Through the Wormhole – Is Poverty Genetic?

Through the Wormhole Season 5 Episode 3 – Is Poverty Genetic

Transcript:

 Is Poverty Genetic?        

1 Freeman: Are the wealthy just born in the right place at the right time, or are the poor victims of a system designed to keep them down? Perhaps physics and biology determine who’s rich and who’s poor.

 Many hope to erase the divide between the haves and the have nots, but what if nature demands winners and losers in life? Could poverty be genetic? Space, time, life itself.

 The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

 Pharaohs, kings, great industrialists and CEOs throughout history, a select few have claimed enormous wealth as a birthright.

 Some of them say they also inherit qualities and virtues that keep them rich.

 Could the chasm that separates rich and poor really be the result of our DNA? Scientists are trying to discover if there is a biological reason the rich stay rich and whether equality and prosperity for all contradict the laws of nature.

 Where I grew up, nobody had much money.

 Nobody we knew, anyhow.

 Rich people were out there, somewhere, but to us, they may as well have been Martians.

 Money was so scarce that I went around the neighborhood collecting bottles.

 I traded them in when I had enough to get into the movies.

 Now, of course, things are different for me.

 I’m in the movies.

 Money isn’t much of a worry.

 My experience shows that being born poor is not necessarily a life sentence.

 But for billions of people around the world, poverty passes from generation to generation without end.

 We inherit property, or the lack of it, from our parents.

 We also inherit our parents’ DNA, and for as long as we’ve known about genetics, scientists have been wondering if there is a connection between our money and our genes.

 Genes are pieces of code that tell your body how to function.

 There are about 25,000 genes in human DNA.

 How do they affect our personalities? These are questions University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer has been asking for 20 years.

 Eric studies the genetics of complex human behavior.

 One way you can think about the role that individual genes play in the creation of complex genetic effects is that it’s like the role that an individual thread might play in the creation of a complex tapestry.

 You couldn’t really understand the role of each thread one at a time, separate from the others.

 You have to know how each thread fits into the warp and woof of the fabric and how they all work together to create the pattern.

 Well, with genes, it’s the same way.

 Freeman: These are the genetic interactions within just one of your 23 pairs of chromosomes.

 It’s a highly interconnected, highly complex web of genetic factors.

 After the human genome was decoded in 2001, studies emerged claiming to find links between individual genes and characteristics like common sense, ambition, and perseverance.

 Some imagined we might soon be able to identify who was born to prosper and who was born to fail.

 This has frightening implications.

 Imagine banks demanding saliva tests before granting loans, custody battles decided by which parent has better financial genes, or entire races labeled as credit risks.

 But a decade later, the vast majority of these one-gene, one-trait studies have been proven wrong.

 Turkheimer: I think if you would ask me “are we gonna know what the genes for human personality are in 20 years?” I think I would’ve said, “Yeah, sure, we’ll know something.

 ” It’s turning out that the way genetics works is more complicated in a way that doesn’t allow us to identify the effects of individual genes.

 Freeman: So Eric has a new approach: Using statistical software to analyze the vast body of data collected around the world on twins.

 Are you shaped by your genes or by your environment? It’s the problem that always gets in the way of studies on how genes are connected to complex traits.

 But twins offer a way to separate the effects of nature and nurture.

 Identical twins share virtually Fraternal twins share 50% of their genes.

 By comparing identical and fraternal twins, we were able to demonstrate in a general way that genes have effects on almost everything.

 Freeman: Eric began looking at very large samples of twins from all around the U. S.  From all socioeconomic groups.

 He used I. Q.  as a predictor of future wealth of a child, a link most studies find to be very strong.

 Turkheimer: What we found was quite surprising.

 Children raised in poverty, their home environment was by far the most important factor.

 Their genes seemed to play almost no role at all.

 Freeman: If a child with genes predisposing him or her to be a financial wizard is raised in an extremely harsh environment, that exceptional DNA may not shine through.

 Turkheimer: And then as you moved from kids raised in those really terrible circumstances up to kids raised in the middle class, the role of genes became more and more and more important, and once you got to the middle class or better, genes took over, and by the time you got to the wealthiest people in the study, genes were making all the difference.

 Freeman: Genes do have important effects on how rich or poor children will be when they grow up, but it’s an effect that is only visible when kids grow up outside of poverty.

 Turkheimer: To some extent, it’s probably true that people who wind up living in poverty have some kind of genetic difference from people who wind up making a lot of money.

 I think what our work has shown is that it doesn’t matter what kind of genetic tendencies some of these kids may have had.

 If they’re raised in a bad enough environment, they’re not gonna be able to express them.

 Freeman: The tapestry of genes that make up you as an adult are shaped by the fabric of DNA you were born with and by the environment you grew up in.

 How can we overcome the cards that nature and nurture dealt us in the womb and the crib? A new study suggests our economic destiny may be determined by the time we are 12, because poverty can affect the brain.

 Martha Farah is the founder and director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

 She has often wondered, “Why do poor children perform worse on I. Q.  tests and in school?” Farah: Many different disciplines have tried to understand how it is that poverty shapes people’s life chances.

