Genetic Advantage and Equality of Opportunity in Education: Two Definitions and an Empirical Application

Gene-Environment Interplay in the Social Sciences

“…On the other hand, they find a negative PGI-SES interaction when predicting high school graduation. Consistent with this finding, Pereira (2021) finds no evidence of an interaction between the educational attainment PGI and childhood SES for total years of education in the HRS. Using the same dataset, Lin (2020) finds a negative interaction between a different measure of family SES and the educational attainment polygenic index for the probability of advancing to the next educational level, suggesting that the genetic effect becomes smaller when parental education increases.…”

“…In the inequality of opportunity framework, the existence of 'innate ability' or 'talents' has long been acknowledged (e.g., Rawls, 1971). Genetic data can be used to estimate the share of 'genetic advantage ' Pereira (2021) or 'genetic lottery' (Harden, 2021b) more directly. While it is unclear whether this genetic component should be perceived as a fair or unfair source of advantage, it is clear that genetic components matter for the realization of outcomes that society considers important.…”

“…1 However, over time, the role of genetic variation in shaping life outcomes has become increasingly accepted. 2 Early instances of this interest explored the genetic roots of human behavior (Becker, 1976;Hirshleifer, 1977) and equality of opportunity (Rawls (1971), see also Harden (2021b) and Pereira (2021)) as well as the inter-generational transmission of human capital (Behrman and Taubman, 1976;Bowles and Nelson, 1974), where 'genetic talents' are considered one of the sources of inequality, or of the intergenerational persistence in human capital. 3 More recently, economists have sought to quantify the role of genes on educational and health outcomes (see, e.g., Miller et al, 1995;Barth et al, 2020).…”