Are Human Genetics An Unfair Lottery? - Paige Harden | Modern Wisdom Podcast 387

1. 0:00 – 2:47

   Intro

   1. PHPaige Harden0:00

      Homelessness is a problem that's in many ways just like puberty, right, which is that, like, you know

   2. CWChris Williamson0:04

      Homelessness is just like puberty. You heard it here first.

   3. PHPaige Harden0:07

      ... you know, feeling so ... In the sense that there's genetic effects on people's biology, and then there's how our social and legal environment responds to that. In the US, a serious mental illness is the one of the biggest risk factors for being homeless.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:26

      It seems like you've had a spicy few years of controversy.

   5. PHPaige Harden0:30

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson0:30

      Do you think that's fair to say?

   7. PHPaige Harden0:33

      Um, I don't think I've ever heard the word spicy before to describe it, but I do think that it's fair to say that there's been a couple years of controversy, yes.

   8. CWChris Williamson0:44

      I'm pretty fascinated by your positioning because doing behavioral genetics, which for good or for ill has kind of been adopted by some people on the right, um, but your political leanings are toward the left. So, you occupy this sort of very difficult space in between.

   9. PHPaige Harden1:01

      (sniffs)

   10. CWChris Williamson1:01

       Why, why do you think it is that you consistently find yourself in the eye of the storm of these debates?

   11. PHPaige Harden1:08

       Y- Uh, that is a very good question that I have asked myself, um, on a number of occasions recently. You know, I, I think there are people that walk into things sort of deliberately courting controversy, sort of seeing, "Okay, what can I say that's gonna be provocative?" And that genuinely has not been kind of my approach or experience. It really has kind of felt bew- this kind of bewildering, dislocating experience in which I say things that seem just true to me, and then it is only by saying them out loud that I realize that they are controversial. And, and in fact almost never controversial when each statement is taken on its own. It's something about the combination of them, like, the package of them that seems to provoke strong feelings. Um, but, you know, like, I'm a professor. I'm an academic. I feel like y- I have this great privilege of getting to think about things that I think are important and thinking out loud about them with my students and in my research papers and then more recently with kind of more public-facing work. And my goal in all of this has just been to really articulate, like, what do I think is true. Like, what do I think is true from a scientific perspective, and what do I think is true in terms of, um, expressing my own personal, like, political and moral convictions? And it just turns out that if you repeatedly say true things, um, in this space, that seems to rile up, um, pretty strong feelings, I, I think on both sides of the political spectrum, which is interesting.

2. 2:47 – 9:15

   Why is Behavioural Genetics so Uncomfortable?

   1. PHPaige Harden2:47

   2. CWChris Williamson2:47

      Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with behavioral genetics generally?

   3. PHPaige Harden2:53

      Oh. You know, there's this really great paper by a legal scholar, Dov Fox, where he talks about genetics and to a lesser extent neuroscience as subversive science. And I love that phrase, subversive science. And he's, what he's arguing is that it can subvert really basic intuitions that we have about, um, agency or equality. I don't actually think it has to be subversive in quite those ways. I think sometimes the perceived subversiveness of behavioral genetics rests on misunderstandings of it. Like, if properly understood, many of the fears of the ways that genetics will subvert our values of equality or agency or identity, um, you know, turn out to not be true. But we live in a secular age in which people often don't believe in souls anymore, and so they've substituted genes as kind of their essence placeholders is the way that some people talk about it. And so when you start talking about genetics, I think ultimately you're talking about people's selves. They're, you are ta- you're talking about things about themselves that they, they value or cherish or fear, um, or things they see in their children. So, uh, you know, to some extent, I don't think that you can talk about genetics and humans without there being some emotion attached to it, and that's probably a good thing, that we want to preserve our sense of something, um, something sacred about our humanness even in a secular age.

   4. CWChris Williamson4:27

      Yeah. Sacred is the word that I had on the tip of my tongue there as well. You think about the successes that you have, the failures that you have, the things you value in yourself, the idiosyncrasies, your inclination toward playing this sport or not, toward having a family or not. All of these things, we like to consider ourselves as having some sort of agency. And yeah, the conception that you can be anything that you want to be, that living in a meritocracy where you get to choose your own route, that your failures and your successes are yours to bear, there's a lot of, uh, waves clashing. It's like the Bermuda Triangle of awkward tidal forces all crashing up against each other.

   5. PHPaige Harden5:08

      (laughs) Yeah. No, I think that's true. There is something that we ... Um, I think many modern people resist the idea of constraint, the idea that there is constraint, that, you know, that, that we are not just these kind of, like, disembodied minds that have free and infinite potential to choose any future for ourselves, but in fact even many of our choices are constrained by, like, our embodied biology. I think people find that idea really, um, alienating. And then I also think, you know, people ... It's not just genetics. Um, you know, there's this quote in my book from the novelist and essayist E. B- E. B. White, like, most people know him from the children's book Charlotte's Web but he also wrote, um, for The New Yorker for many years and has this book of essays. And there's a quote from it which is, "You can't speak of luck to a self-made man."... and he's, what he's getting at there is that when you've had some success, there is a lot of our psychology that kind of kicks in to justify it as like, "I earned this," like, "Look how hard I worked for this." And people can feel enraged, actually, when you say, "Well, you worked for it, but also that work was scaffolded by all of this luck. And some of that luck is environmental, and some of that luck is sort of your embodied biology." I think people can often feel like you're trying to take their success away from them or take away a source of pride away from them, which is not what I'm trying to do. Um, I think I'm more trying to engender a sense of, of gratitude that you've been given things that, you know, you, you didn't earn, you didn't necessarily deserve. A- and also a sense of compassion for people who haven't had the same luck, um, in certain ways.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:59

      What are you trying to do with this book, then?

