Looks like another round of the nurture versus nature argument.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/your-genes-wont-make-you-rich/
That’s because “Rich Dad” teaches better lessons for success than “Poor Dad”.
From the article:
Okay, but perhaps they were smarter and had other important attributes, like an understanding of what it takes to raise a successful child. Poor people who give up their children for adoption probably possess certain characteristics that poor people who keep their children do not. Maybe that adds to the adopted child’s future success.
As an aside, a friend who lived in Sweden for 20 years told me there were no adopted children there, since the liberal view of abortion pretty much assured that no unwanted children were born. That may have been a generalization.
^^ LOL, that is very much a generalization that’s incorrect.
“Sweden has the highest per capita proportion of international adoptees in the world. In practice, this means that the vast majority of Swedes have personal experience of adoption. There is a good chance of having a relative, friend or neighbour who has adopted or is an adoptee. Adoption is an accepted and well-established way of forming a family in Sweden.”
http://www.adoptionscentrum.se/en/Adoptions/Adoptions-in-Sweden/
^^LOL, well, that cite is not inconsistent with what I was told and wrote. If it is true that there are few unwanted children born in Sweden (due to liberal abortion policy), then of course those who want to adopt are going to have to look outside the country, and of course the proportion of international adoptees in Sweden would be the highest in the world. LOL
Bay, I’m not an expert, but I think the adoption rate of international children may have a lot more to do with the stringent rules of Swedish adoption agencies. We have the same thing in this country, where people have access to Americam-born children, but it’s just easier to circumvent the red tape and adopt privately.
^I am curious and will ask my Swedish friend when she comes back from her trip to Sweden.
Meanwhile, 800-1,000 per year come from mostly Asia and Latin America.
BB,
Why do you think your friend will know anything about adoptions in Sweden? My friend lived there 20 years and turned to international adoption (here in the U.S.) due to lack of available Swedish born adoptees.
I tried to read the study but found it ridiculous. Maybe I’m missing something.
Why would anyone believe that this kind of study would uncover some relationship about “genetics”? What is the relationship between intelligence and obtaining wealth? What is the relationship between your potential intelligence and your ability to achieve your potential due to environment?
Second, 2519 kids sounds like a lot but 20 years is a long time. Was 1950 in Sweden the same as 1970 in Sweden (and then forward because that’s just the period in which the kids were adopted)? What if kids adopted in the 1950’s were raised into a more stable economy? Were the inheritance and gift tax laws the same all the way along? How can one adjust for the incentives to give more to a child as death tax rates go up? (You could examine a large sample and extrapolate but the error potential would be large when applied to a smaller population.)
Third, what if adopted parents specifically avoided selecting children with difficulties that can’t be avoided when you raise your own? This was mentioned in the 538 piece in the context of “random”, but it’s really about whatever bias is in the sample, which means if I were creating a prior for Bayesian analysis, I’d assume the adopted children weren’t randomly selected but were partially selected by parents and partially selected by agencies to fit the adoptive parents’ and the childs’ needs. Lets say you have bright child up for adoption or a baby born to an educated couple of young grad students who can’t raise it: wouldn’t you as an agency look for a family that might bring out this child’s potential? I don’t know, but I assume yes and I know that friends who adopted here specifically chose children born to very bright people (and the birth parents did the same).
According to my anecdotal source, Sweden (and other European countries) do not allow arranged adoptions. If you want to adopt a Swedish child, you put your name on the list and get whomever comes up next. This was one of the reasons (besides lack of available Swedish children) my friend chose to adopt in the US. The birth mother was a European friend of hers, and neither Sweden nor her friend’s country would allow them to arrange the specific adoption. The US allows this, so they both temporarily moved here for that purpose. (Baby born in US)
My point being, the Swedish adoptions probably were truly “random” in that respect.
“Why do you think your friend will know anything about adoptions in Sweden?”
Uhm, maybe because she lived and worked there for most of her adult life and interacted with other parents? If your knowledge comes from your friend, why not add another person’s anecdotes?
That’s fine. You only divulged that she was on a visit to Seeden, which is why I asked.
@Lergnom Apparently, not only did you not read the paper, but you don’t seem to understand some basic things about how studies of this type work.
Adoption studies are one of the tools we have to help parse out nature/nurture questions.
This may not be the best example, but
Nicole Richie was adopted by Lionel Richie. Would her path be the same if she hadn’t been adopted? She seemed fairly wild, would she have continued down a destructive path had she not had the means to pull her out.
My immediate thought is “Duh!”
The children of wealthier people have more money. How is this news? Perhaps if they had combined this with a study comparing the wealth of adoptees with their non-adopted siblings (the birth children of their adoptive parents) I might have found this at least a little more interesting.
This gives me hope for my adopted children, with two of three having dropped out of college. The one that finished has a birthfather, who also finished college, and is fairly successful (both son and birthfather). Wealth obviously helps just about any situation, but it amazes me how strong “nature” can be.
This is nothing new, it is very much along the lines of talent is overrated, Malcolm Gladwell’s work and so forth. Wealth, or other measures of success, depend on a lot of factors, and for example, someone who genetically is let’s say gifted with a very high IQ, doesn’t mean they are going to be successful, groups like Mensa are full of people who led pretty ordinary lives, who never really achieved “success” in the way we are talking about (doesn’t mean they weren’t successful, just that they didn’t stand out in ways many would consider a success). Nurturing has a lot to do with that, if the parents you grow up with are afraid of everything, afraid of failure, want you to take the safe path, you likely won’t grow up to be entrepeneur, you’ll likely end up an accountant or something; if you parents were entrepeneurial or were risk takers, you likely will learn it is okay to do that. A brilliant set of twins, adopted out, might end where one because a good engineer but does nothing spectacular, because he was encouraged to take the solid path, the other one might end up founding a major company or an incredible charity…someone of relatively normal intellectual gifts can do profound things, and to be honest, a lot of very well off people, self made or otherwise, are not necessarily intellectual giants (some are, of course, many are pretty ordinary). The skills, the emotional attributes, are very much environmental. Intelligence obviously does things, but unless guided, can wither on the vine, whereas someone who isn’t quite as brilliant, ends up doing spectacular things.