A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

by Nicholas Wade

  But if culture explains economic performance in even a few groups, it could play a significant role in all economies. Scholars fear pursuing the issue further because they are not really using culture in just its accepted meaning of learned behavior. Rather, it is a catchall word that includes possible reference to a concept they dare not discuss, the possibility that human behavior has a genetic basis that varies from one race to another.

  The sociologist Nathan Glazer, for instance, all but admits that culture and race are valid explanatory variables, yet ones that cannot be used: “Culture is one of the less-favored explanatory categories in current thinking. The least favored, of course, is race. . . . We prefer not to refer to or make use of it today, yet there does seem to be a link between race and culture, perhaps only accidental. The great races on the whole are marked by different cultures, and this connection between culture and race is one reason for our discomfort with cultural explanations,” he writes.33

  Several social behaviors that economists have identified as obstacles to progress are ones that could well have a genetic basis. One is the radius of trust, which can extend to strangers in modern economies but is confined to family or tribe in premodern ones. “Seen from the inside, African societies are like a football team in which, as a result of personal rivalries and a lack of team spirit, one player will not pass the ball to another out of fear that the latter might score a goal. How can we hope for victory? In our republics, people outside of the ethnic ‘cement’ . . . have so little identification with one another that the mere existence of the state is a miracle,” writes Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian economist.34

  The willingness to save and delay gratification is a social behavior that Clark finds gradually increased in the English population in the 600 years before the Industrial Revolution. Conversely, the propensity to save seems considerably weaker in tribal societies. This could be in large measure because such societies are poorer; everyone saves more as they get richer. But the disinclination to save in tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate consumption. To quote Etounga-Manguelle again, “Because of the rapport that the African maintains with time, saving for the future has a lower priority than immediate consumption. Lest there be any temptation to accumulate wealth, those who receive a regular salary have to finance the education of brothers, cousins, nephews, and nieces, lodge newcomers, and finance the multitude of ceremonies that fill social life.”

  There is reasonable evidence that trust has a genetic basis, though whether it varies significantly among ethnic groups and races has yet to be proved. The aspects of culture that some economists have begun to see as relevant to economic performance could well have a genetic basis, even though this has yet to be proved or even seriously investigated. Social behavior, whatever its degree of cultural or genetic foundation, can be modulated by education and incentives, so a better understanding of its role in economic performance might have practical consequences. Those who ignore culture also ignore “an important part of the explanation of why some societies or ethno-religious groups do better than others with respect to democratic governance, social justice, and prosperity,” writes the development expert Lawrence Harrison.35

  The link between race and culture is evident in the well-known natural experiment put in motion by human migrations. Members of various races have migrated to a range of different environments but maintained their distinctive behaviors in many countries over many generations. The economist Thomas Sowell has documented many of these episodes in his trilogy about race and culture.

  Consider the case of Japanese immigrants to the United States. They arrived as agricultural laborers in Hawaii in the late 19th century to work on the sugar crop and later moved to the mainland. The first generation were farmworkers and domestic servants and gained a reputation for hard work. The second generation, with the advantage of American college educations, sought to learn professions. By 1959 Japanese Americans were earning the same family income as European Americans, and by 1990 their income was 45% higher.36

  In Peru, Japanese workers achieved a reputation for hard work, reliability and honesty and became successful in both farming and manufacturing. In Brazil, Japanese settlers were found to be efficient, industrious and law-abiding. As they prospered, they entered banking and manufacturing and came to own almost 75% as much land in Brazil as there is in Japan. In these three different cultures, the Japanese were successful because of diligent work habits, with the first generation being prodigious farmers and the second generation moving into the professional world.

  The overseas Chinese were equally productive immigrants, especially in Southeast Asia, where they worked indefatigably and built up businesses. Most Chinese immigrants began as farm laborers with a prodigious capacity for hard work. In Malaysia, Chinese doing unskilled labor alongside Malays on the rubber plantations would produce twice the output. As early as 1794, a British report on the Malaysian settlement of Penang labeled the Chinese as “the most valuable part of our inhabitants.” 37

  Chinese enterprises were typically family owned and family run, even when they grew into sizable corporations. They clung to their own values and work ethic among populations who often took a more relaxed view of how time should be spent. In the Caribbean, Sowell writes, the Chinese “remained outside the value system of West Indian society—unaffected by its Creole patterns of conspicuous consumption, distribution of largesse, forgiveness of debts, and other traits that operate against business success.” 38

  Small Chinese populations in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia grew to play disproportionate roles in these countries’ economies. They dominated the thriving economy of Singapore and were so productive in Indonesia that their success provoked envy and repeated massacres. By 1994 the 36 million Chinese working overseas produced as much wealth as the 1 billion people in China.39

  Significant Chinese immigration into the United States began in 1850 with the California gold rush. Often allowed to mine only those areas that others deemed unprofitable, the Chinese persisted and flourished where others couldn’t. Chinese workers built much of the Central Pacific Railroad and at one time supplied 80% of all agricultural workers in California.