   7. PHPaige Harden7:01

      (laughs) That's such a good question. You know, I ask myself all the time, like, "How did I get myself into this?" Um...

   8. CWChris Williamson7:08

      I foresaw-

   9. PHPaige Harden7:08

      But I think I'm trying to do a couple... (laughs) I'm trying to do a couple different things. So, I think I'm trying to, one, just explain what genetics is up to these days, right? Like, a lot of times you hear this phrase, "We're in the middle of a DNA revolution," and I think we are from the perspective of science's ability to measure people's DNA directly, cheaply, non-invasively at scale. That would have seemed like science fiction two decades ago. Um, so, I think that is gonna affect people's lives, and there are so many myths and misunderstandings about what genetics can say and what it can't say about psychological differences between people. So, part of what I'm trying to this, do this book is just to explain, as a researcher and a professor in this field, like, to the best of my ability, explain it in a way that's clear so that people can understand and clear up some of the myths. And then also, you know, I, I have realized since I've been doing this work for such a long period of time, that many people find it profoundly unintuitive to think that genetics matters and also to consider yourself a political liberal, as someone who's really invested in the idea of social equality as a, as a political project. Um, and so whereas those two things feel quite consonant in my mind, like they feel like they fit together quite nicely (laughs) , um, and I've never... You know, in an academic paper, like, you know, it's 4,000 words. You maybe have like 1,000 words for the discussion. You can maybe squeeze in like two sentences somewhere to explain an idea. Whereas a book gives you space to expound on something that, um, I think is important, that I think is counterintuitive for many people, um, that I think or that I hope changes the conversation, like, stretches the conversation so that there's kind of new space and it's not running in quite the same tracks that it's been running in, um, for such

3. 9:15 – 15:22

   Defining Social Equality

   1. PHPaige Harden9:15

      a long time.

   2. CWChris Williamson9:16

      What do you mean by social equality? 'Cause that term-

   3. PHPaige Harden9:18

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson9:19

      ... is very fraught.

   5. PHPaige Harden9:21

      Yes, yes. Um, it's always equality of what? So, I actually mean it quite, um, quite simply, which is, what are the ways in which people's lives turn out differently in a society? So, if we look at the end of people's lives, we can think there's differences in physical health, um, how long do you live, how physically healthy are you, your risk for disease. We can look at differences in psychological well-being, um, serious mental illness, but also depression and anxiety and well-being, and do you think your life is worth living? Um, and then, uh, more economic outcomes, so we can think about income, or wealth, or labor market participation, levels of education. What's interesting about those three domains of inequality of outcome now compared to previous times in human history is that in the US and in the UK, they're really bound up with one another and, and, and really bound up in particular with education. So, if we look back several hundred years ago at the life spans of nobility versus commoners, you didn't actually see that people who were at the top of the pecking order lived that much longer than commoners. Like, the plague came for them all, right? Like, there were communicable diseases were the primary cause of death, and you know, that you didn't have these huge disparities in physical health. Whereas now what you see is that, you know, the most educated people, they don't just make more money, they live longer, they live healthier lives, and they enjoy their lives more. And I think when you start thinking about that cluster of inequality in which a very educated slice of the population is getting more of everything, those are the types of social inequalities that I'm really interested in.

   6. CWChris Williamson11:23

      What's the sort of outcome that you would want from this? Because we can't flatten society for-

   7. PHPaige Harden11:30

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson11:30

      ... everything. You can't just have this-

   9. PHPaige Harden11:32

      (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson11:32

       ... homogenous gray sort of-

   11. PHPaige Harden11:34

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson11:34

       ... taupe color painted across everything. It can't be vanilla all the way down.

   13. PHPaige Harden11:38

       Yeah. No, and I don't want it to be. I mean, I think-

   14. CWChris Williamson11:41

       But there must be some constraints. At, at, at what point do you-

   15. PHPaige Harden11:44

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson11:44

       ... uh, where does the boundary lie for what you consider should be something which is within this sort of mandate?

   17. PHPaige Harden11:50

       Yeah. Yeah. So, I think when we're thinking about, um, like this question of like, what should be equalized, right? Like, oftentimes people immediately go to resources, right? Like, should we equalize income or should we equalize...... opportunities to go to college. And I think, you know, the scale of inequality and income, particularly in the US, like, we could argue is inefficient and a problem. What I'm more interested in is equality of, like, one kind of basic things that we owe to fellow humans as kind of, as a kinda necessary part of reflecting their human dignity. So, a huge thing in the US is healthcare, right? That, like, millions of people don't have access to the healthcare. They can't go to the doctor when they're sick. Um, I think nothing explains America and American poverty quite so much as seeing, you know, fill your own dental cavity kits in Walmart, right? Like, those are the sorts of things where it doesn't really matter to me, like, whether or not you've not gone far in school because you didn't have the ability versus you just didn't care about, like, you just, you know, like, you're just bored by it and you'd rather do something else, like, you'd rather be a mechanic than a chemist. Like, go forth in life. There are things that you still are, you think are owed as part of being, just being a human in our society, um, that right now we really do, particularly in America, structure according to education in a way that I think is unnecessary. And we don't have to look that far to other, uh, you know, high-income countries that say, um, you know, "We want people to go far in school. We think it's instrumentally useful to, you know, have people who do certain things get paid more. We're not gonna send you home to die if you have cancer 'cause you don't have health insurance." Right? Like, I think there, there's really basic things like that. I also think there's, you know, this increasing, um, like, disrespect and sort of degradation of prestige for the types of labor that aren't the sort of things that, like, I do, right? Like, I'm really good at rotating abstract information in my head and, like, working at a computer. That's not manual skill, that's not emotional labor, like, in service of retail or waitressing, which was, you know, waitressing was the hardest job I ever had in my life. Um, so we have these narratives right now around, like, essential workers, um, who don't have control over their schedule, who don't have access to health insurance, who don't have, like, the kind of financial stability that allows them to think, "I could have a family," like, "I could own a home." Um, and that's not because their labor isn't valuable to society. It's because we've devalued that labor. So, those, like, those kind of things about, like, healthcare, freedom from financial anxiety, like, having enough material security so that you feel like you can get married and start a family, like, not being constantly evicted from your home, we can think about equalizing those, and it's not some Soviet dystopia, right? Like, that's not, like, a gray, like, that's, like, Finland, right? (laughs) Like, I'm describing things that do exist in the world, um, but that are forms of inequality, like, really persistent inequality that, um, that we justify often, particularly in America, according to these guidelines of, like, meritocracy in education.

