Zip Code is Not Destiny

   The left is committed to social explanations for everything--especially (but not only) human capacities and actions.

   As I've long maintained (and as Pinker notes in The Blank Slate), this is largely a moral or political position, not a particularly scientific one. People who acknowledge e.g. genetic factors influencing intelligence are racist, racist. REEEEE...

   So the left was very excited by the claim that childhood Zip Codes are better predictors of success later in life than facts about parents...

   But, pretty predictably, that turns out to be false...

   In actual fact (though this isn't asserted in the article) genetics seems to account for about half of intelligence, and intelligence is an important factor in success. Parental attitudes and actions also matter. As does the rest of the social environment (roughly: Zip Code). The normal, rational view is that all such things matter. But the left is ideologically committed to social monocausalism.