I'm delighted that my three boys and one girl have grown up or are still growing up in a house full of books in English, Chinese, German, and other languages. Sure enough, my oldest son makes a fine income as a hacker--but wait, I grew up in a house full of books too, and I've NEVER made as much money as he already makes.
A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.
> There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
ISTR in the last few years seeing similar research that controlled for most typical measures of SES that are associated with positive outcomes (parents income, parents educational attainment, etc.) which found that growing up with more books in the home had a positive impact on a number of outcome measures (leveling off once at about 100 books.)
I suspect that there is some degree in which it is serving as a proxy for as-yet-unidentified socio-economic, genetic, and parenting style and parental personality traits, but I also suspect even once all those were identified and taken into account, simply having books handy has some positive effects.
That's not the point of tokenadult though. He's pointing out that if higher incomes and book reading are both caused by some third factor, encouraging more reading might not have the desired effect on income.
Honestly, I spent a lot of my childhood / teen years reading and engaging in other solitary activities and I sometimes feel like my time would have been better served trying to connect with my peers. I still read a lot these days, but I just do it with no expectation to derive future benefit from it. Mind you my reading these days is 70% non-fiction. I put reading in the same category of entertainment as TV and video games (FWIW I don't believe either medium sucks compares to literature, and you get out of it what you put in).
Am I alone on this?
A lot of written fiction constitutes an intelligent person intently thinking about some subject, drawing upon their experienec and communicating their ideas. This kind of thing happens much more rarely on TV and in video games. And it almost never happens in casual communication.
Now, if you buy the increasingly popular notion that ideas and perspectives don't matter, than you're unlikely to derive anything worthwhile out of any medium. I know a lot of people who can't, and for them all the media does look like vacuous entertainment. They read Orwell's 1984 and simply don't get it. They start criticizing its technology or character development and simply don't see the underlying messages.
Totally agree with his from my own experience. Although I think it's a grass is greener thing. Now that I connect with my peers more often, I long for the solace of focusing on books!
They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.
Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years.
In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.
"leisure" was probably the wrong word, in context. The sort of 'leisure' (or pastime) of watching TV can be completely passive. One can 'watch' TV for 2-3 hours and literally not have to think about anything difficult. Reading a book is far more of an 'activity - requiring active thought processing - than TV watching. And for many people, reading a book is anything but pleasure.
My main argument is that reading books is the hard part. Leisure time is an example I gave of a contributing factor. There are other contributing factors, such as cultural ones, which I alluded to.
Beyond that, though, it's not merely the case of an individual having time to read. A parent who does not read to their child is raising a child to be less literate or even illiterate.
I'd very much appreciate it if both of you present some evidence, because I now realize my vague assumptions about this are not really based on anything...
The general phenomenon here is very well known; just searching around for this I found stuff like "UK time use data for the period 1961-2001 do indeed indicate a reversal of the previously negative leisure/status gradient". ( https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2005-... ). But that paper is obviously more concerned with the UK than the US.
Data on this is directly available from the American Time Use Survey, if you want to tabulate it yourself -- while they do collect various data on employment status, they don't publish a summary of time use by employment status.
It's weird to assume that all time spent outside a paying job is leisure time. People who have money can afford to spend a lot less time cooking, taking care of children and elderly parents, etc.
This makes me wonder if ebooks have the same effect --- because these days, owning a few thousand of them or more, although perhaps maybe not completely legally, is nothing more than the price of an Internet connection.
I too wonder about this. Having read from physical books most of my life and switching to ebooks/PDFs (reading from laptop or iPad) was not as fun/convenient as I thought it would be. Although saving resources, the feeling I get when holding a book and writing in it (jogging down thoughts or deriving equations) are irreplaceable by electronic files.
This is not the first comment if this type there.
But reading may have nothing to do with family's wealth. I grew up in really poor family (heck, we still had dirt floor on our kitchen when I was little), but I read a ton.
Why I was able to do it? Public library and school library.
Thus is the right answer, not "inheritability of intelligence". Economic status propagates through generations much more directly than any genetic quality like intelligence (which isn't even a quality commanded to a significant degree by genetics)
> Economic status only lasts on average 3 generations.
