Claim That Links Economic Success and Genetic Diversity Draws Criticism

Genoeconomists' use of population-genetic data to predict economic success is sparking a war of words, including charges of racism

By Ewen Callaway and Nature magazine

The United States has the right amount of genetic diversity to buoy its economy, claim economists. Image: D. ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

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From Nature magazine

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was referring to purported links between genetics and an individuals intelligence when he made this familiar complaint in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man.

Fast-forward three decades, and leading geneticists and anthropologists are levelling a similar charge at economics researchers who claim that a countrys genetic diversity can predict the success of its economy. To critics, the economists paper seems to suggest that a countrys poverty could be the result of its citizens genetic make-up, and the paper is attracting charges of genetic determinism, and even racism. But the economists say that they have been misunderstood, and are merely using genetics as a proxy for other factors that can drive an economy, such as history and culture. The debate holds cautionary lessons for a nascent field that blends genetics with economics, sometimes called genoeconomics. The work could have real-world pay-offs, such as helping policy-makers to set the right level of immigration to boost the economy, says Enrico Spolaore, an economist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, who has also used global genetic-diversity data in his research.

But the economists at the forefront of this field clearly need to be prepared for harsh scrutiny of their techniques and conclusions. At the centre of the storm is a 107-page paper by Oded Galor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It has been peer-reviewed by economists and biologists, and will soon appear in American Economic Review, one of the most prestigious economics journals.

The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting for myriad factors such as economic-based migration. High genetic diversity in a countrys population is linked with greater innovation, the paper says, because diverse populations have a greater range of cognitive abilities and styles. By contrast, low genetic diversity tends to produce societies with greater interpersonal trust, because there are fewer differences between populations. Countries with intermediate levels of diversity, such as the United States, balance these factors and have the most productive economies as a result, the economists conclude.

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Claim That Links Economic Success and Genetic Diversity Draws Criticism