The People Who Are To Choose Them

James Madison | Sociogenomics | Elsewhere: Sectoral Bargaining in California, Fake Gurus, Portfolio

Mar 13, 2025

person standing near table — Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

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I have observed, that gentlemen suppose, that the general legislature will do every mischief they possibly can, and that they will omit to do every thing good which they are authorised to do.
If this were a reasonable supposition, their objections would be good. I consider it reasonable to conclude, that they will as readily do their duty, as deviate from it: Nor do I go on the grounds mentioned by gentlemen on the other side -- that we are to place unlimited confidence in them, and expect nothing but the most exalted integrity and sublime virtue. But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

| James Madison, Virginia Ratifying Convention

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Madison defends the principle of a representative government, stating that we are not left with only the trust in elected officials’ virtue and intelligence. On the contrary, it is the virtue and intelligence of those that choose them who we are to trust.

Implicitly, then, by Madison’s reasoning, any failure arising from the shortcomings of the elected is to be attributed to a shortfall of virtue and intelligence in the electorate.

He says nothing here about what we are to do in the face of such a failure, except by the reapplication of the basic principle: the people must rise to the times, elect better representatives, and cull those with little virtue or debased intelligence. Otherwise, we would have to reconsider representative democracy, and replace it with something else, a different Grand Experiment.

Sociogenomics

I recently encountered sociogenomics, a recently developed scientific field, which Catherine Bliss characterizes like this:

Since the dawn of the genome era society has been moving toward a sociogenomic paradigm—a view of the world that sees all aspects of human biology and being as an interdependent mix of genetic and social factors.

In essence, sociogenomics unties the knot at the heart of the ‘nature versus nurture’ duality.

Dalton Conley lays out the core concept:

Nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.

The expression of genes is influenced by the environment we are surrounded by, ranging from our gut biota to exogamous forces like stress. But, our genetically shaded behaviors also change our environment: if a few members of a high school class are predisposed to become addicted to tobacco, a greatly increased proportion of students take up smoking.

Much of sociogenomics is based on new capabilities in genetic analysis, to find correlations between specific gene variants and observable behaviors. An example by Conley:

Picture a kid who is born with two working copies of what’s known as the sprinter’s gene, ACTN3. By elementary school she might be winning every game of tag, every race, and be chosen first whenever sides are drawn up. You could see how parents and coaches might encourage a kid like that to join an organized sports team and how she would be likely to receive positive feedback for her performance on it, which in turn might motivate her to train harder. By high school she makes varsity track and soccer, and the more she excels, the more coaching and training is made available to her.
Of course, any number of factors might cause her to quit sports — an injury, say, or a toxic team environment. But if she keeps at it, her starting position on a big college team won’t be the result of just her genes or her hard work. It will also be the result of how her genes shaped her environment, influencing the people and opportunities she encountered, and how her environment shaped the way and the degree to which her genes expressed themselves.
It’s a continuous feedback loop, in which neither nature nor nurture is a fixed entity.

These feedback loops are being found by sociogenomics research all over the place. They increasingly rely on identifying and summarizing small genetic influences into ‘polygenic indexes’, and there is a PGI for just about any observable outcome. Again Conley:

Take the PGI for educational attainment — that is, how far we go in school. Research I participated in found that among adults whose scores were in the lowest tenth on that PGI, only 7 percent had finished college. Among those whose scores were in the top tenth, that number was 71 percent. That’s a significant gap.

Think of the sprinter’s gene scenario earlier: the precocious child whose mother discerned an early attraction to reading and responded by spending more time reading with that child. As a result, that child arrives at kindergarten already reading, and their teachers encourage this behavior and praise the child’s efforts. This leads to even more skilled reading of what for others in their cohort would be quite challenging materials, which leads to more instruction, and so on.

(To make this personal, this is my scenario: I was reading when I arrived in kindergarten. In the sixth grade, when I had been sent to the principal’s office, yet again, for being restless in class, he asked me why I was unwilling to color maps in Geography class, and I said I didn’t want to color a map of Europe, I wanted to know more about the countries on the map. He allowed me, thereafter, to ask to go to the library whenever I was bored in class. By the time I graduated 8th grade, I had read every book in the school’s library (including the ‘girl’s books’) and the encyclopedia, through the letter ‘S’. My reading was at an advanced collegiate level at 13, when I was accused of cheating on the standardized reading test because my score was ‘too high’. My mother suggested giving me last year’s test, which the educators hadn’t considered, and which put the issue to rest.)

