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They continue: > (i.e., within-pair genetic differences are not correlated with the within-pair environmental differences; see e.g. Stenberg (2013) who stresse
by evrydayhustling 7y ago
They continue:
> (i.e., within-pair genetic differences are not
correlated with the within-pair environmental differences; see e.g. Stenberg (2013) who
stresses the importance of this assumption for the interpretation of heritability estimates),
and iv)
So this is only about whether sibling differences are correlated with the environment -- which seems much more reasonable. On the other hand, the very next one is problematic:
> [We assume] there is no assortative mating. The last assumption would not hold if the genotypes of the parents were correlated (Posthuma et al. 2003).
Tendency of parents to have some genetic sorting seems both easy to measure and quite likely - why not dig in to its impact?
Finally, another thing that makes the result hard to generalize (emphasis added):
> We show that in the relatively equitable economic and institutional environment of Finland, the share of variance of lifetime earnings explained by education is clearly less than a tenth (in our data).
The authors acknowledge that they were measuring the size of effect in an environment that has far less variation in the variable than many. This seems like a good place to confirm the existence of an effect, but a bad place to be confident of its size, and a worse place from which to generalize about more heterogenous environments. Compare Finland's GINI index (income concentration) to US, UK, or China to get an idea of how much more variation there is in those societies: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/compare#country=cn:fi:gb:us https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/comp...