Month: July 2018
Genes->Education->Social Mobility
Tens of thousands of studies correlate family socioeconomic status with later child outcomes like income, wealth and attainment and then claim the correlation is causal. Very few such studies control for genetics, although twin adoption studies suggest that genetics is important. Cheap genomic scanning, however, has made it possible to go beyond twin studies. A new paper, for example, looks at differences in education-associated genes between non-identical twins raised in the same family and they find that children with more education-associated genes tend to have greater educational attainment and higher income later in life. In other words, differences in child outcomes both across families and within the same family are in part driven by genetics.
Surprisingly, however, the authors also find evidence for “genetic nurture” the idea that parental genes drive child environment which drives outcomes. That’s surprising because it’s hard to find strong evidence for big environmental effects in adoption studies but here the authors can rely on more precise data. Specifically, the authors look at maternal education-associated genes that are NOT passed on to the children and yet they find that such genes are also correlated with important child outcomes (fyi, they only have maternal genes). So smart parents benefit children twice. First by passing on smart genes and second–even when they do not pass on smart genes–by passing on a smart environment. Previous studies missed the latter effect perhaps because they focused on rich parents rather than smart parents (the former being easier to measure). The authors suggest that by looking at how smart parents help kids without smart genes we may be able to figure out smart environments and generalize them to everyone. That strikes me as optimistic.
Here is the paper abstract:
A summary genetic measure, called a “polygenic score,” derived from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of education can modestly predict a person’s educational and economic success. This prediction could signal a biological mechanism: Education-linked genetics could encode characteristics that help people get ahead in life. Alternatively, prediction could reflect social history: People from well-off families might stay well-off for social reasons, and these families might also look alike genetically. A key test to distinguish biological mechanism from social history is if people with higher education polygenic scores tend to climb the social ladder beyond their parents’ position. Upward mobility would indicate education-linked genetics encodes characteristics that foster success. We tested if education-linked polygenic scores predicted social mobility in >20,000 individuals in five longitudinal studies in the United States, Britain, and New Zealand. Participants with higher polygenic scores achieved more education and career success and accumulated more wealth. However, they also tended to come from better-off families. In the key test, participants with higher polygenic scores tended to be upwardly mobile compared with their parents. Moreover, in sibling-difference analysis, the sibling with the higher polygenic score was more upwardly mobile. Thus, education GWAS discoveries are not mere correlates of privilege; they influence social mobility within a life. Additional analyses revealed that a mother’s polygenic score predicted her child’s attainment over and above the child’s own polygenic score, suggesting parents’ genetics can also affect their children’s attainment through environmental pathways. Education GWAS discoveries affect socioeconomic attainment through influence on individuals’ family-of-origin environments and their social mobility.
You can find the appendix with the key results here. I find the lab style difficult to follow. The authors run regressions, for example, but you won’t find a regression equation followed by a table with all the results. Instead the regression is described in the appendix and then some coefficients, but by no means all, are presented later in the appendix.
How to give admissions officers more discretion
Heaven forbid that grading should occur on a common scale with strong safeguards against cheating. This missive is from Princeton:
On July 5, the University dropped the need for applicants to submit an essay score from the SAT or ACT. Beginning this 2018-2019 application season, applicants will, instead, have to submit a graded high school writing sample, preferably a work either of English or history.
In a statement, the University said that this new policy shift “aims to alleviate the financial hardship placed on students, including those who have the opportunity to take the test without writing during the school day and for free.”
Taking either test with the writing section costs more than taking the test without the writing section. The ACT with the writing section costs $16.50 more than without it, and the SAT similarly costs $17 more with it.
According to the statement, University officials “believe that assessing a student’s in-class work will provide helpful and meaningful insight into a student’s academic potential.”
The net result of this decision is to lower the status of higher education. Here is the full article, via Catherine Rampell.
Epp and Borghetto have solved for the equilibrium…
And most of you won’t like it:
This article investigates the effects of economic inequality on legislative agendas. It considers two competing hypotheses: (1) that policymakers will act to counter rising inequality by renewing their focus on redistributive social policies, and (2) that rising inequality makes legislative agendas especially vulnerable to the influence of economic elites, and that these elites will attempt to keep redistributive social policies off the agenda. Empirical tests, which are designed to arbitrate between these hypotheses, use data on public laws and parliamentary bills introduced in the legislatures of nine European countries between 1941 and 2014. The evidence is supportive of the second hypothesis: as inequality becomes more acute, European legislative agendas become systematically less diverse and this narrowing of attention is driven by a migration away from social safety-net issues toward issues relating to law enforcement, immigration, and national defense.
