I expected to despise Katherine Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, but I didn’t. I outright reject some of the recurrent themes and arguments—including the one expressed in the title, but the central theme is one that I accept: we can have a just society even if genetics are an important cause of every outcome we care about and recognizing the facts about genetic causes will make this easier.
Though initially off-putting for reasons I will explain, as I consumed the book, I came to admire its clear exposition of highly complex scientific content, its balanced and insightful discussion of controversial issues, and the way it prodded me to question some of my own assumptions. My revulsion toward the minor themes is outweighed by the importance of understanding and accepting the central one. Harden adds enough nuance and leaves enough unspecified for me and others who do not share her political philosophy to nonetheless accept the book as a valuable contribution.
First impressions
I first came across Harden’s work in a 2018 New York Times Op-Ed called Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education. At the time, I was working on my book, which I conceived around 2014, began writing in 2016, and published in November of 2019. It too discusses the genetics of education—in an effort to comprehensively think through the ultimate causes of social inequality and the prospects for justice, and so I was highly intrigued with what Harden had to say.
Harden’s op-ed started with a summary of research from scholars around the world that I had also been following about efforts to predict educational attainment and cognitive ability based on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are the building blocks of genes, representing millions of locations where DNA may or may not differ between people.
Harden described this work clearly enough, but strikingly, she came to the polar opposite conclusion as I did about this works’ implications. While I found the research highly optimistic about the prospects of common people living productive healthy lives, Harden wrote: “[T]hese genetic results reveal the injustice of our so-called meritocracy. As a nation, we justify stark inequalities with the idea that people who stayed in school deserve more than people who didn’t finish high school or college — more money, more security, more health, more life.”
In summary, she claims that genes explain important social outcomes, and that means that society is unfair, because no one controls their genes. She adds that understanding genetics will unlock greater capacity for tailoring learning or development to children with different genes—to help them reach their potential.
From my perspective, this has causality upside down. Social outcomes are unequal largely because political power is unequal. The distribution of income is far more unequal than human biological distributions of cognitive and non-cognitive genetic talent. One is left to wonder from this piece if Harden thinks the high levels of income inequality in the United States are largely the result of the country’s genetic diversity, rather than its political institutions.
I am also deeply skeptical of Harden’s minor point—which is also discussed in her book—that high-quality teaching or environmental opportunities mean something completely different for children born with low-levels of natural intelligence compared to those with high-levels, and classifying children into these groups could be useful. In the absence of genetic data or theory, teachers and parents have long understood that some children master concepts at different levels and rates than others and can use that information to make sure that children are challenged at the appropriate level. Children, for example, are recommended books at their revealed reading level, not the reading level implied by their age, a biological fact that only serves as a rough guide. Similarly, if parents or teachers had polygenic scores for their children, it too would only serve as a rough guide.
The causal explanation for why a child reads at a fourth-grade level instead of a third-grade level is entirely irrelevant to which book is recommended. As I describe in my book, what is well established is that children’s reading level increases when their parents read to them at a young age and attempt to teach literacy, and since these findings are established through randomized control studies (that encourage more reading through interventions like sending parents books or text message reminders), we can conclude that genetics are not confounding the effects.
Education and Genome Wide Association Studies
At the time of Harden’s op-ed, there has been three large-scale studies at that point of the genetic predictors of educational attainment (EA1, EA2, EA3). With each study, the sample size and predictive power of the genetic analysis increased. The scientific rigor is extraordinary and detailed discussion and related publication can be found at the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. To oversimplify, the authors essentially run millions of regressions to test whether having nucleotide of A,T,C, or G at a given location on one of the 22 non-sex determining genes predicts years of educational attainment. The sum of each incremental effect comprises a polygenic score for educational attainment.
The polygenic score only predicted 3% of the variation in educational attainment in the first iteration with DNA data from 127,000 people, but as of the third version (EA3), it predicts 10% of the variation in a sample of 1.1 million people, and just recently, in EA4, the polygenic score can explain up to 13% of the variation with 3 million people. In this last sample, 3,952 different SNP locations reached genome-wide statistical significance, meaning they were highly likely to predict more or less educational attainment in an out-of-sample database.
What do scholars make of these results? It strikes me—and people like the noted genetics scholar Eric Turkheimer—that 13% is not a lot. Moreover, much of the effect is evidently not causal, because many of the genes are no longer significant and half as powerful in predicting whether one sibling has more education than another with different SNPs. This means that many of the genes which looked like they might affect education, were simply correlated with environmental circumstances—like advantageous parenting or schooling opportunities—that cause higher educational attainment. I calculate that the 13% would be 4%, based on their summary data if restricted to causal estimates.
