Discussion of a recent paper by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg:

Wacziarg’s most recent work relates genetic distance between populations to differences in economic outcomes, such as their income per capita, to better understand the process by which innovations diffuse from one culture to the next. He found that countries whose populations are the most remote genetically from the populations that developed major innovations over the past 200 years are the least well off. While geographical remoteness also plays a role, it is genetic distance that most strongly correlates with how rich or poor a nation will be. The research also suggests that the main way genetic distance hinders the diffusion of development is by creating cultural barriers. The greater the genetic distance, the greater the cultural barriers are to the flow of ideas and technologies…

Genetic distance is therefore a good indicator of how long ago two groups went their separate ways. “Greater time apart corresponds with greater cultural differences between these groups also, because they’ve had a longer period in which to develop different languages, customs, norms, and habits,” Wacziarg says…

Wacziarg is adamant, however, that such findings do not mean that certain groups are more genetically prone to wealth or poverty. “We’re not looking at what kind of genes are involved, we’re just looking at genetic distance between groups,” says Wacziarg, who has conducted one study on the diffusion of development with Enrico Spolaore of Tufts University. “There have been tremendous reversals in fortune over time. A thousand years ago the richest countries were China and India. Europe was a mess—in the middle of the Dark Ages. If there were something genetic about being European that made you rich, one would suspect it would have made you rich consistently throughout time.”

The relationship between genetic distance and economic status is a function of the closeness of a given group to the locus of an innovation or new invention—something he discerned by comparing the wealth of various groups in different time periods. “Europe in the 19th century benefited economically from developments that led to the Industrial Revolution, for example,” he says. “People in China, say, who didn’t have the same language, norms, habits, and values, took 150 years to start benefiting from those developments. They were physically and culturally far from the invention.”

Hat tip to Pienso.