7 Comments
Jul 13Liked by Sasha Gusev

Your substack is outstanding.

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“With 10 embryos, one can get a gain equivalent to ~10 months of schooling if selecting on educational attainment”.

Isn’t this huge? In fact, is there any environmental intervention that delivers such a big impact?

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It's roughly the increase in average years of schooling that's observed every 15-20 years in the US or UK (https://barrolee.github.io/BarroLeeDataSet/DataLeeLee.html), so equivalent to the environmental intervention of ~waves hands~ whatever we've been doing.

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That’s a false comparison. Whatever gives you an extra 10 months of education now, is not the same as “wait 20 years, and then everybody gets more education”.

Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself. If it were, we should just mandate that everybody goes to university. Problem solved! We’ve made everybody smarter! Alas, it’s not that simple.

If, counterfactually, it were that simple, then a head start equivalent to being born 20 years later would still be a massive advantage that people would give their eye teeth for.

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>>That’s a false comparison

I don't think so, the point of the comparison is that kids born today have the equivalent of optimal embryo selection gains compared to kids born 15-20 years ago because of ~waves hands~ all the things we've been doing as a society to improve access to education. And, to be clear, embryo selection is not going to give you 10 months of education now either. The scores have not reached the within-family heritability (and would require GWAS of at least several million families to do so) and the embryo selection process is not yet efficient enough to reliably get 10 healthy embryos. It *is* possible to give your kids a tutor for 1 month a year though, and probably cheaper than IVF + sequencing and you don't have to worry about the genetic correlation with SCZ/BD.

>>Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself.

This is like saying `hours spent exercising per week` is just proxying fitness but isn't the valuable thing itself. The relationship between education and it's outcomes has likewise been shown to be bi-directional using a variety of different causal inference approaches, both genetic and non-genetic.

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None of the causal studies of education measure the causal effect of waiting 20 years! In fact, there is evidence that the marginal benefits of education have been declining as it has become more widespread. Sure, hiring a tutor might be a good thing… Do we have evidence that it gets you an extra year of education?

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The Mendelian Randomization studies are conducted in older adults and are essentially structured this way: take genetic variation that influences educational attainment in early adulthood then look at it's effect on downstream outcomes in late adulthood. Many of the studies in Ritchie et al. 2018 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253) had several decades of follow-up and of course Ritchie et al. 2015 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25775112/) looked at outcomes at age 70.

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