4. 15:22 – 22:13

   How Genes Affect Education

   1. PHPaige Harden15:22

   2. CWChris Williamson15:22

      Explain to me the link between that and genetics and DNA.

   3. PHPaige Harden15:26

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:26

      Because, to me, that just sounds like policies that the government needs to sort.

   5. PHPaige Harden15:30

      (laughs) Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson15:30

      Like, we've got, we've got the NHS in the UK, so we fixed the healthcare problem. You put-

   7. PHPaige Harden15:34

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson15:34

      ... UBI in, therefore you fix the, uh, the income problem.

   9. PHPaige Harden15:38

      Not-

   10. CWChris Williamson15:38

       The prestige thing is a-

   11. PHPaige Harden15:40

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson15:41

       ... cultural, um, artifact of the way that people view particular different jobs. So, you'd have to have some sort of-

   13. PHPaige Harden15:46

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson15:46

       ... retraining. So, these, to me, I don't see the link between that, uh, and the genetics side.

   15. PHPaige Harden15:50

       Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, like, that's such a, like, that's such a good observation because I, I feel like what you're picking up on is, like, part of why I get surprised when people think that I'm a very controversial thinker. Because, like, my bottom line on the, uh, for many things is, you know, there should be a floor, there should be a social safety net beyond which people can't fall, um, which isn't hugely controversial in large segments of the population. I think where genetics comes in is in two ways. So, the first is, you know, even if you're s- even if we say regardless of how people do in school, they should have a certain access to a quality of, certain quality of life, um, we're still also interested in improving the, how people do in school. We're still interested in proving how children learn. And a big part of the book is invested in describing how ignoring genetics makes that project harder. Like, if we do research that's predicated on the assumption that children are all genetically the same when they're not, like, the research base on which we're building our policies and interventions to try to help children succeed in education have predictable problems, which is that they don't work. Like, most of the

   16. CWChris Williamson17:09

       Wh- what are the genetic differences in outcomes based on genetic markers?

   17. PHPaige Harden17:15

       Yeah. So, I mean, just to back up a second, like, if we look at, um, you know, there's kind of two ways to, to study this. And so, one is just looking at twins or adoptive, adopt- adoptees, so looking at family members who differ in their genetic and social relationships in some way. And those, uh, those types of studies have long suggested that, you know, h- things like intelligence test score performance, but also personality traits like conscientiousness and planfulness, um, educationally relevant disorders like ADHD or conduct problems, are all heritable, which means that, like, part of the reason why children are different on these things is because they have different genes. And then more recently, there have been studies that identify specific genetic variants, so specific DNA differences between people that are correlated with these different outcomes. And it's r- you know, the, that science has progressed so rapidly...... that it's really f- forced social scientists to pay attention to it because now these genetic markers are as strongly correlated with, say, the likelihood of going to university as, uh, variables like family income are. So-

   18. CWChris Williamson18:30

       What's the, what's the sort of correlation that you find between either parents and children or genetic markers and outcomes in IQ or academics?

   19. PHPaige Harden18:38

       Yeah. Yeah. So when we're talking ... So I guess, like there's a number of different numbers you can throw around. Like, I would say, like the, maybe a touchstone is to think about, like what is the correlation between a polygenic score, which is, you know, kind of a summary of someone's DNA information. It's capturing environmental processes, but it's calculated just from your, their DNA, and rates of college completion in the US. And that correlation is like between .25 and .3, um, which isn't huge, but is about the same size as you get between like family SES and going to college. You can make that number smaller by being like, well, what is the correlation when you're looking at within siblings? You can make that correlation bigger when you're like, well, that's not capturing all of the genetics. What if you're looking at everything, not just what's measured in a polygenic score? Um, you know, the, that's like an active area of scientific debate. Like, I think what's important is whatever the number is, it's not zero, right? There are meaningful, genetically associated differences between children and the outcomes that we care about, really at every m- every stage of the educational process. So like Robert Plomin in the UK, who I know you've had on, has looked with this with regards to, um, like exam scores at age 16. I've looked at it in relation to like which math class do you get tracked into in the ninth grade? Um, we can predict whether or not people stay in math even knowing their grades in their previous year from their DNA, right? So like among students who are all in the same school and they all got Bs, like the DNA predicts which ones stay in math versus drop out of math. So as soon as we're talking about those types of correlations in the .2 to .3 range, they're not large, but none of our correlations for things that we measure in kids, like school-going, are large. Um, and we can start to g- like use them in our studies. Um, so that, that was ... Oh, I cut ... I feel like we've, we followed a little tangent, and I don't remember the original question, but basically we now can, we now can measure DNA and assess its association with outcomes we really care about, still with a great deal of uncertainty, but with enough certainty that we can see that it is making a difference, right? And at the same time, most of the kind of work in child development is not paying attention to that, right? So th- it's continuing to study parenting or school environments or neighborhood environments in relation to child outcomes, and there's this huge flaw at the heart of so much of that research, which is that children get more than their environments from their parents, and that flaw is really holding us back from designing better interventions, designing better policies to help children succeed in school. Um, so to put that together, my argument is kind of two-pronged, which is that I think we need genetics in order to do the sort of science to help children succeed, and at the same time, knowing that genetics makes a difference is not some huge barrier to the political project of improving people's lives. There are ... It ... You know, as you said, like you have the NHS. Like, you don't need genetics for that. And both of those things can be true at the same time.