Here is the paper, via the excellent Matt Grossman.
Not the United States
The father was detained in February; three months later the mother was also taken away by authorities. They had allegedly shared extremist Islamist content on their mobile phones, family friends said. Despite protests from relatives, two of their children, aged 18 and 15, were then detained and their younger two, aged seven and nine, were sent to a state welfare centre. “The grandfather even wept, but the authorities would not let him keep his grandchildren,” recalled an acquaintance.
So what’s up?:
As the Trump administration struggles to reunite migrants and their children forcibly separated at the US border, China has been separating families on a far larger scale as part of a rapidly intensifying security campaign.
That is from Emily Feng at the FT, via Comrade Balding.
Tuesday assorted links
Why are wages not doing better?
What’s going on with falling (!) wages? “From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings *decreased* 0.1%” for production and nonsupervisory employees
That is from Erik.
It’s all about investment, not tariffs and trade wars
I’ve been saying this for a while, here is an excellent piece by Shawn Donnan at the FT:
Since it was first created in 1975 as an inter-agency committee, Cfius has been able to review foreign investments only on narrow national security grounds. But if it adopts the broad Trumpian definition of national security as economic security, this could open a whole new range of transactions to its scrutiny. Might a mid-western auto plant that makes components purely for civilian vehicles suddenly be treated as a national security asset and be banned from foreign ownership?
Presidents have for years resisted efforts in Congress to require Cfius to consider an economic benefits test when it approves large foreign investments, as similar bodies do in countries such as Australia and Canada. Mr Trump, however, seems to be embracing the idea. Legislation to reform Cfius, which the Trump administration will have broad powers to shape in its implementation, is nearing its final journey through Congress.
Maybe they’ll have to revise the Star Wars prequels too…
Lower travel costs boost scientific collaboration
Here is a kind of gravity equation for science:
We develop a simple theoretical framework for thinking about how geographic frictions, and in particular travel costs, shape scientists’ collaboration decisions and the types of projects that are developed locally versus over distance. We then take advantage of a quasi-experiment – the introduction of new routes by a low-cost airline – to test the predictions of the theory. Results show that travel costs constitute an important friction to collaboration: after a low-cost airline enters, the number of collaborations increases by 50%, a result that is robust to multiple falsification tests and causal in nature. The reduction in geographic frictions is particularly beneficial for high quality scientists that are otherwise embedded in worse local environments. Consistent with the theory, lower travel costs also endogenously change the types of projects scientists engage in at different levels of distance. After the shock, we observe an increase in higher quality and novel projects, as well as projects that take advantage of complementary knowledge and skills between sub-fields, and that rely on specialized equipment. We test the generalizability of our findings from chemistry to a broader dataset of scientific publications, and to a different field where specialized equipment is less likely to be relevant, mathematics. Last, we discuss implications for the formation of collaborative R&D teams over distance.
That is from a new paper by Christian Catalini, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Patrick Gaulé.
Monday assorted links
1. Don’t fear the inverted yield curve.
2. “Our results provide the first evidence that legal access to SSM improved health for adult gay men.”
4. Somehow I have ended up looking at Gibeau Orange Julep.
5. Wingsuit terrain flying. That is a video, more here.
Why doesn’t Mexico’s economy grow more quickly?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Instead, it is education that is arguably Mexico’s most fundamental problem. In most emerging economies, if you are ambitious and seek higher wages, you will invest in more education. Mexicans have traditionally had another choice — crossing the border to work in the U.S. Mexicans who make this choice can move from earning a dollar or two a day to 10 or 15 dollars an hour, though with higher living costs. It is hard to beat that boost simply by finishing high school or even college in Mexico.
And:
Admittedly, this [informal, grey or black market] labor can be and often is absorbed into the more formal, more productive sectors of the economy, including exports. But the rate of absorption is quite slow, which in turn helps to set the slow growth rate of the economy. And in any case neither the high-productivity nor the low-productivity firms have that much room to grow within their respective categories, a major difference from many other emerging economies.
The odds are that Mexico will have to opt for the slow but steady long game, as Denmark once did.
