Kathryn Paige Harden - The Genetic Lottery

THE GENETIC LOTTERY

The Genetic Lottery

Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

Kathryn Paige Harden

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harden, Kathryn Paige, author.

Title: The genetic lottery : why DNA matters for social equality / Kathryn Paige Harden.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012198 (print) | LCCN 2021012199 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691190808 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691226705 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: GeneticsSocial aspects. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Genetics & Genomics | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy

Classification: LCC QH438.7 .H39 2021 (print) | LCC QH438.7 (ebook) | DDC 304.5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012198

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012199

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Alison Kalett, Hallie Schaeffer

Production Editorial: Terri OPrey

Jacket/Cover Design: Karl Spurzem

Production: Danielle Amatucci

Publicity: Sara Henning-Stout, Kate Farquhar-Thomson

Copyeditor: Annie Gottlieb

Jacket art: Shutterstock

For Jonah and Rowan, my fortune

I used to believe that luck was a thing outside me, a thing that governed only what did and didnt happen to me. Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA.

TANA FRENCH, THE WITCH ELM

In the summer before my son started kindergarten, my mother, suspicious of the Montessori approach I had taken to his preschool education, offered to help him get ready for what she calls real school (the kind with desks). I was fairly confident that his transition to kindergarten would go fine, but I nevertheless seized my chance to go on real vacation (the kind without small children). Off my children went to spend two weeks with their grandmother, while I spent two weeks on a beach.

My mother used to be a schoolteacher. A speech pathologist by training, she worked in a semi-rural school district in northern Mississippi, where her students often had serious learning disabilities and were always poor. Now that shes retired, the sunroom in her house in Memphis is decorated with posters scavenged from her old classroom: the ABCs, the US presidents, the worlds continents, the Pledge of Allegiance. When I returned from vacation, my children could proudly recite: I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

On the posters laminated surface, my mother had used a purple marker to annotate the text of the Pledge of Allegiance with more child-friendly words. Above Republic, she wrote country. Above liberty, she wrote freedom. Above justice, she wrote, being fair.

Being fair works admirably well as a kindergarten-friendly definition of justice. As any parent who has seen siblings squabble over a toy can attest, children have a keen sense of fairness and unfairness. If tasked with dividing up some colorful erasers to reward other children for cleaning their rooms, elementary school children will throw away an extra eraser rather than give one child an unequal share.

Even monkeys have a sense of fairness. If two capuchin monkeys are paid in cucumber slices for performing a simple task, they will both happily pull levers and munch on their cucumber snacks. Start paying just one monkey in grapes, however, and watch the other monkey throw the cucumber back in the experimenters face with the indignation of Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers.

As human adults, we share with our children and our primate cousins an evolved psychology that is instinctively outraged by unfairness. Right now, such outrage is bubbling all around us, threatening to boil over at any moment. In 2019, the three richest billionaires in the US possessed more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the country. Like capuchin monkeys being paid in cucumbers when their neighbor is being paid in grapes, many of us look at the inequalities in our society and think: This is unfair.

Life, of course, is unfairincluding how long ones life is. Across many species, from rodents to rabbits to primates, animals who are higher in the pecking order of social hierarchy live longer and healthier lives. It might be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the gates of Heaven, but the rich man has the consolation of being able to forestall judgment day.

These income inequalities are inextricable from inequalities in education. Even before the novel coronavirus pandemic, life spans for White

In addition to living longer and healthier lives, the educated also make more money. In the past forty years, the top 0.1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by more than 400 percent, but men without a college degree havent seen any increase in real wages since the 1960s.The 1960s. Think about how much has changed since then: We have put a man on the moon; we have fought wars in Vietnam and Kuwait and Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen; we invented the internet and DNA editing; and in all that time, American men who didnt get past high school havent gotten a raise.

When economists talk about the relationship between income and education, they use the term skills premium, which is the ratio of wages for skilled workers, meaning ones that have a college degree, to unskilled workers, meaning ones who dont. This conception of skill leaves out tradespersons, like electricians or plumbers, who can have lengthy and specialized training via apprenticeship rather than college. And anyone who has ever worked an allegedly unskilled job like waiting tables will rightly scoff at the idea that such labor doesnt require skill. Working in food service, for instance, involves supplying emotional energy to other people, displaying feelings in the service of how other people feel. the tendency to fetishize the skills that are cultivated and selected for in formal education as inherently more valuable than all other skills (e.g., manual dexterity, physical strength, emotional attunement).

In the United States, the magnitude of the skills premium in wages has been increasing since the 1970s, and as of 2018, workers with a bachelors degree earned, on average, 1.7 times the wage of those who had completed only high school.