5. 22:13 – 33:37

   Proposals for Progress

   1. PHPaige Harden22:13

   2. CWChris Williamson22:13

      I had a conversation after the Robert Plomin episode went up, and I, I got to, uh, how would you say, I got to circle the outside of the whirlwind briefly, uh, while that one went up-

   3. PHPaige Harden22:23

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson22:24

      ... uh, the one that you sit in the middle of sometimes, and, uh, a buddy replied, who's very familiar with the behavioral genetics research, and he said, "Thousands and thousands of parenting books out there, zero that include behavioral genetics research. One book on behavioral genetics beats five books on normal-

   5. PHPaige Harden22:41

      Right.

   6. CWChris Williamson22:41

      ... developmental parenting." And-

   7. PHPaige Harden22:43

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson22:44

      ... that sort of really hit it home for me. I was like, that ... It, it makes a lot of sense. What I'm interested to try and find out is what, what are you proposing? Okay, we can make some sort of predictions based on genetic markers-

   9. PHPaige Harden22:57

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson22:57

       ... about a child's, uh, predisposition in school. They're going to be good at maths or shit at English, or maybe they're just going to be higher IQ, lower IQ, maybe they're autistic, maybe whatever, whatever. Like, what do you propose that people do from there?

   11. PHPaige Harden23:12

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson23:12

       Schools, policymakers.

   13. PHPaige Harden23:15

       Yeah. Yeah. So I propose, I would say, three general things. I think the first is my fellow researchers, who are writing the stuff that goes into the parenting books, high-income parents do this and that makes their kids better, they should be routinely integrating something about genetics into their research so long as they're trying to figure out what aspects of parenting or school environments or neighborhood environments, like actually make a difference for children's lives. It's not that nothing makes a difference. It's that w- kind of reverse engineering what are the actual ingredients of change in effective schools and effective parents in o- you know, in neighborhoods that foster achievement, that are opportunity zones. That's a really hard scientific problem, and we can be making better progress at solving that if in the same way that researchers like routinely control for socioeconomic status when they're trying to say reading to kids matters, like let's make genetics part of like the w- the everyday work in a, work-a-day arsenal of social scientists.... I think for policymakers, um, and interventionists that are doing policy evaluation or randomized control trials of educational interventions, anyone that's, like, doing an experiment, tinkering with something and seeing if it works, I also think that they should be, when they can, including genetic information so that they can get beyond just seeing does an intervention work on average for the average child, and instead get at are the interventions I'm trying serving the most vulnerable, serving the kids who are most at risk for poor outcomes. So, moving beyond just a focus on the average kid that doesn't exist to heterogeneity of intervention effects, heterogeneity of policy evaluation. And then I think the third thing is like, you know, again, I- I won't speak to the UK context 'cause I don't live there, I don't live in that political climate. Like, I live in Texas. I live in a state in which people are often very opposed to any idea of redistribution and very pro-meritocracy, and buttress those political beliefs with a really earnest commitment to the idea that any success they have, they earned it. And I would like people to consider the role of luck, and in particular, genetic luck, in their successes and think about if- if this is in part because you got lucky rather than because you're good, what does that mean about your commitments to other people? I- I just want people to consider that question and take it seriously.

   14. CWChris Williamson26:03

       How would you differentiate between luck and effort?

   15. PHPaige Harden26:09

       Effort. I mean, it's kind of an impossible thing because I think, you know, what you see is that our genes shape our personality and then our personality shapes, um, what we, how much effort we put into things, right?

   16. CWChris Williamson26:23

       Well, this was, uh, this was a question-

   17. PHPaige Harden26:25

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson26:25

       ... that I was going to say. So let's say that you had two students in the same school with similar genetic predispositions for maths and English and stuff, and one works harder than the other, is that a problem? Well, if conscientiousness has a genetic marker in it, then you go, okay, do we need to somehow control for the child's predisposition at working hard? Like-

   19. PHPaige Harden26:45

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson26:45

       ... you know, question's out of the window with regards to free will for a philosophical debate.

   21. PHPaige Harden26:50

       Yeah. (laughs) Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson26:50

       Like, what's left on the table for us to actually-

   23. PHPaige Harden26:53

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson26:53

       ... bear as our own?