In a compelling review of Harden’s book, the biologist Graham Coop and Molly Przeworkski reject Harden’s argument that genomic research is relevant to redressing social inequality or changing how we think about redistributive justice. They write, “we believe instead that current PGS for educational attainment are neither interpretable nor particularly meaningful. GWAS undoubtedly captures some causal genetic effects, that is, more than confounding alone, and there is interesting science to learn from these initial findings. But we currently understand next to nothing about the causal paths from GWAS findings to educational attainment.”
In other words, the best available evidence from genetics research shows that the dominate source of variation in educational attainment across people in a given age-group comes from environmental factors like family and educational opportunities.
The results are even more encouraging once you realize that these SNPs, which predict educational attainment, are not rare “genius genes” but common. A genetic genius, in this sense, is someone with many common SNPs. Of the 10 million SNPs analyzed by the genomic scholars, the average significant SNP was found in 48% of the population and almost all of the significant SNPs would be classified as common, according to my analysis of their SNP level data. So, essentially everyone has some combination of the 3,952 SNPs that predict educational attainment.
Harden, obviously, reaches a different conclusion. Using the latest data, she could rightly claim that people in the top decile of the polygenic score are roughly 10 times more likely to complete college than those in the bottom decline. The problem with this argument is the polygenic score prediction for education is rather bad for any given individual and conflates parenting and other environmental effects (since this headline result does not adjust for within-family effects). We know from this research and the wider literature that environmental factors are far more important.
The fairness of nature
More fundamentally, the notion that genes, SNPs, or even nature can be unfair strikes me as absolutely wrong. As I argued in detail in my book, fairness is understood by humans and other intelligent animals as proportionally, balance, and people all around the world are perfectly happy to compensate people who are more productive with more income—or other benefits. Even in hunter-gatherer communities which shared almost all of their property, more productive hunters were rewarded with prestige and additional offspring. Likewise, no one complains that in professional sports, the best players—which is easy enough to observe—earn more in prize money and sponsorships.
Imagine a low-ranked professional men’s tennis player arguing that he should get some portion of Raphael Nadal’s lifetime winnings—not because Nadal cheated, took performance-enhancing drugs, or even benefitted from elite training opportunities, but because Nadal is naturally a better athlete!
When confronted with someone with an obvious genetic advantage, the healthy response is admiration, not envy. Harden would like us to believe that people born gifted, intellectually speaking, do not deserve to win scientific prizes or receive higher income or prestige because they did not earn it! Harden seems to argue that it is impossible to earn anything because we don’t choose our genes and genes affect everything we do. One could further add that we do not choose our environment, our planet, or the fact that we are humans. To follow her logic to its conclusion, one would have to be an omnipotent being to earn, because to earn something means to be sole cause of its outcome.
Of course, that’s not what merit or earning something actually means. People rightly earn acclaim if they produce work that merits acclaim. More generally, people earn when their work contributes to a productive outcome. Earning is the fruit of work. For someone with obvious socialist sympathies, it is bizarre that Harden seeks to undermines the ancient and basic connection between work and earning that has served as the basis for the abolishment of slavery, serfdom, and oppressive working conditions.
It is both entirely unknowable how someone managed to produce great work and entirely irrelevant whether it was the result of genetic luck, wonderful parenting, adherence to Stoic virtues, or something else. Fairness has never and never will require a meta-physical theory of free will.
So, on that point about the unfairness of nature—which is woven into Harden’s book and public discussions about it—I reject her argument completely. Nature does not trade with us. Nature does not contract with us. We inherited nature because we would not have existed without it and cannot exist without it. Nature doesn’t owe us anything. It doesn’t even owe us an existence. Most of the universe is characterized by cold lifeless molecules floating around giant balls of gas or drifting through dark matter, with the tiniest flickering of energy all that distinguishes it from nothingness. We should be grateful to have a life—and more grateful still if it is a happy life, in which we focus on cultivating the best versions of ourselves among friends and family under just institutions. It would be exceedingly petty to insist that the universe make us the smartest, best-looking, and strongest person in the world, capable of winning over millions of followers with our talent and ability.
Justice, fairness, and balance only have meaning in the exchanges of life. We owe something to those who have given to us or to those who we created. Perfect reciprocity—where everyone is paid exactly what they contribute—would be widely appreciated as a fair starting point for the distribution of good things.
But perfect reciprocity would make for a catastrophic organizing principle for society, and here’s where Harden’s book challenged me and may challenge you. Perfect reciprocity would result in the death of every child since they are incapable of producing anything; therefore it has to be accepted that parents, at least, must go beyond reciprocity, and once accepted for parent-child relationships, it is undesirable and impossible to prevent people from applying generosity to non-family members.
