[Freddie deBoer] Could It Be... Genes? social science's bizarre resistance to considering genetic influence

A big paper by James Heckman and Rasmus Landersø just came out from the NBER. It uses data from Denmark to look at social spending, socioeconomic equality, and educational mobility. (That is, how well children perform academically compared to their parents, operationalized primarily by comparing parent years of education1 to child grades2.) If you’re unaware Heckman is a rather evangelical researcher (not a bad thing!) who does studies for essentially one purpose: to demonstrate that early childhood interventions of various kinds can make major improvements in a variety of social, educational, and economic metrics3.

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Anyway, family influence. As you can guess from the title, I think this paper is indicative of a bizarre refusal to acknowledge genetics exist within social scientific research and policy documents. Here’s their discussion of how families might influence the educational outcomes of their children:

Families operate through multiple channels. (i) Through direct parental interactions with children in stimulating child learning, personality, and behaviors. This comes from direct engagement and by setting examples for children to emulate, including supporting, supplementing, and advising schooling and other activities in which children engage. (ii) Through choice of neighborhoods and localities which influence the quality of schooling and the quality of peers. (iii) Through guidance on important lifetime decisions

I can think of another way that children are influenced by family6: through genetic information that is passed on through the reproductive process. Genetic influence would be perfectly consistent with the finding that the United States and Denmark have similar amounts of educational mobility despite significantly different policy and socioeconomic conditions. Educational mobility is similarly low between systems because genetic similarity between parent and child has a large impact on educational outcomes and is unaffected by social policy.

This is an article about how family influences children without a consideration of the most direct and powerful way. The words “gene” and “genes” and “genetic” do not appear in this paper. Neither do “heritable” or “heredity” or “hereditary.” The concept of the transfer of genetic information from parent to offspring simply does not exist in this mental space… in a paper about how families influence the characteristics of their children. I would call this odd, but it’s par for the course in social science research. And I just don’t really get it.