   25. PHPaige Harden26:54

       No, I mean, you're- you're exactly right. Like, there, there's a great essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, and it's about this question of moral luck, right? Which things that are lucky but that we're still responsible for. And he was like, "If we take, you know, if we eliminate kind of the role of luck in human lives, like, what's left over shrinks to an extensionless point," right? Like, there's essentially nothing left once we start to take into this account that, like, luck shapes personality, which shapes effort. Like, there's no getting rid of luck in your life. Um, for me, what that says, and I, you know, I'm borrowing this idea from political philosophers. Um, you know, the philosopher John Rawls said, "None of our precepts of justice tilt towards desert." Which is basically what he was saying, like, this whole political project of trying to figure out like what people deserve and what people earn in order to justify inequality is bound to fail because there is no separating, like, effort from luck. It's turtles all the way down. What we should thinking, be thinking about is, you know, what inequality is instrumentally useful, right? Like, rewarding some people more for certain types of work is better for everyone if it increases certain types of, um, productivity or is more efficient in the allocation of certain goods or resources. That's a different argument than saying, "I deserve my salary because I'm so clever," right? Like, um, so I'm not trying to say, like, I'm not trying disappear agency out of people's lives. I'm trying to get people to consider that if they are, quote-unquote, "successful" in the sense that they enjoy a certain level of economic goods in our, like, winner-takes-all meritocratic rat race, um, that looking to their own lives and thinking about how much they deserve it and earn it might be missing part of the story. It's missing the-

   26. CWChris Williamson28:53

       But I mean, if- if you as a scientist are struggling to be able to bifurcate those two, the person themselves-

   27. PHPaige Harden28:59

       (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson28:59

       ... with all of their biases and their self-love-

   29. PHPaige Harden29:01

       Yeah. (laughs) Sure, sure.

   30. CWChris Williamson29:01

       ... it's essentially an impossible task. And there'll be-
6. 33:37 – 44:40

   Surprising Genetic Correlations

   1. PHPaige Harden33:37

   2. CWChris Williamson33:37

      Getting back to genetics then-

   3. PHPaige Harden33:38

      Yeah. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson33:38

      ... what are some of the more surprising correlations that you found? I saw a, I saw a bit about when identical twin sisters have marriages with different levels of conflict-

   5. PHPaige Harden33:48

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson33:48

      ... that children have equal risk for delinquency.

   7. PHPaige Harden33:51

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson33:51

      What are some of the other ones like that?

   9. PHPaige Harden33:52

      Yeah. Well, I mean, that project is part of, like, a, uh, most of my graduate work, which was attempting to address this problem that we've talked about before. And the problem being that most studies just correlate aspects of parenting and child outcomes and then are like, "Oh, well, this aspect of parenting is, like, the secret sauce," right? So, there, you know, there's eight million studies that are parents who fight more have more behavior problems. Like, "This is why you should learn to get along with your spouse more, 'cause it's gonna help your kids' ADHD." And, like, very few considering that, like, argumentative parents might have argumentative children, like, for reasons other than just environmental modeling. Um, so my graduate work was a lot on, like, kind of divorce, marital conflict, age at childbearing, like, you know, is teenage pregnancy, like, actually bad for kids? Um,

   10. CWChris Williamson34:45

       What did that come up with? What did that suggest?

   11. PHPaige Harden34:46

       And you know, things like age of mother. Um, it suggests that, like, teenage moms definitely face a lot more, like, financial problems than mothers who delay childbearing. Like, there's, there's, um, you know, there's a penalty to early motherhood in terms of education and the labor market. Um, but the effect of adolescent parenthood on kids particularly, their, like, um, conduct problems and ADHD, is a lot smaller than people might anticipate. And, you know, and that's because, um, people do not have children as teenagers at random, right? So, like, more impulsive sensation seeking moms are more likely to have kids young and they're more likely to have impulsive sensation seeking kids. Um, so there's just a lot, like, going back to your, you know, there's eight million parenting books which are all like, "Here are all the things correlated with being, like, a high in- high income white lady," basically is what they're, they're all saying. Um, and very few of those things are shown to actually have, like, a causal impact on child development. Like, it's just like, "Let's see what's in fashion amongst people in a certain social class and then, like, give us, give, give parents a lot of advice (laughs) based on that, not really on, like, tons of solid science."

   12. CWChris Williamson35:58

       I couldn't believe that girls who hit puberty earlier are less likely to do maths.

   13. PHPaige Harden36:05

       Oh, that, that was surprising to you? Well, you weren't a girl, I guess.

   14. CWChris Williamson36:10

       Yeah. Well, it didn't-

   15. PHPaige Harden36:11

       I mean... (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson36:11

       ... I di- I didn't think that if you're a girl who hits puberty sooner, the boys that are in the maths class are going to hit on you because you're the one that's developing, and it makes complete-

   17. PHPaige Harden36:20

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson36:20

       ... it makes complete sense. I don't dis-

   19. PHPaige Harden36:22

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson36:22

       ... disbelieve it for a moment, but I was like, oh yeah. But that's because when girls go from being a girl to being a woman, something sort of attractive happens to the boys that are looking at them. When boys go from being boys to men, nothing happens. Like essentially-

   21. PHPaige Harden36:41

       (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson36:41

       ... nothing changes. Their voice just gets a bit weird-

   23. PHPaige Harden36:43

       (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson36:43

       ... and they get spotty.

   25. PHPaige Harden36:45

       So, it's so interesting. You know, I just taught my adolescent development lecture because I teach intro psych, which is great to teach adolescent development because they're all freshmen, right? So, they're 18, they just went through this. Some of them are still going through this. And I teach a really big online class, and so I put them into chat rooms all the time where they can talk to each other, and I was like ... So, their chat prompt was, "Do you wish you could have gone through earlier, through puberty earlier or later?" And all of the girls are like, "I wish that it had happened later. Like, I was the first one in my class. It was embarrassing, it was discouraging. Men are skeevy. Boys start to look at you totally differently. Like, you know, my parents treated me differently." Which is true. Like, the research literature show- like, girls go through puberty a little earlier than boys anyways, and so the earliest maturing girls look like women, and the boys in their class look like boys, um, but that doesn't stop the boys from being, like, creepy to them in a lot of ways. And so, whereas the boys were like, "I couldn't wait. Like, my voice cracked and I was like, when is the rest of this? I still can't grow a beard. I'm still waiting for this." And I think it's int- I mean, I think that's actually a great example of, like, there's what genes do to your body, and then there's how society responds to your body, right? Like, going through puberty is very heritable, you know? Like, that's kind of, like, a developmental timing thing. Um, but then you have breasts and hips, and your, your, your social environment and your teachers and your parents are responding to you differently, and so it's, um ... We sometimes use the phrase environmentally mediated genetic effects. Like, it's the effect of your genes on your body that then becomes, like, the grist for the social mill and, like, the social response that you're getting from people. And so, when you see that, like, girls who go through puberty early are less likely to take advanced math classes, is that a genetic effect? Well, like, going through puberty earlier is genetic, but then there's also, like, the social construction of girlhood and of, um, sexual gender dynamics between adolescents that, like, is responsible for that outcome.