  Their success provoked a series of discriminatory laws advocated by those who could not compete against them. Excluded from one industry after another, by 1920 more than half of all Chinese in the United States worked in laundries and restaurants. As soon as adverse laws were repealed, a younger generation of Chinese Americans started to go to college and enter professional jobs. By 1959, Chinese family income had drawn level with the U.S. average, and by 1990 the median family income was 60% higher than that of non-Asian Americans.40

  Among non-Asian immigrants, Jews, a special case, are discussed in the next chapter. Germans immigrated to Russia, the United States and Australia, earning a reputation in all three countries for their orderliness and discipline. In Russia they filled many important professions to such a degree that by the 1880s Germans occupied 40% of the Russian army’s high command and 57% of the foreign ministry staff. At one time almost the entire membership of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was German.41

  In the United States, many German immigrants took to farming and were more productive than many other groups. “They were widely known for their industriousness, thrift, neatness, punctuality, and reliability in meeting their financial obligations,” Sowell reports. In Australia they became successful farmers, recognized for their hard work, thoroughness and respect for the laws.

  The grand theme of Sowell’s trilogy is that races have their own strong cultures that shape their behavior, in contrast to the common view that society determines the fates of its minority groups. His purpose is to demonstrate the persistence of racial, ethnic and national cultures but without exploring why such cultural traits endure. He has nothing to say about genetics. But traits that endure, as he has shown, in a range of different environ
ments and from one generation to another are of course quite likely to be anchored by a genetic adaptation; otherwise they would quickly disappear as immigrant groups adapted to their hosts’ dominant culture.

  Behaviorial traits like industriousness are particularly likely to be retained, but the universal instinct to conform to social rules seems to ensure that the political behaviors of the host country supplant those of the immigrants. Chinese Americans do not organize themselves into authoritarian structures, nor Arab and African Americans into tribal ones.

  There is in fact a straightforward explanation for the behaviors of all the migrant groups described by Sowell, in terms of the ratchet of wealth explanation given above for the Industrial Revolution. Populations like Europeans and East Asians, who have adapted, during centuries of living in agrarian systems, to the exigencies of running efficient economies, are at considerable advantage when migrating to other countries. Hard work, efficiency and group cohesion characterize the behavior of East Asian and European migrant groups. It is particularly notable that the Japanese and Chinese should attain higher than average standards of living in the United States, competing against a predominantly European population. The longer history of urbanization in East Asia may underlie part of this competitive advantage.

  Populations that have adapted historically to market economies can still fall short of success during periods when they adopt inefficient institutions, such as China under Mao or North Korea under the Kim family dictatorship. When North Korea adopts market-friendly institutions, a safe prediction is that it would in time become as prosperous as South Korea. It would be far less safe to predict that Equatorial Guinea or Haiti needs only better institutions to attain a modern economy; their peoples may not have yet had the opportunity to develop the ingrained behaviors of trust, nonviolence and thrift that a productive economy requires.

  The IQ and Wealth Hypothesis

  Standing in sharp contrast to the economists’ working assumption that people the world over are interchangeable units is the idea that national disparities in wealth arise from differences in intelligence. The possibility should not be dismissed out of hand: where individuals are concerned, IQ scores do correlate, on average, with economic success, so it is not unreasonable to inquire if the same might be true of countries.

  The global IQ/wealth thesis is connected with the interminable debate about black and white IQ differences in the United States, but it involves somewhat different issues and builds more on that part of the evidence about which both sides agree.

  The two camps in the IQ debate are known as hereditarians and environmentalists. Both sides generally agree that when IQ tests are administered in the United States, European Americans score 100 (by definition—their scores are normalized to 100), Asian Americans score 105 and African Americans score 85 to 90. The African American score is noticeably lower than the European score (15 points, or one standard deviation, say the hereditarians; 10 points, say the environmentalists). So much is agreed. The controversy arises in interpreting the gap between the European and African American scores. The hereditarians say the difference in scores is due 50% to environmental reasons and 50% to genetics, although they sometimes change the mix to 20% environment and 80% heredity. The environmentalists assert that the entire gap is due to environmental impediments and that if these were removed, the gap would ultimately disappear altogether.

