According to Jason Collins, Oded Galor and Quamrul Ashraf will soon write,
there is little evidence to support the claim that the variation in institutions across societies is driven by differences in their endowment of specific genetic traits that might govern key social behaviors.
I believe that in Hive Mind Garett Jones endorses the view that higher average IQ can lead to better institutions. So I will want to read the Galor-Ashraf paper when it appears.
Ashraf & Galor’s mechanism is very implausible—it relies on *neutral* genetic diversity, and neutral genetic distance. It’s fundamentally different to Hive Mind.
the late Robert Conquest said (I paraphrase) “much societal performance is influenced by habits.” Depending on how you define things like habits, norms, and traditions, that hypothesis will take you a long way.
If habits are partly heritable, you probably need to take them into account as durable, at least over the short run.
I’m not sure how you do this scientifically. It will be easy to drift into speculations on “national character” or into pseudo-scientific racism.
Thomas Sowell asserted that Germans in the modern age are bookish and like a certain type of music. You will find libraries and choral societies wherever they migrated.
Peter Frost has blogged on this general topic at Unz.com, and some of his essays are moderately persuasive. He is a pleasure to read. You could also read the blogger JayMan. I worry about the lack of peer review, though Peter Frost seems like an academic through and through–JayMan I’m just not too familiar with his background.
What I like about Robert Conquest’s definition is he stressed “habits” without making a commitment to whether they are learned or inherited genetically.
I’m pretty sure you can find a decent elaboration of Conquest’s view in _Notes on ravaged century_, 1990.
at Psychological Comments (Dr. James Thompson) there is a review of Hive Mind. He asks what about time preference–isn’t it at least as important as intelligence? They are not identical. Are they correlated?
The two fundamental building blocks of Wade’s theory are rather speculative. In particular, his narrative relies on unsubstantiated selection mechanisms and on empirically unsupported conjectures regarding the determinants of institutional variation across societies.
This is from Charles Murray’s review of Wade’s book in the WSJ:
Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that these latter chapters, unlike his presentation of the genetics of race, must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: “There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303380004579521482247869874
So Wade speculates about how the modern world came to look the way it does, and his hypothesis is criticized for being speculative.
What evidence would suffice, anyway? Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but you can’t exactly build a simulation of population dynamics in Bronze Age Europe and model which traits outcompete which; you can really only look at the relative frequencies of alleles in and make ex post inferences about what selective pressures might have produces differences in those relative frequencies. My guess is that a lot of people would deny any and all such inferences for being “speculative.”
From the quoted paper (note that the authors are citing their own previous work):
Diversity can positively influence economic development by widening a society’s spectrum of individual skills, abilities, and cognitive approaches, which fosters innovative activity, stimulates specialization, and allows societies to adapt more rapidly to changing technological environments. Conversely, by also widening a society’s spectrum of individual values, beliefs, preferences, and predispositions in social interactions, diversity can reduce the extent of social cohesion, generate inefficiencies in the provision of public goods, and hamper economic coordination, thus conferring a negative influence on economic performance. In light of a diminishing marginal effect of diversity associated with each of these two counteracting forces, the hypothesis predicts an inverted-U relationship between diversity and development, capturing the trade-off between the social costs and benefits of diversity.
…
The main finding from Ashraf and Galor’s analysis of contemporary comparative development suggests that (i) increasing the diversity of the most homogenous country in the sample (Bolivia) by 1 percentage point would raise its income per capita in the year 2000 by 41 percent; (ii) decreasing the diversity of the most diverse country in the sample (Ethiopia) by 1 percentage point would raise its income per capita by 21 percent; (iii) a 1 percentage point change in genetic diversity (in either direction) at the “optimum” level of 0.721 (that most closely resembles the diversity level of the United States) would lower income per capita by 1.9 percent; (iv) increasing the diversity of Bolivia to the level prevalent in the United States would increase Bolivia’s per-capita income by a factor of 5.4, closing the income gap between the two countries from a ratio of 12:1 to 2.2:1; and (v) decreasing the diversity of Ethiopia to the level prevalent in the United States would increase Ethiopia’s per-capita income by a factor of 1.7 and, thus, close the income gap between the two countries from a ratio of 47:1 to 27:1.
That’s…..I don’t know. Diversity is doing an awful lot of work in that second paragraph.
This seems like a much more compelling criticism:
Wade argues that unlike Africa, East Asia experienced economic growth and development since the mid-twentieth century because of their genetically determined ability to adopt market-friendly institutions from the West. This argument, however, is based on the existing distribution of institutions across societies rather than underlying forces that brought about this realization. Specifically, Wade hypothesizes that African societies are unable to adopt growth-enhancing institutions based on the observation that they have not adopted them, but this flawed reasoning implies that any society that has not yet adopted virtuous institutions is necessarily unable to adopt them. In addition, Wade’s conjectures are based on the supposition that societies are generally willing to unilaterally adopt virtuous institutions (but are often unable to do so because of inappropriate genetic predispositions), disregarding the incentives of those with economic and political power in society to block institutional reform.
South Korea is a good example because iti is now a first world county like Japan, and there are two stories of comparative development with counties that were equally poor 60 years ago and have a history of being colonized. North Korea isn’t very distinct genetically, but remains very poor, and, while a complex situation, I suppose a parsimonious way to put an explanation is “stubbornly committed to bad institutions”.
Meanwhile, Nigeria was slightly richer than SK in the early 60’s, but has not fared nearly as well since then, despite inheriting and perpetuating those historically excellent British institutions.
Obviously, there is a lot of causal density. But pining everything on ‘institutions’ and writing off the impact of population group genetics is almost certainly wrong.
For an early read, the pre-publication version is available here: https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2016-02.html
It seems like it took smart people to be taken in by communism.