   26. CWChris Williamson39:00

       That highlights exactly what I was saying earlier on, that there's two elements at play there. You can try and control for the culture, or you can try and control for the genetics.

   27. PHPaige Harden39:09

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson39:09

       Because the outcome or the, the impact that you're trying to avoid-

   29. PHPaige Harden39:12

       Yeah. Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson39:12

       ... is something which occurs culturally, but there's two ways that we can play around with this. You know, do-
7. 44:40 – 56:23

   Dealing With Unfair Equality

   1. CWChris Williamson44:40

      I, I would struggle to justify saying that the guy that sits on his couch in his house of three other dudes smoking weed and playing Xbox all day is as valuable ...

   2. PHPaige Harden44:53

      No.

   3. CWChris Williamson44:53

      ... as a contributive of a member of society as the mechanic or the university professor or the bus driver or anybody else.

   4. PHPaige Harden45:00

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson45:00

      Right? Like, I understand that you can say this is genes and environment for most of the way down, that this person is the, the nail on the end of the finger of the arm of the position that they were given, of the life that, that they've been leading that's currently being grown out of the earth. But, I, I can't-

   6. PHPaige Harden45:21

      What about the freeloader?

   7. CWChris Williamson45:23

      The house has-

   8. PHPaige Harden45:23

      Is that

   9. NANarrator45:23

      That's

   10. CWChris Williamson45:23

       ... the rubber has, the rubber has to meet the road at some point. It's like, look.

   11. PHPaige Harden45:27

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson45:27

       We have to make people culpable for some of the things that they do.

   13. PHPaige Harden45:32

       Yeah. So, we, I mean, we definitely already do that, right? Like, I would say, like, you know, in terms of people being ... people given, not being given many chances and people being at high risk for experiencing a lot of poverty and immiseration, um, if they're not "contributing." Like, I feel like that's in many ways like a defining feature of the American political landscape. Um, and people, you know, that sense of, like, that, like, it's not fair if they're rewarded when they're not contributing is a very, like, basic moral intuition that I'm not really trying to push against, right? Like, my children have that. Like, my daughter, if I'm like, "You both have to go clean up your room, and then you can watch TV," and my daughter does most of the work cleaning up the room, she is effing outraged if her brother also gets to watch television. She's like, "But he just sat there while I did all the work. Like, why does he get to watch TV?" Like, that sense of outrageousness over ... um, you know, children are outraged by unfair inequality, but they're also outraged by what they consider to be equality that's unfair too, like unfair inequality. Like, if people get the exact same for different effort, like children get really mad about that too. There's two things I wanna, like, just add to that, which is one, what do we owe even the slacker on the couch by virtue of him being a human, right? And like, he probably isn't owed, um, a yacht and a million dollar 401K, but like, are we gonna send him home from the hospital? Are we gonna tell him to pull his own teeth, right? Like, though, like, what do we owe people even who are slackers, even who are bad, like, even who aren't "contributing." I don't think we pay enough attention to that, at least in, in where I live. And the second is, um, my colleagues Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan have written a great book on administrative burden, which is, like, what are the costs of administering social programs when you're trying to separate the deserving applicants from the undeserving applicants? And basically their research suggests that even though freeloaders bother us, we can end up hurting ourselves and the people who actually need help more by putting in this administrative machinery that l- like, is trying to suss out, like, is this person a mechanic or is this person's, you know, the video gamer on his couch, right? So, not universalizing things, even though it does activate our, like, very six-year-old impulses of like, but someone might not get something even when they're a slacker and they're not doing anything. Like, not universalizing things can make programs more expensive and in-depth so that the people who do need them are less likely to get them. And so I, at the end of the day, I'm just kind of a consequentialist about this, in which I feel like, um, you know, I'd rather a guilty man go free than an innocent man be in jail. And like, I would rather have someone who is like, undeserving of a social benefit get it than ...... have a whole machinery in place that ends up hurting people who, like, have legitimate claims on a service. Um, so those are-

   14. CWChris Williamson49:00

       I think that's a really good-

   15. PHPaige Harden49:00

       ... the considerations that apply.

   16. CWChris Williamson49:01

       Yeah, I think that's a really good identification of why people who lean left tend to be compassionate.

   17. PHPaige Harden49:11

       (laughs)

   18. CWChris Williamson49:11

       I think that's, like, the best summarization that I've ever seen for that. Um, because for me, I think my indignation would overtake my empathy. I, I think that m- m- I would... I don't know if I would be prepared... the guilty man going free versus the innocent man going to jail. Like, that's, you know, that's a, that's a much tighter decision for me to make. It's more difficult for me to work out where I lie on that. Um, what I thought was really interesting was you talking about unfair equality as well as unfair inequality.

   19. PHPaige Harden49:46

       Yeah. Mm-hmm.

