slate | Wade’s argument has three parts: First, along with the divergence of
physical traits such as skin color and types of earwax, racial groups
have genetically evolved to differ in cognitive traits such as
intelligence and creativity. Second, Wade argues that “minor
differences, for the most part invisible in an individual, have major
consequences at the level of a society.” Third, he writes that his views
are uncomfortable truths that have been suppressed by a left-wing
social-science establishment.
The word “inequality” does not appear in the book’s index, but what
Wade is offering is essentially a theory of economic and social
inequality, explaining systematic racial differences in prosperity based
on a combination of innate traits (“the disinclination to save in
tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate
consumption”) and genetic adaptation to political and social
institutions (arguing, for example, that generations of centralized rule
have effected a selection pressure for Chinese to be accepting of
authority).
Wade is clearly intelligent and thoughtful, and his book is informed
by the latest research in genetics. His explanations seem to me
simultaneously plausible and preposterous: plausible in that they snap
into place to explain the world as it currently is, preposterous in that
I think if he were writing in other time periods, he could come up with
similarly plausible, but completely different, stories.
As a statistician and political scientist, I see naivete in Wade’s
quickness to assume a genetic association for any change in social
behavior. For example, he writes that declining interest rates in
England from the years 1400 to 1850 “indicate that people were becoming
less impulsive, more patient, and more willing to save” and attributes
this to “the far-reaching genetic consequences” of rich people having
more children, on average, than poor people, so that “the values of the
upper middle class” were “infused into lower economic classes and
throughout society.”
Similarly, he claims a genetic basis for the declining levels of
everyday violence in Europe over the past 500 years and even for “a
society-wide shift ... toward greater sensibility and more delicate
manners.” All this is possible, but it seems to me that these sorts of
stories explain too much. The trouble is that any change in
attitudes or behavior can be imagined to be genetic—as long as the time
scale is right. For example, the United States and other countries have
seen a dramatic shift in attitudes toward gay rights in the past 20
years, a change that certainly can’t be attributed to genes. Given that
we can see this sort of change in attitudes so quickly (and, indeed, see
large changes in behavior during such time scales; consider for example
the changes in the murder rate in New York City during the past 100
years), I am skeptical of Wade’s inclination to come up with a story of
genetics and selection pressure whenever a trend happens to be measured
over a period of hundreds of years.
Wade’s attitudes toward economics also seem a bit simplistic, for
example when he writes, “Capital and information flow fairly freely, so
what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying
every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as
Denmark?” The implication is that the answer is racial differences. But
one might just as well ask why can’t Buffalo, New York, take out a loan
and become as rich (per capita) as New York City. Or, for that matter,
why can’t Portugal become as rich as Denmark? After all, Portuguese are
Caucasians too! One could of course invoke a racial explanation for
Portugal’s relative poverty, but Wade in his book generally refers to
Europe or “the West” as a single unit. My point here is not that
Haitians, Portuguese, and Danes are equivalent—obviously they differ in
wealth, infrastructure, human capital, and so forth—but that it is not
at all clear that genetic differences have much of anything to do with
their different economic positions.