It is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, according to many secular and religious ethical codes, and for good reason. Whether through the bad luck of genetics, old age, disease, accident, or injury in combat, even the strong do not begin life as such and eventually become weak. Our duty, therefore, is to work within our limitations and accept the limitations of others, even if that means re-distributing some of our surplus to them.
Hierarchy arises from output under equal opportunity, never input
Harden is excellent in challenging our conceptions about who is most valuable in society, and even more deeply: what traits are valued. Although her focus is on cognitive ability, she discusses many other traits, such as deafness, pointing out the efforts of some deaf people to purposedly engineer their offspring to be deaf, so as to share in their cultural identity. My first reaction to this was that they were being selfish to permanently harm their offspring and reduce his or her lifetime capacity for productivity, but Harden helped me see that they do not see themselves as harmed or unproductive.
I still disagree with parents who would force deafness on their children, but I like Harden’s effort to reassess how and why we think some traits are inherently valuable. I’m reminded of Steven Knight’s Apple TV science-fiction series “See,” which explores this theme at a larger scale. People born with vision are deemed witches and hunted down and driven to extinction. People with vision were blamed for creating environmental disasters that led to the loss of vision in the first place and massive loss of life. “See” imagines a society in which leaders have decided to lower society’s productive capacity for a collective good. As one can imagine, however, the audience realizes that while the strength of vision (or cognitive ability or hearing) can be used to elevate or destroy, eliminating its potential is inherently wrong and self-defeating. In the show, some characters move up in their social standing by exploiting the gifts of the few people who do have vision. At the same time, characters born without vision have some advantages in their extraordinary development of other senses, and those born with vision are humbled when they realize that.
The lesson from the show is the same lesson I take from Harden’s book. We should appreciate genetic difference and understand that traits assumed to be disadvantages can have very complex social effects that offset those disadvantages. The upshot is to accept people for who they are and for people to accept what nature has bestowed onto them. What matters in how we judge others and how they fare in social standing is not based on their genetics, which we can almost never observe anyway, but in their actions, behavior, and intentions.
It’s not that traits like vision, intelligence, perseverance, courage, or physical health are without inherent value. They have inherent value because they facilitate work, make it easier for people to survive and thrive and share value with their community. That value will allow some people to achieve higher social status than others, and that’s fair, so long as the status is achieved and not assumed, as it was in hereditary social hierarchies—like feudal monarchs, caste systems, and under American slavery. What’s not fair is to discard people because they cannot produce—or to assume they cannot produce because of a genetic condition. Where there are productive, healthy people, there is usually surplus, and where there is surplus, those who are not productive—for whatever reason—can and should be taken care of. Those are rare cases, however. In all but the most extreme cases, people can find some productive way to contribute to society. Regardless, I hold the Catholic view that there is inherent value and dignity in life, no matter its capacity for work.
Anti-eugenics versus genome-blind and eugenic approaches to social problems
The end of The Genetic Lottery introduces an interesting and somewhat helpful way to think about political issues. If you have read anything intelligent about Harden’s popular book, you would know what she is on the political left and very firmly rejects the eugenic research of decades past and its contemporary adherents. In her view, the fatal error of eugenics scholars is to equate social hierarchy with genes and use genetic arguments to justify social hierarchy.
Harden claims genes are relevant to existing social hierarchy, but she would like to change the social hierarchy to make genes less relevant. I argue that genes are not very important to the social hierarchy and explicitly set out to prove that inter-racial and inter-ethnic differences in social hierarchy cannot be based on genetic differences. Harden has a somewhat softer agnostic stance that we cannot know if inter-racial differences are based on genetics, but she is just as critical as I am of anyone claiming that genes explain inter-group differences and has stated so many times publicly.
To her credit, Harden is also critical of those on the left who entirely dismiss genetics as irrelevant. I agree with her, even though I see genetic research as much less relevant than she does to explaining social status or other complex social outcomes, and for most social science research, it doesn’t matter at all whether a cause is biological or domestic (both are family effects) when evaluating a policy intervention. If an intervention works, it is able to overcome limitations caused by biological and non-biological causes.
Nonetheless, Harden’s position here has led to much criticism from people on the left, and here, I can only say that they can quibble with her interpretation of the evidence and the causal claims—as I do, but Harden is on absolutely sound scientific ground throughout her book and could not have gone further in distancing her argument from the eugenic (or hereditarian) perspective.
Indeed, one of the most impressive things about the book is Harden’s crystal-clear exposition of complex scientific research and methods. This alone is a gift to the public and every scientist should be grateful to her for helping the public understand genomic research and causal inference.