Gregory Clark's work "The Som Also Rises", "A Farewell to Alms" and his various articles suggest the heritability of socioeconomic status is around 0.7 and is uniform across all human societies he and his team have studied. The upper class maintain their social status if not their wealth.
The same surnames that were over represented among Qing dynasty mandarins are over represented among upper level PRC officials. One in five Swedish prime ministers have had surnames indicative of noble ancestry when holders of said surnames are ~1% of the population.
The figure most often quoted is 0.5 for inheritability of intelligence (doi:10.1007/BF01067188), and don't forget this means genetic+environmental factors. Inheritability of wealth of course depends on the specfic society, but the figure of 0.7 was quoted by another commenter below.
“Perhaps books matter because they encourage children to read more and reading can have positive effects on school performance. Alternatively, a home filled with books indicates advantageous socio-economic conditions.”
"Alternatively"? I think the word is conclusively or obviously.
If you corrected for economic class, you'd certainly still see the same thing -- a culture of literacy improves lifetime earnings.
At least anecdotally, I grew up rather poor (single mother household, working as greenhouse manager, 4 kids), but we had a strong culture of literacy in my household.
Knowing how to read difficult material, and by extension self-teach, was a big part of my ability to move into tech.
The Guardian article leaves it sounding like the only thing they considered was books, but the abstract mentions some of the controls:
"We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10. We instrument years of education using compulsory school reforms and find that, whereas individuals in rural areas were most affected by the reforms, those with many books enjoyed substantially higher returns to their additional education. We show that books retain explanatory power even when we select relatively homogeneous groups in terms of the economic position of the household."
There is going to be a correlation that those who have many books at home are likely to be more educated than those who do not and that as a rule those who are more educated are going to have higher incomes.
There is also going to be a correlation that those who have more books at home and read them are going to be more curious about the world than those who do not and this curiosity, too will lead to a higher income statistically.
My father is a humanities prof. at a major university who had thousands of books in his home office that we would read as children growing up. We would discuss books and ideas at the dinner table. Thus, in effect we children received a liberal arts education at home.
Today, with a $75 kindle people have access to great libraries for many of the classics are freely accessible. Shakespeare, Twain, George Elliot, Dickens, Shaw, ... all free to download and read.
Moreover, many ebooks still under copyright can be checked out electronically from public libraries and read.
The studies reported of course were observational. It would be interesting to prospectively perform a study placing books in a number of households and seeing how children develop over 20 years.
Your link describes a dumb study. I also doubt that for instance, dumping truck loads of unwanted library books in kids' houses would necessarily impact on their potential for being paid for their services in the future. A thoughtful choice of books provided by their parents would likely have a different outcome.
The study cited by the original post does not consider "a thoughtful choice". It considers the number of books measured by shelf space. Studying the consideration of material by their parents would, IMHO, be a worthwhile, albeit, much more difficult thing to study.
Who knew? Although, it goes without saying that this is a correlation, not causation.
If you stock culturally illiterate parents' house with books, it would--to borrow from a Soviet fable--be akin to giving a Rhesus macaque spectacles. (In the fable, the monkey tries everything possible with the glasses, including putting them on its tail. Everything except the intended application.)
I didn't live in a house with books, but my mother took me and my sisters to the library very often when we were kids. For me personally, I believe that access to books gave me much of my motivation to learn, particularly with regards to astronomy. It was early reading of astronomy books that got me really interested in science. Growing up, I didn't do particularly well in language and literature, mainly because I just wasn't interested. If I hadn't been allowed to develop an innate interest in science through astronomy, I doubt I would have done as well in math and science classes as I did because I expect I would have found them uninteresting too. I credit that early interest in science as a big factor in me now having a well-paying programming career.
Absolutely agree with the socio-economic bit being the main factor. I wonder, however, if a minor factor is the ability to skim, which is strengthened by reading young. My girlfriend is Brazilian who speaks English well and I observe her having much more trouble doing basic research and gathering random knowledge simply because she is much slower skimming in English. Whether it's looking for a restaurant or figuring out how to pay a parking ticket or whatever, while she does manage, it takes her probably 2x the time it does for me. Moreover, I think this is a barrier to acquiring more knowledge. If there is a question about something, my first instinct is to just hop on google and figure it out. Hers often times isn't, I think in part because there's just more energy and frustration involved in doing so than for me.
