In my class, I give my students a list of your rights and responsibilities of adulthood. You can get married, you can be tried as an adult for a crime, you can rent a car, you can drink alcohol, you can join the military. And I'm like, I want you to,
if you were dictator for the day, and what age should we be able to do these things? And then at what age do we actually do them, right? And it's like in Texas, you can be tried as an adult for a felony 10 years before you can rent a car. Like that's insane from a developmental science perspective. And what we do is we hold them responsible for making adult like decisions when we're trying to punish them.
But we withhold the rights that come from being an adult, like such as voting or drinking as late as possible. And then we wonder why adolescents are resentful of adults. Like, well, because you treat them like petulant children all the time and don't design anything for their sake. So I could go on and on about this. But like, we don't take adolescents seriously in our cultures. And I think that's a real shame. Frederick Taboa, who wrote the cult of smart, he agrees that genes and look play big roles and life outcomes. And as a result, he's a strong supporter of communism. Are you tempted by communism?
I think that Freddie would describe himself as a socialist not a communist. And I think it's interesting because I think his socialist, I don't know, Freddie, very well, just mostly writing. No, one might not have to call it Freddie. Well, we've been on like a symposium together before. And he, I'm pretty sure his political commitments, like predate any interest in genetics, which I think is an important point, which is that observing that there are
genetic differences between people, it doesn't commit you to any moral or political project. I think it's more, given a moral political project, what constraints about the real world do I need to take into account when I'm thinking about how to bring this about? And so, I mean, that's been very much my case, too. I was in a gallotary and before I was a behaviour geneticist. Have you read the book Why Whites Run Slower? No. Okay, so this French guy,
he looked at athletic performance, largely being determined by genetics and there was this ACTN3, the sprint gene, and there's an RR form for speed and an RX form for endurance. Have you seen this? So I have read about this. Do you know if there's any truth in it? So my sources of knowledge about this are two books. One is David Epstein's The Sports Gene, Some knowledge about this are two books. One is David Epstein's The Sports Gene, which is fantastic. I really recommend it. And that book is all about the genetics of athletic performance, in various capacities and various specific genes.
And I think what's interesting about his book is I know David only through Twitter, like he wrote that book years before I wrote mine. It's on a completely different domain of human skill, which is athletics versus education. But thematically, it actually ends up in a very similar place, which is like, yes, genes matter, figuring out which genes matter is really hard, and it's never just jeans, right? Like this is such a complicated, complicated, developed little story. And then the other source of information about genetics and sports that I have read is out of Rutherford's, how to argue with a racist, which spends a lot of time on these kind of stories about like why some racial groups are quote-unquote better at some sports than others. And it is basically the same place that Epstein's
does, which is like, you know, if you pick like one gene and one comparison, it can look so like such a neat, tidy story. And then as soon as you think about the larger picture of athletic performance, like those just those stories kind of like fall apart entirely. So I don't, you know, like this is not, I don't, I don't know anything about the genetics of sports performance other than reading those two books. So like, but you know, my sense of it is when it comes to really complex domains of skill, these neat stories about populations in one gene almost never hold up to more sustained scrutiny. Adam Rutherford called me out
after the Robert Ploman episode. He tweeted something mean about me, some of my friends with him, yeah, exactly. Anyway, did you ever no longer friends with anyone who says something means means you're on Twitter? Like in my experience, you would be like left with no people. Like there's a lot of storm. There would be no one. There would literally be no one like the genetic lottery.
Why DNA matters for social equality will be linked in the show notes below. And if people want to try and bolster your dwindling Twitter world as people continue to clash up against you, where should they go? So I'm on Twitter at KPH3K and you can find me on the website which is kphardin.com. Thank you. Alright, thank you so much. you