 My colleagues and I are taking a neurobiological approach to this question.

 Freeman: Over the past few years, Martha and her colleagues have scanned the brain architecture of hundreds of children from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

 She has found there are physical differences between the brains of the rich and the poor.

 Farah: The question we asked was, “What parts of the brain are dependent “on that socioeconomic status for the size and shape that they eventually grow to?” What we found is that several important areas do show an effect of socioeconomic status.

 Freeman: Growing up in extreme poverty slows the growth of the hippocampus, which is important for learning, memory, and stress regulation, and it also shrinks the prefrontal cortex, which helps coordinate memory, perception, and motor control.

 Rich kids tend to have a thicker cortex than poor kids, but it is crucial to note the rich and poor aren’t born with these differences.

 The brains of the poor start off the same as anyone else’s.

 Their brains are, however, at greater risk of developing slowly in early childhood.

 It is not genetics that does the damage.

 It is lack of mental stimulation and the stresses of poverty.

 One difference we know exists between the childhood experiences of poor kids and wealthier kids is that the wealthier kids get more cognitive stimulation, everything from being read to, just being talked to, conversation, visits to interesting places, and we know that that promotes cognitive and brain development.

 Freeman: But other forces can determine who is rich and who is poor, forces that govern not just individuals but entire nations.

 Today’s rich man may be tomorrow’s pauper, because wealth is often a matter of geography.

 Two millennia ago, if you wanted to get rich, you’d head for Rome.

 For the past century, you came to America.

 Now you might want to head for China.

 Why are certain places bursting with money at certain times? Why are some nations poorer than others? Two scientists have a radical explanation.

 Economies buzz because of the genetic mix of the people in them.

 These Ivy league economists may not look dangerous, but to the academic world, they are wild-eyed anarchists.

 A few years ago, Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College and Oded Galor of Brown University were looking to explain the disparity of wealth between nations.

 Their findings set off a raging debate about the roots of poverty.

 As economists, we are ultimately interested in understanding the origins of global inequality.

 Those origins lie in the distant past.

 Freeman: Oded and Quamrul set out to study the role genetic diversity has played in wealth distribution around the globe.

 They reached a surprising and unpopular conclusion.

 You know, Oded and I established that there is a cause and effect of genetic diversity on economic development that goes back to the distant past, and it persists through the present day.

 Initial conditions tend to be very persistent.

 These variations in conditions that go back, you know, show up in the data today, and they’re there.

 Evolutionary biologists find that the farther an indigenous group is from Africa, the less diverse it is genetically.

 Africans are the most genetically diverse because all the various peoples of the world originated there.

 The smaller groups that left Africa to settle in more distant lands are less diverse.

 Oded and Quamrul traced this genetic effect across 80,000 years.

 Then they compared it to markers of economic development over the last 2,000 years.

 Genetic diversity is responsible for about 1/6 of the variations or the inequality that we see across the globe, which is a huge fraction.

 The economists found that too much or too little genetic diversity can be harmful to economic development.

 Throughout history, they claim, successful societies have been the ones that hit the sweet spot of genetic diversity.

 In baseball, the sweet spot of the bat is about six inches from the end of the barrel.

 This is where the performance of the bat is maximized and the hand sensation, or sting, is minimized.

 It is the spot where the bat is just right.

 There is a sweet spot.

 The sweet spot at the moment is associated with the level of diversity in the United States, and societies that are more diverse are more able to cope with this rapidly changing technological environment, and the degree of diversity is generating benefits in the context of innovations.

 But this is where it gets controversial, because if there is a perfect amount of genetic diversity, that means there are also less optimal mixtures of humanity.

 Oded and Quamrul found that societies lacking in genetic diversity tend not to be innovative.

 On the con side, societies that tend to be more diverse are less trustful, less cohesive, less coordinated.

 An overly diverse country, by this analysis, is the Congo, where ethnic groups have been dividing for over 50,000 years.

 Now it’s mired in civil war.

 On the other hand, a country like Poland isn’t diverse enough.

 It has only been inhabited for about 5,000 years.

 So it is very coherent ethnically, but it is not a powerhouse of innovation.

 Oded and Quamrul say a blend somewhere in the middle lets new voices emerge, promotes innovation, and leads to economic health.

 But some anthropologists say the economists are wrong.

 There is no sweet spot.

 They also charge that Oded and Quamrul’s work could be used to justify discrimination or even genocide to reduce diversity in the name of economic progress.

 The professors say their work has been misunderstood because an appreciation of diversity can overcome its drawbacks.

 We can assure that societies that are overly diverse, such as the societies in Africa, can benefit from their level of diversity simply by assuring that, in fact, diversity is cherished, diversity is respected, and ethnic groups are being protected.

 We are not saying that there are some traits that are better than others for, you know, economic prosperity, both at an individual level or at the societal level.

 What we’re saying is it’s the mix.

 It appears that since human civilization began, some have always had more than others, be it individuals or nations.

 Wealth and power may change hands, but the difference remains.

 Can this be changed? Can we create a society in which there is wealth for everyone and not just a few? According to this man, the odds may be stacked against us.

 Poverty may be an inevitable outcome of the laws of physics.