She and I also agree is that there is nothing for progressives to fear about genetics research, though we come to this conclusion for different reasons. She comes to it because she thinks genetics can be bundled with other social inequality and addressed in a similar manner. I come to it because I think genetics are not nearly as important as other social inequalities and do not need to be addressed. Meanwhile, I am optimistic about the capacity of local institutions, like non-profit organizations, religious organizations, schools, and social service agencies to boost up the cognitive ability of at-risk children, and I am not worried that they will have low polygenic scores or that even if they did, it would be an insurmountable barrier to a productive and happy life.
Yet, Harden’s progressivism suggests a discomfort with meritocracy and markets that I do not share. A society can be fair with moderate levels of income inequality or social status inequality because the diversity of human talents and interests will yield different outcomes. Thus, even highly functional republics like Sweden and Denmark exhibit some inequality, even with very equitable opportunities. Incidentally, I calculate in my book that if people were paid only based on revealed ability, the United States would exhibit similar levels of inequality as those countries.
For now, however, roughly half of income inequality in the United States is generated by unfair opportunities, based on political inequality. The best examples of this are doctors and lawyers, which are large highly paid groups that are systematically overpaid because of the ways their powerful interest groups have constrained competition and created systems that over-reward their services. Likewise, because of segregation and the legacy of Jim Crow, Black Americans have still not been fully allowed to participate in markets or been fully given equal opportunity to important public goods and services. For me, fixing political inequality is both feasible and important, whereas rectifying genetic inequality, would be infeasible, undesirable, and rather unimportant.
Social status versus moral approbation
Even as she seeks to undermine “meritocratic logic,” Harden acknowledges that many forms of work require allocating positions based on merit, defined as the ability to perform the required tasks well. She cites examples of pilots, surgeons, engineers, and teachers as examples of “high-stakes professions” that need to be based on merit to the benefit of society.
I found this greatly reassuring, even if somewhat contradictory and under-specified. Shouldn’t all work be merit-based? Why only high-stakes ones, and who decides if a job is high-stakes?
This section of her book clarifies greatly what she finds so irksome about “merit.” Harden argues that “we”—as a society—equate merit with morality, and she wants to stop that. I don’t think this is a controversial position. I never assumed someone was morally superior if they could run faster, commit more facts to memory, perform math quicker, or otherwise demonstrate physical or cognitive ability, and I cannot really think of anyone who does, so I am not entirely sure what motivates this discussion.
For that matter, I don’t think our society bestows greater moral status to rich people because they are rich. That sentiment is rightly dismissed as snobbery, a trait exhibited only by villains in our culture. Everyone knows that some people are rich because they inherited wealth or were otherwise “lucky,” but many people are also rich because they worked hard, had good ideas and developed them, revised them, took risks, and persisted. Those are admirable traits that sometimes lead people to riches and sometimes lead people to be excellent stay-at-home moms or house cleaners or police officers.
Harden seems to want to devalue these traits—pointing out that their value to society depends on the context in which they are used. “It’s how we use [our talents] that counts,” she writes, quoting Madeline L’Engle. That’s fine. The phrase “evil genius” does not connote moral appreciation, but intelligence and other useful or honorable traits (the Cardinal Virtues, say) can still be generally worthy of admiration in the abstract and cultivation in practice, knowing that the moral standing of any individual depends on how these traits are used and not on whence they came.
We do not need genetics research to decouple virtue from social status. Stoicism, Christianity—and many other religious and secular moral philosophies—have already done this. Virtue can lead to social status, undermine it, or reshape its definition. Some religious figures take vows of poverty which undermines their economic status but may also elevate their status in their community. The priest Thomas Merton, for example, was a famous writer, much beloved and admired public figure, despite living a reclusive life as a monk in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Science and society
Despite my objections to many themes in the book, I stated that I agree with what I consider to be its primary theme: that genetics is not a barrier to justice and understanding it can facilitate justice. I’ve said enough on the first part. On the second point, I share Harden’s enthusiasm for additional genetics research and remain open to its discoveries and insights.
There are several reasons for my position on this: science is true and the best available means we have for the systematic discovery and revision of what we know to be true. True ideas are more often useful than untrue ones, and grasping truth is its own reward.
Less abstractly, there is a steady stream of bad ideas in public policy, and some of them can be dismissed because they ignore science and ignore the genetic basis for human behavior. Socialism and communism are bad ideas, for example, because the fundamental goal is to reward people equally for unequal work is unfair and widely recognized as such. It’s unfair because we would not have survived as a species if we didn’t think it was unfair.
Quite likely, there will be many applications to research and policy from genetics research that currently elude us. No doubt, Harden’s work will continue to bring valuable perspective to the science and interpretation of the results.