New study out: Income and Education Disparities Track Genetic Ancestry

We just published a new study in OpenPsych:

• Hu, M., Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Fuerst, J. (2023). Income and Education Disparities Track Genetic Ancestry. OpenPsych, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.09.11

Structural racism has often been invoked to explain observed disparities in social outcomes, such as in educational attainment and income, among different American racial/ethnic groups. Theorists of structural racism typically argue that racial categories are socially constructed and do not correspond with genetic ancestry; additionally, they argue that social outcome differences are a result of discriminatory social norms, policies, and laws that adversely affect members of non-White race/ethnic groups. Since the examples of social norms and policies commonly provided target individuals based on socially-defined race/ethnicity, and not on genetic ancestry, a logical inference is that social disparities will be related to socially-defined race/ethnicity independent of genetically-identified continental ancestry. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we employ admixture-regression analysis and examine the independent influences of socially-identified race/ethnicity and genetically-defined ancestry on the educational attainment and income of parents, using data from a large sample of US children. Our study focuses on self-identified Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and East Asians in the United States. Analyses generally show that the association between socially-identified race/ethnicity and outcomes is mediated by genetic ancestry and that non-White race/ethnicity is unrelated to worse outcomes when controlling for genetic ancestry. For example, conditioned on European genetic ancestry, Americans socially-identified as Black and as Hispanic exhibit equivalent or better social outcomes in both education and income as compared to non-Hispanic Whites. These results are seemingly incongruent with the notion that social outcome differences are due to social policy, norms, and practices which adversely affect individuals primarily based on socially-constructed group status

Various egalitarians claim that discrimination, either directly or indirectly via "structural racism" or "systemic racism", explains various American race/ethnic differences. Chiefly they are concerned with the omnipresent White-Black gaps in education, income, mortality and so on. They rarely bother to test this model, aside from pointing out that gaps themselves exist, which they mostly take as prima facie evidence of discrimination. This inference of course rests on the assumption of nonexistence of other contributing factors, in particular, human capital in the form of average intelligence, patience, or lower mental illness. In this study, we tested their model once again, but with a twist on the approach. The dataset is still the awesome ABCD study:

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is a joint long-term initiative that includes 21 research sites throughout the US, focused on examining brain development and child health to investigate the psychological and neurobiological foundations of human growth. At baseline, around 11,000 children aged 9-10 years were sampled, using a probability-based sampling approach aimed at establishing a comprehensive and inclusive sample of US children within that age group. In this current investigation, we utilized the ABCD 3.01 baseline data.

In particular, most of the sample has had their genetics measured using microarrays, which then allows for fine-grained ancestry scoring in the same way that 23andme and other consumer genomics companies do it. The argument of the paper is a typical John Fuerst style one:

1. Egalitarians claim that race has little or nothing to do with genetics.

2. So social race -- whatever people perceive themselves and others as -- cannot in their model be accounted for by genetics.

3. So if discrimination is happening, then social race should be the potent factor, not actual genetic ancestry.

4. Thus, if one pits these against each other in statistical models to explain race gaps in education or income, then according to their model, social race should explain the association (if any) between genetic ancestry and socially valued outcomes.