Conley lays it out:

I worked with the Danish social scientist Asta Breinholt to study how parents interacted with their children. We found that children who have genes that correlate to more success in school evoke more intellectual engagement from their parents than kids in the same family who don’t share these genes. This feedback loop starts as early as 18 months old, long before any formal assessment of academic ability. Babies with a PGI that is associated with greater educational attainment already receive more reading and playtime from parents than their siblings without that same genotype do. And that additional attention, in turn, helps those kids to realize the full potential of those genes, that is, to do well in school. In other words, parents don’t just parent their children — children parent their parents, subtly guided by their genes.

So I was training my mother, who was attuned to these behaviors by her genetic makeup: she went on to earn her M.D. and teach at Harvard Medical School.

That’s the central insight of sociogenomics: Genes alone aren’t enough to determine these outcomes and neither is environment, but it’s not just because nature and nurture both shape the individual. It’s because they both shape each other, with nature influencing the way we experience nurture and nurture influencing the way our nature expresses itself.

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What about sociogenomics at work? Yes, adults are perhaps less likely to respond rapidly to the sort of feedback loops that the girl with the sprinter’s gene did, but people do learn from others on the job, and mentors will naturally gravitate to protégés with an innate sense of drive, analytic reasoning, or creativity. They would then open doors and create opportunities for the protégé. The protégés might find the right spot to apply their particular mindset and influence others in their working group, and so on.

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Researchers in the field report on one of the most salient trends: as more information about genetics becomes available in the future, the ‘density’ of the data increases. This is partly based on the number of individuals included in genetic studies, but also the advances in genetic sequencing, where finer grained data is revealed in individual genomes. There is no telling where this will lead, or what correlations may be discovered.

A few lines from Callie H Burt, from her overview of the field:

We conclude by highlighting perhaps the most important ongoing challenge: conducting, interpreting, and communicating research at the intersection of genetics and social science responsibly. While these obligations apply to all researchers, researchers in social-science genomics bear additional responsibilities in light of how difficult it is to correctly interpret genetic associations—as highlighted by the extensive discussion of interpretation throughout this review—as well as the enduring legacy of eugenics (Rutherford, 2022). While far from sufficient, terminology can help to some degree. Researchers should be cognizant of the potential social harms of, and be especially careful about conducting and communicating, research that could be (mis)understood as comparing ethnic, racial, or other groups on socially valued phenotypes, such as cognitive performance or income. Given how easy it is to slip into genetic determinism, we believe it is helpful to continually remind readers of research papers that the effects of individual genetic variants are small (e.g., Chabris et al., 2015), can operate through environmental pathways (Jencks, 1980), and have no obvious bearing on the effectiveness of interventions (Goldberger, 1979).

Just as researchers should be aware of these considerations, organizations should be cautious when evaluating employees' genetic information about hypothetically advantageous traits in the workplace.

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Still, I am immensely hopeful that the upset of the ‘nature versus nurture’ dichotomy will significantly impact our thinking about the interconnection of our genes and our environment. It’s a ‘glass half full/half empty’ moment.

The reality about the glass is that it is full: half full of water, half full of air.

Sociogenomics is that sort of zen-like shift in observation: the Möbius strip does have only one side, although it is a three-dimensional object.

Sectoral Bargaining in California

In Effects of the $20 California Fast-Food Minimum Wage, Michael Reich reports updated estimates on the impacts of a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers:

Our updated findings include: an estimated wage increase of 8 to 9 percent for workers covered by the policy; no spillovers to non-covered workers; no negative effects on fast-food employment; and price increases of about 1.5 percent— or about 6 cents on a four-dollar hamburger. The number of fastfood establishments grew faster in California than in the rest of the U.S. I also identify questionable methods in a recent industry report that claims the policy led to substantial negative employment effects and large price increases. That report cherry picks its numbers and does not use modern causal identification methods, casting doubt on its claims.

So the next time some clown spouts off about how raising the minimum wage of fast food workers will kill American businesses, you now have the real science.

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Fake Gurus

I loved this piece by Paul Sweeney: FAKE GURUS: SIMON SINEK & THE SOUNDBITE SELLERS.

In my view, even more suspect than the genre of ‘success’ books is the rise of the self-appointed ‘leadership guru’ whose simplistic soundbites are slavishly accepted as genius by their millions of adoring fans. What sets the self-appointed guru apart from the success genre author is that at least many authors of success books made some attempt to back up their theories with research. In contrast, gurus convince us that their dazzling insights alone should change how we view the world.

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