American Economic Review is arguably the most prestigious economics journal in the world. So it was especially worrying to see them publish Ashraf and Galor's thesis claiming a hump-shaped relationship between genetic diversity and economic development. The claim has a certain plausibility to it. Very high diversity can be expected to generate ethnic fragmentation, presumably a catalyst for politico-economic dysfunction. Societies with extremely low diversity, assuming straightforward biological reductionism, can be expected to generate fewer innovations than Goldilocks societies with near-optimal levels of genetic diversity. Ashraf and Galor have shown that the hump-shaped relationship is detectable even after controlling for a number of biogeographic conditioners. Yet, the thesis remains unconvincing on both theoretical and empirical grounds.
What Hump-Shaped Relationship?
What Hump-Shaped Relationship?
What Hump-Shaped Relationship?
American Economic Review is arguably the most prestigious economics journal in the world. So it was especially worrying to see them publish Ashraf and Galor's thesis claiming a hump-shaped relationship between genetic diversity and economic development. The claim has a certain plausibility to it. Very high diversity can be expected to generate ethnic fragmentation, presumably a catalyst for politico-economic dysfunction. Societies with extremely low diversity, assuming straightforward biological reductionism, can be expected to generate fewer innovations than Goldilocks societies with near-optimal levels of genetic diversity. Ashraf and Galor have shown that the hump-shaped relationship is detectable even after controlling for a number of biogeographic conditioners. Yet, the thesis remains unconvincing on both theoretical and empirical grounds.