Do better scientists smile more?
Theory and research indicates that individuals with more frequent positive emotions are better at attaining goals at work and in everyday life. In the current study we examined whether the expression of genuine positive emotions by scientists was positively correlated with work-related accomplishments, defined by bibliometric (e.g. number of citations) and sociometric (number of followers for scholarly updates) indices. Using a sample of 440 scientists from a social networking site for researchers, multiple raters coded smile intensity (full smile, partial smile, or no smile) in publicly available photographs. We found that scientists who presented a full smile had the same quantity of publications yet of higher quality (e.g. citations per paper) and attracted more followers to their updates compared to less positive emotionally expressive peers; results remained after controlling for age and sex. Thin-slicing approaches to the beneficial effects of positive emotionality offer an ecologically valid approach to complement experimental and longitudinal evidence. Evidence linking positive emotional expressions to scientific impact and social influence provides further support for broaden and build models of positive emotions.
I wonder for which fields this might not be true…?
The paper has many authors, including my colleague Todd B. Kashdan. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Corruption and sensitive soccer games
We utilize data from sensitive soccer games in 75 countries between the years 2001 and 2013. In these games one team was in immediate danger of relegation to a lower division (Team A) and another team was not affected by the result (Team B). Using within-country variation, our difference-in-difference analysis reveals that the more corrupt the country, according to Corruption Perceptions Index, the higher is the probability that Team A would achieve the desired result in the sensitive games relative to achieving this result in other, non-sensitive games against the same team. We also find that in the later stages of the following year, the probability that Team A would lose against Team B compared to losing against a similar team (usually better than Team B) is significantly higher in more corrupt countries than in less corrupt countries. This result serves as evidence of quid pro quo behavior.
That is a recently published paper by Guy Elaad, Alex Krumer, and Jeffrey Kantor. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
CIVIL and the future of media?
David Siegel emails me:
CIVIL is a new start-up from Consensys, whose goal is to change journalism.
The Civil marketplace is built on a protocol that in turn is built on the Ethereum blockchain.
This ecosystem is built around a token-curated registry, using what we call a “skin-in-the-game coin,” the CVL. This is an application of mechanism design to blockchain-based tokens that can be acquired, exchanged, and go up in value, creating a new micro-economy for – in this case – truthy journalism. The basic unit of Civil is a newsroom. A newsroom is a person or group who can publish anything they like. They can charge readers using CVL tokens or credit cards or anything else. What makes Civil interesting is that anyone can challenge a story’s veracity.
To challenge a story, you send some CVL coins to a smart contract. The community then votes on the veracity of the story, or even the newsroom itself. Anyone who votes must stake coins. If the story is voted true, those who voted true take the pot – they win all the staked tokens. If the community finds it’s false, then those who voted for false share the purse. This skin-in-the-game mechanism is the next evolution of communities like Steem and is game-theoretically far more advanced than Reddit or Quora. It promises to eliminate fake ratings, reviews, and content farms pumping out propaganda. By creating token-based games that reward virtuous behavior – the first one of which was Bitcoin – today’s blockchain entrepreneurs promise to bring us a new era of less biased news, better blogging, more accurate ratings, and potentially better science.
Sunday assorted links
1. Apply for the next Coase Institute workshop.
2. Why IVF proved to be so important. A good piece.
3. Guardian best summer books lists. Frankly, very little in these lists seemed to appeal to me, so I offer this to you all as an alternative perspective on what to read.
Trump’s gender gap also concerns intensity of preference
Among self-identified Republicans, Trump’s approval is 91 percent among men and 82 percent among women. But the gap in intensity of support is what is particularly telling. While 68 percent of male Republicans say they strongly approve of the way Trump is handling his job, just 31 percent of female Republicans say the same — a whopping 37-point difference.
There is a double-digit difference between all men and women in their evaluation of Trump’s handling of immigration, and likewise among Republican men and women. On trade, Republican men and women are in general agreement in giving positive marks, but they are widely separated in whether they feel strongly about that support.
On his handling of the economy, the gap is even larger. Across the entire population, more than 6 in 10 men give him positive marks for the economy, but fewer than 4 in 10 women say the same. Among Republicans, there is a 27-point difference between men and women in the level of strong approval expressed for the way the president is dealing with the economy.
Here is the full story by Dan Balz.