In England, 36% of Pakistani marriages are cousin marriages. How does this consanguinity affect health outcomes in England?
A new paper estimates that inbreeding is responsible for 10% of type 2 diabetes cases & 8% of Asthma cases among British Pakistanis.
The estimated level of parental relatedness for British Pakistanis is shown below. It should be noted that this is a select group of Pakistanis who volunteer their DNA for research. I'd guess relatedness and the effect of inbreeding in the population are being underestimated.
It's a shame the authors didn't look at the effect of inbreeding on IQ among Pakistanis - a prior paper finds inbreeding associated with low IQ. The South Asians in the G&H cohort had levels of "autozygosity" three standard deviations above the norm of Europeans in the UK biobank
The think tank @ukonward has published a survey of 47,000 people asking whether they trust others.
Areas with high trust were prosperous and had less crime. They also said, “[an] area where there is a lack of correlation is ethnic diversity."
But that wasn't quite true...🧵
The dataset is publicly available. When I dived into the data I found rather different results.
MSOAs (Middle Super Output Areas) with more white White people had higher levels of social trust.
Different ethnic groups are associated with varying levels of trust. Places with more East Asians tend to have more trust, whilst areas with more Blacks tend to have lower trust.
The Simpson Index, a measure of ethnic homogeneity predicts higher trust.
The results are similar to the most recent survey of intelligence researchers where only 16% deny a genotypic role in the black-white IQ gap. If anything, opinion has moved in the HBD direction over time.
New paper from me and @KirkegaardEmil: National Intelligence and Economic Growth: a Bayesian Update.
National IQ strongly correlates very well with GDP per capita. We ask whether national IQ is the best explanation of economic growth and whether it is causal.
We say yes! 🧵
How do we know whether IQ is the best predictor? We need to test it against many other theories - institutions, culture etc but they can't all fit in one model!
So we use 'Bayesian model averaging', running hundreds of thousands of regressions and taking a weighted average.
The method gives two key statistics.
1. the posterior inclusion probability (PIP), which is the probability a variable should be in a model of economic growth.
and 2. The standardised coefficient - the estimated effect of a variable on economic growth.
New data from Scott Alexander shows that the birth order effect is very real.
Looks like it is due to nurture:
- birth order effect is the same for related and unrelated siblings
- birth order effect diminishes with a larger age gap
- Falling fertility has led to better investment in children, compensating for dysgenic decline
- You should consider diminishing returns to children in fertility choices
- You can improve judgement of your partner's genetic quality, looking at the success of the older sibling
You should want your first son to be the first child. The evidence suggests that the sex of the older sibling does not matter for the birth effect.
Men have a higher variance in life outcomes and thus have a higher expected return on additional investment.