Dude, that's kind of funny. It's like you even answered your own question already in the question itself. And didn't even notice it.
Judging by my own experience it's not so much the age part but the foreign language part the comes into play. ;)
If the same study was just girls, would you also object?
The truth is that boys are falling behind academically, I think most normal people would agree that in a well designed educational system, gender would not factor in outcome.
It was less an objection than an honest question -- and I'd still have the same question if the study was just girls. One reason for the question is that I'd actually be curious to know if there's a difference in earning power based on gender (or income or other common variables).
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?
And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas?
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :)
If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves.
Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable?
IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder.
The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think.
To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology.
So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
I meant violently, although politically not physically. People are quite aware that science was perverted once to justify racism and sexism and that scientists everywhere did inhuman things to subjects even very recently (at small scales some unscrupulous scientists continue to do pretty evil things that harm subjects but nowhere near the kinds of things that used to happen). Every student that runs human subjects experiments has to take a mandatory course about this now so that we don't go down this route again (at least in the US, I assume Canada/EU have the same rules but I don't have firsthand experience).
People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
Wow. You need to read some behavioral genetics. Let me know if you care to. I'll give you references. They've found g heritable in primates other than humans as well.
The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
I've read quite a bit. I have a PhD in a broadly related field. I tried to explain that you're just confused about what heritability means in this context, what the relative effect sizes are of environmental factors vs parents, that these studies have crazy confounds, and the fact that these things aren't settled and are highly controversial in academic circles but clearly that's not working.
I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean.
There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
Of course intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable, I doubt this was ever an argument against eugenics. (I don't have an opinion to be honest, just thought it was a weird remark)
You ask a legitimate question. My first part of my answer to your question is that my previous comment provided a link. The link is to a thoughtful review article by a careful scientist (Eric Turkheimer). Professor Turkheimer's writings are just about all available for free downloading from his faculty website at the University of Virginia, so you can follow the development of his thought over decades of active involvement in behavior genetics research, often in collaboration with other leading researchers on the same topic.
Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions.
But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should.
Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.
Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful?
Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!
Eugenics is already practiced on a small scale by individual mate selection. It is morally indefensible on a large scale because no existing large scale systems have the decision-making granularity to appropriately make those kinds of decisions, nor are those decisions relevant to what humans generally need their cultures to accomplish.
>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?
Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Nothing!
I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene.
It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available).
Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument.
You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them.
Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children?
> You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty...
And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
Schizophrenia may (or may not) correlate on the phenotype level, but genetically, they are inverses. Genetic risk for schizophrenia lowers IQ in GCTAs, genetic correlation, and family studies. If you select for intelligence, you will get less schizophrenia, and if you select against schizophrenia, you will get more intelligence.
I don't know about Schizophrenia, but I think a world with more high-IQ people with Asperger's wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I mean, I'm not a proponent of the (semi-serious?) thought that "aspies are the next step in human evolution", but since I was diagnosed myself recently, I've found myself imagining what such a world would be like every once in a while...
Anyways, I'm all in favor of some forms of 'eugenics' as our knowledge about the effects increase. We've been helping our own evolution along for quite a while now, so I don't see why tinkering with our genes should somehow be completely off-limits.
You say that like being an Aspie is bad. Of course IQ genes don't as far as we know have bad side effects. It seems Fischerian, and actually uncorrected to ASD.
A lot of people say "Aspie" when they really just mean "socially mal-adjusted turbo nerd." It happens that lots of smart people are generally nice and can read a room. You just don't hear about them because they aren't constantly talking about their IQ.
Sure, but it's not like we can just sit on our hands and wait until we are 100% sure of what we could do; the welfare state is already selecting for us. And in my experience, most people are opposed to getting rid of the welfare state.
This means that the choice is not "eugenic or do nothing", it's "eugenic or dysgenic".
This is a short-term effect, and you have the fitness function backwards.
The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed.
So one type of person is on the way to extinction, and another type is growing without bound. Currently this means the the total population (both groups together) is shrinking, but that will change.
A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.
[1] http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf