Category Archives: books and book reviews

Human migration and evolution

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One point that Charles Murray makes effectively in Human Diversity is that human migration necessarily creates different genetic patterns.

If we start with a tribe of 200 people, and 100 of them break off and move to a new location, those 100 cannot possibly take with them a representative sample of the gene pool of the whole tribe. There are many possible genetic combinations, but by arithmetic the new tribe can only take 100 combinations with them.

Here are some thoughts I have about that;

1. An assumption that Murray makes, which I believe is accurate, is that there is not much re-mixing. The old tribe and the new tribe cross-breed very little, if at all. In prehistoric days, the physical separation made cross-breeding unlikely. Also mutual tribal suspicion.

2. My guess is that some human colonies survived, and some didn’t. The ones that survived preserved their genetic tendencies and cultural traits.

3. Surviving colonies tend to stay put. If the colony really thrives and its population increases, then it will send out more migrant colonies.

4. My guess is that when long-distance communication and transportation was primitive, failing colonies tended to just fail. As technology improved, failing colonies would be more inclined to migrate, because they have better knowledge of where life might be better.

5. Of all of the colonies that humans ever created, only a relatively few were successful. When your genome is used to speculate about your ancestry, it is linking you back to one or more of the successful colonies.

6. If only a small proportion of colonies were successful, then of all of the viable combinations of genes, only a few will be present. Evolution will not have selected with extreme rigor. Yes, some of the colonies failed because of weak genes. But others failed because of bad luck or bad culture. And not very many combinations of genes were tried.

7. I think that this picture reinforces my skepticism about polygenic scores ever being able to explain much of the observed variation in heritable traits. We will observe some combinations of genes with great frequency, making additional sampling from those populations redundant from a statistical perspective. My intuition continues to be that we are now or soon will be at the point of greatly diminishing returns to increased sample size.

8. It is not just prehistoric migration that follows the colony model. Consider David Hackett-Fisher’s Albion’s Seed. Consider the Bosnian community in St. Louis, the Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, etc.

9. The more that a migrating colony marries endogamously and brings strong cultural beliefs when it migrates to a larger society, the longer it can persist without without dissolving into that society. Consider Orthodox Jews.

10. What will emerge from the migration process is populations with differences in both genetic makeup and cultural practices. Most of these differences are random, as opposed to selective. This will make it difficult to pin down the extent to which differences in outcomes across populations have genetic causes.

Dalton Conley on polygenic scores

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At the AEI, Dalton Conley commented on Charles Murray’s new book. At minute 30, Conley starts to discuss polygenic scores. At around minute 35, he points out that the polygenic score for height, which seems to do much better than polygenic scores for other traits, still does a terrible job. The score, which has been based primarily on data from Europeans, under-predicts heights of Africans by 6 inches.

As you know, I am a skeptic on polygenic scores. The exercise reminds me too much of macroeconomic modeling. Economic history did not design the types of experiments that we need in order to gauge the effect of fiscal and monetary policy. What we want are lots of time periods in which every little changed other than fiscal and monetary policy. But we don’t have that. And as you increase the sample size by, say, going back in time and adding older decades to your data set, you add all sorts of new potential causal variables. Go back 70 years and fluctuations are centered in steel and automobiles. Go back 150 years and they are centered in the farm sector.

Similarly, evolution did not design the types of experiment that we need in order to gauge the effect of genes on traits. That is, it didn’t take random samples of people from different geographic locations and different cultures and assign them the same genetic variation,, so that a statistician could neatly separate the effect of genes from that of location or culture.

If I understand Conley correctly, he suggests looking at genetic variation within families. I am not sure what advantage that has that is not outweighed by the disadvantage that you reduce the likely range of genetic combinations that you can observe.

My critique of Case and Deaton

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Mercatus titled it Death and Politics.

Their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, includes both an actuarial analysis of disturbing patterns of mortality in the United States and a political statement calling for government action to overhaul pharmaceutical regulation, take control of the health care system, and shift the balance of power in the economy away from capital and toward labor. It seems evident to the authors that their political statement follows from their actuarial analysis, but the connection between the two struck this reader as tenuous.

If there were a Nobel Prize for scapegoating. . .

Yuval Levin watch

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1. My review of A Time to Build.

Levin sees today’s elites as unwilling to abide by institutional constraints. Some abuse their power within an institution. Levin terms this “insiderism”. Others only use institutional prestige to enhance their personal ambitions but eschew any obligations to bolster the institutions that support them or to conform to institutional norms. Levin calls this “outsiderism” or “platforming,” meaning using the institution as a platform from which to expand one’s personal recognition.

2. A very comprehensive interview of Yuval Levin by Richard Reinsch . Hard to excerpt, but here is a slice:

meritocracy contributes to that problem because it leaves our elites now thinking that their positions are earned, that their authority is legitimate by default because they’ve been selected into elite institutions of higher education in particular. . . an elite that doesn’t think it needs to be constrained is a very bad fit for a democratic society.

It invites the kind of resistance, frustration, and ultimately populism that we’ve seen, and I think it deserves that response. Our elites in fact don’t think enough about how to constrain themselves in ways that could make it clear to the larger society that they’re playing a legitimate and valuable role. And I think institutions have an enormous role to play in that because our elite institutions can constrain our elites in ways that put them to use for the larger society. That’s what the professions do. That’s what political and cultural institutions do when they’re functioning well.

But if we understand our institutions as performative, as just platforms for people to stand and shine on, then they don’t really function to constrain our elites. They just display our elites and increase the frustration of the larger society with them. I think part of the solution to this part of the problem our country confronts is an idea of institutionalism that requires much more constraint and formation, that requires people to understand themselves as needing to prove that they operate by some standard of integrity and public service and that would require a real cultural change in a lot of our elite institutions.

As I read political theory

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For some reason, a lot of the books that I’ve delved into recently have dealt with political theory. These include:

–10% Less Democracy, by Garett Jones

–American Secession, by F.H. Buckley

–Power Without Knowledge, by Jeffrey Friedman

I am unhappy with the writing style that I am finding. Although I learned enough from Jones that I recommend his book highly, for my taste his style is too folksy. Buckley also strikes me that way, although less so.

I suppose if you were talking political theory to someone with an average college freshman level of background and interest (and I have low expectations for both), then informal language and cultural allusions might help. But the average college freshman is not going to pick up a book on political theory.

On the other hand, Friedman’s prose is laden with academic jargon. If you are a graduate student trying to signal to your professors that you have been listening to their lectures, then that may be a good strategy. In fact, the technical terms may appeal to the typical reader of a book in political theory. But not me.

As to substance, the authors avoid the mistake of acting as though the problem for political theorists is to get the political system to reflect the will of the people. But so far I do not come away from these books, either individually or collectively, with a clear sense of the problem that political theory is supposed to solve. What are the goals that we want to achieve, and what are the constraints under which we operate? If and when I write on political theory, I will want to try to be as clear as possible on those questions.

Tyler Cowen on Charles Murray

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Cowen writes,

“8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.”

Here I have what I think is a major disagreement with Murray. If he means the term “shared environment” in the narrow sense used by say twin studies, he is probably correct. But in the more literal, Webster-derived conception of “shared environment” I very much disagree. Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify.

Now that I have taken a first pass through the book, I believe that this criticism is unfair and should be retracted. Murray uses the term “milieu” to cover what Tyler means by “culture,” and Murray says everything about “milieu” that Tyler would want him to say about culture.

What Murray means by “shared environment” is just about anything that can vary within a (cultural) milieu. Parenting, schooling, government taxes and transfers, etc. All of it runs up against a broader version of the Null Hypothesis. But Murray says very clearly and emphatically that the milieu matters a great deal.

I wish that Murray had written Human Diversity under a pseudonym. Perhaps “Thomas Piketty” or “John Rawls.” It deserves the sort of study and discussion that was afforded Capital in the 21st Century or A Theory of Justice.

Polygenic scores

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Charles Murray is bullish on them.

I think the application of genomic data to social science questions is roughly where aviation was in 1908. The world’s best plane, the Wright Flyer, was little more than a toy. Yet within a decade, thousands of acrobatically maneuverable aircraft were flying high and fast over the battlefields of Europe.

I will read his latest book, but I have already staked out a more skeptical position.

Plomin is optimistic that with larger sample sizes better polygenic scores will be found, but I am skeptical. Unless there are unexplored areas in the existing data sets, such as non-linearities or interaction effects, my guess is that there are diminishing returns to enlarging the sample size.

That refers to Robert Plomin and his book Blueprint, not to be confused with another recent book of the same title by a different author.

Road to sociology watch

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Dani Rodrik writes,

The new face of the discipline was on display when the AEA convened for its annual meetings in San Diego in early January. There were plenty of panels of the usual type on topics such as monetary policy, regulation, and economic growth. But there was an unmistakably different flavor to the proceedings this year. The sessions that put their mark on the proceedings and attracted the greatest attention were those that pushed the profession in new directions. There were more than a dozen sessions focusing on gender and diversity, including the headline Richard T. Ely lecture delivered by the University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand.

Woody Allen once worried about what you would get if you combine the head of a crab with the body of a social worker. I worry about what you get if you combine the scientific hubris of an economist with the ideology of a sociologist. Maybe this:

The AEA meetings took place against the backdrop of the publication of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s remarkable and poignant book Deaths of Despair, which was presented during a special panel. Case and Deaton’s research shows how a particular set of economic ideas privileging the “free market,” along with an obsession with material indicators such as aggregate productivity and GDP, have fueled an epidemic of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism among America’s working class. Capitalism is no longer delivering, and economics is, at the very least, complicit.

Actually, the book has a publication date of March 17, but I guess it is now fair game to discuss the review copy I received. I think that their analysis is flawed in important respects. I’ll link to my review when it appears.

Trust problems

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In a conversation with Tyler, Reid Hoffman said,

I almost never meet with an entrepreneur that doesn’t come from an introduction from someone I trust. . .

the way that I do investing is entirely through my network

He also says,

most jobs are described as “must have a BA or a BS,” a bachelor’s degree, whereas a lot of jobs don’t actually need that. But it’s like, “Okay, what’s the simplest credential that everyone’s aware of that I could throw on the table that says you have some capability of learning, and you’ve been trained in some learning institution?”

And one of the things that I actually wrote is an essay that’s, I think, on both LinkedIn and reidhoffman.org, is thinking about creating a diploma that’s not this old sheepskin, but actually is a modern set of attributes and set of characteristics. And we could start looking at these certificates as something that has a much richer language that can apply to different things.

Can entrepreneurs, especially using artificial intelligence, create a more efficient solution to trust problems than Reid Hoffman’s reliance on his personal network, or hiring organizations’ reliance on college diplomas? There is a lot of money to be made if you can solve trust problems more efficiently. That is the way that financial technology firms make their money.

Or how about the trust problems involved in evaluating contentious books? Consider Nancy MacLean’s attack on James Buchanan, or Diana West’s books on Communist influence in the U.S. government.* Could an AI program walk through the webs of sources of such books and give a measure of the reliability of the narrative, which presumably would be less costly than having humans try to settle the issue?

*West argues, for example, that Lend-Lease was passed under Soviet influence. Even though she knows that it was passed in March of 1941, before Hitler surprised Stalin by invading Russia. In March, the Soviets were adhering to the Non-Aggression pact with Germany, and only Great Britain was eligible for Lend-Lease.