   20. CWChris Williamson49:46

       Um, and that's what we're talking about with that indignation, the hypocrisy, the concerns-

   21. PHPaige Harden49:50

       Yeah. Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson49:50

       ... around undeserved... It f- it definitely feels to me... I, I would be really interested to see where your viewpoints are. Let's say that we get the sort of progress that we're hoping for economically in terms of welfare and poverty levels and so on and so forth, um, over the next 20 years, 30 years. I'd be really, really interested to see what your, um, stance would be on this. Let's say that we raise the floor of welfare-

   23. PHPaige Harden50:16

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CWChris Williamson50:16

       ... so that everybody has basic human dignity, right?

   25. PHPaige Harden50:19

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson50:19

       Now one of the problems is that we're not rational creatures. A lot of the time, we're more concerned relatively about our position-

   27. PHPaige Harden50:28

       Yeah. Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson50:28

       ... within the hierarchy than absolutely.

   29. PHPaige Harden50:30

       Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

   30. CWChris Williamson50:31

       And I'm sure that you've considered this because if you offer someone, "You can make an extra $50,000 yourself or you can make an extra $100,000, but all of your competitors make an extra $120,000," people will take the objective lower number-
8. 56:23 – 1:02:33

   The Ethics of Altering Genetics for Equality

   1. CWChris Williamson56:23

      Um, here's one for you. If we could, should we go into the genes and flatten them so that everyone has the same genetic opportunity?

   2. PHPaige Harden56:31

      (laughs) No.

   3. CWChris Williamson56:31

      Because we're trying to achieve-

   4. PHPaige Harden56:32

      How sick is that?

   5. CWChris Williamson56:32

      ... this socially, so why not try and achieve it genetically?

   6. PHPaige Harden56:35

      So, I, I ... There's a great line from Jabzanski, who was a evolutionary biologist in the early, I mean, in the mid-20th century, and he wrote in Science in 1962 that genetic ver- diversity is mankind's most precious resource. Um, and I believe that. Like, I don't ... What I want is a society that is more like a meadow than a lawn of grass, like, and where we have many different people with many different talents, which a lot of diversity that are working in cooperation, and it's beautiful and not homogenous, right? That, that is a quality of thriving, not a quality of gen- genomes, right? Like, whereas a lawn is a monoculture. Like, I'm not r- like, monocultures in agriculture never work out. Like, they never, they're never good. Bad things happen when we have monocultures, and I don't think that there's ... You know, the problem with, with society, in my view, right now is that we have so narrowly defined skill that we have kind of a monoculture of skill and talent, um, amongst who was considered, like, the top of the, like, elite or a status hierarchy, of an income hierarchy. Whereas, you know, one phrase that people use for it is, like, a pluralistic opportunity structure, where there's many different genetically influenced talents that can all ... like, different routes to success. Those are the sorts of, um, social structures that I think are good.

   7. CWChris Williamson58:16

      I'll never forget this meme. It's so useful. I w- I've never been able to find it again. There's this guy, this really big guy, and he's sort of maybe about my age, like, early 30s or whatever. Like, pretty good-looking dude, and he's got a shirt and tie on, and he's stood at the front of a Bed Bath & Beyond, and he's just-

   8. PHPaige Harden58:31

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson58:31

      ... sort of welcoming this woman (laughs) , welcoming this woman-

   10. PHPaige Harden58:33

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson58:33

       ... into a department store, and there's a thought bubble going out of his head, and it says, "500 years ago, I would have been a strong warrior."

   12. PHPaige Harden58:40

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I think, you, you know, I ... Like, I'm o- obvi- like, I'm a woman and I, you know, I'm raising a nine-year-old, but I'm not an expert on men and masculinity. But I do think, just from my observations of my undergraduates, when we look at rates of college completion, when we look at, like, political disaff- disaffectation amongst young men, there's a sense of, "I do have something to contribute. I don't wanna be the person that's, like, sitting on my couch playing video games." Um, but I j- there isn't an opportunity structure for me to feel like the skills and talents I do have are valuable, are prestigious, d- are gonna, like, create a life for myself in which I can have a family. And that, I think, is a huge problem.

   13. CWChris Williamson59:27

       From a gendered perspective, I'm going to guess that boys, on average, tend to sit still with more difficulty in classes, uh-

   14. PHPaige Harden59:35

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson59:35

       ... higher rates of ADHD-

   16. PHPaige Harden59:38

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson59:38

       ... so on and so forth, more antisocial behavior.

   18. PHPaige Harden59:41

       Yeah. I mean, they ... That's all true. And then I think particularly, you know, when we're talking about, like, you know, male adolescents and male puberty, like, this is a period of a lifespan in which adolescents generally, but male adolescents in particular, are really developmentally primed for risk, for feeling like things have stakes. And we put them in high schools that are, like, the most boring things ever, and then they all say, "I've never been more bored. I have no ..." You know, we have closed off all opportunities, you know, unless we're talking about military service when they turn 18, for people to experience a, like, pro-social, positively socially sanctioned forms of risk and adventure-taking. And then we wonder why, like, male adolescents drop out of school and go to college at lower rates than female adolescents, like, across the board. Like, we don't take their developmental needs seriously. Like, we, we just actually are kind of terrible to teenagers generally, um, in terms of taking ... Like, we treat them as, like, deficient adults rather than, like, this is a unique period in the lifespan that has its own developmental needs. Like, how would we, how would we design a school if we actually didn't hate teenagers? Like-

   19. CWChris Williamson1:00:57

       That's a really good point.