  The heritability of intelligence, the measure which the two sides interpret so differently, does not refer, as easily might be supposed, to the extent to which intelligence is governed by the genes. It refers to the variation in intelligence within a population, and specifically to the extent to which this variation is genetic. A trait could be under complete genetic control, but if there were no variation in the population, its heritability would be zero. Intelligence is almost certainly under genetic influence but none of the responsible alleles has yet been identified with any certainty, probably because each makes too minute a contribution to show up with present methods.42

  The two sides in the IQ debate are not so terribly far apart on the facts, given that both sides agree that environmental factors are involved. The hereditarians concede that if an adjustment is made for socioeconomic status, with which IQ score is correlated, then African American scores would rise 5 points, to 90. That is not so much greater than the gap that separates Asian Americans from European Americans, about which no one seems to be bothered.

  Why, then, is the debate so heated? The acrimony arises because the two positions lead to different policy choices. The hereditarians say that since the IQ gap is substantially innate, the Head Start early education program has failed, as was predicted by Arthur Jensen in 1969, and so will similar interventions. The environmentalists deny this, saying the gap in educational attainment is closing, and that it is the racist nature of society that impedes African American advancement.

  That issue needn’t be resolved here. The question of global IQ is a somewhat less fraught issue and is of considerable evolutionary interest because intelligence reflects evolutionary changes in the brain and behavior.

  The principal proponents of the global IQ/wealth thesis are Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, and Tatu Vanhanen, a political scientist at the University of Tampere in Finland. They have gathered data from around the world and worked out the correlation between intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, and various criteria of economic success, such as gross national product per capita. Their findings are published in two books, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) and IQ and Global Inequality (2006).

  The world’s average IQ, they report, is 90. Broken down by race, the IQ of East Asian nations is 105, the European score is 99, and sub-Saharan Africa’s is 67.43 The authors note that the sub-Saharan African score would be considerably higher but for malnutrition and ill health.

  Lynn and Vanhanen argue that IQ scores must be measuring something significant because IQ correlates well with measures of educational attainment. The scores are indeed strongly associated, they say, with what economists call human capital, which includes training and education.

  Turning to economic indicators, they find that national IQ scores have an extremely high correlation (83%) with economic growth per capita and also associate strongly with the rate of economic growth between 1950 and 1990 (64% correlation).44

  “Our argument is that differences in the average mental abilities of populations measured by national IQ provides the most powerful, although not complete, theoretical and empirical explanation for many types of inequalities in human conditions,” Lynn and Vanhanen conclude.45 It follows from this conclusion that not much can be done to reduce inequities in national wealth. “The gap between rich and poor countries can be expected to persist as far as it corresponds to differences in national IQs,” they say.46

  It may seem intuitively plausible that a more intelligent population might garner more wealth than a less intelligent one. But intelligence is a quality of individuals, not of societies. A society of strong men might easily be defeated by weaker men if the weaklings are more cohesive and fight harder. Like strength, the property of individual intelligence does not necessarily transfer from individuals to the society of which they are part.

  And indeed with Lynn and Vanhanen’s correlations, it is hard to know which way the arrow of causality may be pointing, whether higher IQ makes a nation wealthier or whether a wealthier nation enables its citizens to do better on IQ tests. The writer Roy Unz has pointed out from Lynn and Vanhanen’s own data examples in which IQ scores increase 10 or more points in a generation when a population becomes richer, showing clearly that wealth can raise IQ scores significantly. East German children averaged 90 in 1967 but 99 in 1984. In West Germany, which has essentially the same population, averages range from 99 to 107. This 17 point range in the German population, from 90 to 107, was evidently caused by the alleviation of poverty, not genetics.

 
There is a 10 to 15 point difference in IQ scores between the richer and poorer countries of Europe, yet these differences disappear when the inhabitants migrate to the United States, so the differences are evidently an environmental effect, not a genetic one. If European IQ scores can vary so widely across different decades and locations, it is hard to be sure that any other ethnic differences are innate rather than environmental. Lynn and Vanhanen’s book “constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side,” Unz concluded, but “neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed.”

  Lynn and Vanhanen do in fact acknowledge the role of wealth in enhancing IQ scores. But the difficulty of quantifying the IQ-enhancing effect of wealth seriously weakens the ability of IQ scores to explain wealth. More generally, it may be hazardous to compare the IQ scores of different races if allowance is not made for differences in wealth, nutrition and other factors that influence IQ.

  East Asia is a vast counterexample to the Lynn/Vanhanen thesis. The populations of China, Japan and Korea have consistently higher IQs than those of Europe and the United States, but their societies, despite their many virtues, are not obviously more successful than those of Europe and its outposts. Intelligence can’t hurt, but it doesn’t seem a clear arbiter of a population’s economic success. What is it then that determines the wealth or poverty of nations?

  Institutions and National Failure