   20. PHPaige Harden1:00:58

       I think, I think we just actually-

   21. CWChris Williamson1:00:58

       Because we, we, we mollycoddle children, and they're still cute, and there's th- there's still this level of protectionism around them. And yeah, you-You bestow on teenagers the responsibility and the standards that you expect from an adult with all of the resentment of a child that has agency not behaving the way that they should do.

   22. PHPaige Harden1:01:19

       Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true. Like, in my class, I give my students like a list of like, "Here are rights and responsibilities of adulthood." You know, like, "You can get married, you can be tried as an adult for a crime, you can rent a car, you can drink alcohol, you can join the military." And I'm like, "I want you to... If you were dictator for the day, at what age should we be able to do these things? Um, and then at what age do we actually do them?" Right? And it's like, in Texas you can be tried as an adult for a felony 10 years before you can rent a car. Like, that's insane from a developmental science perspective. And what we do is we hold them responsible for making adult-like decisions, uh, when we're trying to punish them, but we withhold the rights that come from being an adult, like such as voting or drinking, um, as late as possible. And then we wonder why adolescents are resentful of adults. Like, well, because you treat them like petulant children all the time and, like, don't design anything for their sake. So, um, I could go on and on about this. (laughs) But like, we, we, don't take adolescence seriously in our cultures, and I think that's a real shame.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:02:32

       Frederic De Boer,

9. 1:02:33 – 1:06:29

   Is Communism Genetics-Friendly?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:02:33

      who wrote The Cult of Smart, he agrees-

   2. PHPaige Harden1:02:36

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:02:36

      ... that genes and luck play big roles in life outcomes, and as a result, he's a strong supporter of communism. Are you tempted by communism?

   4. PHPaige Harden1:02:44

      Um, I think that Frederic would describe himself as a socialist, not a communist. Um, and I think... It's interesting, 'cause I think his, you know, I think his socialist... Um, I don't know Freddie very well, just, um, you know, mostly through writing, but-

   5. CWChris Williamson1:02:57

      Know him well enough to call him Freddie.

   6. PHPaige Harden1:02:59

      Um, well, we've been on like a symposium together before, and he, um, he... I, you know, I'm pretty sure his political commitments like predate any interest in genetics, um, which I think is an important point, which is that, you know, observing that there are genetic differences between people, it doesn't commit you to any moral or political project. I think it's more, um, you know, given a moral political project, what constraints about the real world do I need to take into account when I'm thinking about, you know, how to bring this about? And so, I mean, that's been very much my case too. I was an egalitarian before I was a behavior geneticist.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:03:46

      Have you read the book Why Whites Run Slower?

   8. PHPaige Harden1:03:50

      No.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:03:51

      Okay. So, this French guy, he looked at athletic performance largely being determined by genetics, and there was this ACTN3, the sprint gene, and there's an RR form for speed and an RX form for endurance.

   10. PHPaige Harden1:04:05

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:04:05

       Have you seen this?

   12. PHPaige Harden1:04:07

       So, I have read about this, um, and I-

   13. CWChris Williamson1:04:09

       Do you think there's any truth in it?

   14. PHPaige Harden1:04:11

       So, I- so my sources of knowledge about this are two books. One is David Epstein's The Sports Gene, which is fantastic. I really recommend it. And he is, that book is all about the genetics of athletic performance, um, in very, like in various capacities and various specific genes. And I think what's interesting about his book is, um, you know... I know David only through Twitter. Like he wrote that book years before I wrote mine. It's on a completely different domain of human skill, which is athletics versus education. Um, but thematically, it actually ends up in a very similar place, which is like, yes, genes matter. Figuring out which genes matter is really hard, and it's never just genes, right? Like, this is such a complicated, complicated developmental story. Um, and then the other source of information about genetics and sports that I have read is Adam Rutherford's How to Argue with a Racist, which, um, spends a lot of time on these kind of stories about, like, why some racial groups are "better" at some sports than others. And his up- basically in the same place that Epstein's does, which is like, you know, if you pick like one gene and one comparison, it can look so, like such a neat, tidy story. And then as soon as you think about the larger picture of athletic performance, like those, just those stories kind of like fall apart entirely. Um, so I don't... You know, like this is not... I don't, I don't know anything about the genetics of sports performance other than reading those two books. So like, but, you know, my sense of it is when it comes to really complex domains of skill, these neat stories about like populations in one gene almost never hold up to, like, more sustained scrutiny.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:06:05

       Adam Rutherford called me out after the Robert Plomin episode. He tweeted something.

   16. PHPaige Harden1:06:09

       Really?

   17. CWChris Williamson1:06:09

       He tweeted something mean about me, so I'm not friends with him. Yeah, exactly. Uh, anyway-

   18. PHPaige Harden1:06:13

       (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson1:06:13

       ... The Genetic Lottery.

   20. PHPaige Harden1:06:14

       You know, if you were no longer friends with anyone who said something mean to you on Twitter, like in my experience, you would be like left with no people. Like, there's something

   21. NANarrator1:06:21

       (music)

   22. CWChris Williamson1:06:21

       You're in the eye of the storm. There would be no one, there would literally-

   23. PHPaige Harden1:06:24

       Makes people snarky. (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson1:06:25

       ... be no one left. Look, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality will be linked in

10. 1:06:29 – 1:07:07

    Where to Find Paige

    1. CWChris Williamson1:06:29

       the show notes below. And if people want to try and bolster your dwindling Twitter world-

    2. PHPaige Harden1:06:34

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson1:06:35

       ... as people continue to clash up against you, where should they go?

    4. PHPaige Harden1:06:38

       So, I'm on Twitter @kph3k, and you can find me... I have a website which is kpharden.com.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:06:45

       Thank you.

    6. PHPaige Harden1:06:47

       All right. Thank you so much.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:06:48

       Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:07:07