David Epstein’s The Sports Gene talks about several areas where it’s a feedback loop between nature and nurture:
- One’s starting point, of how much an untrained or unpracticed person is able to do something, is a big influence on whether someone even starts down that formal track.
- Simple access to training resources is a big determinant of whether a person will try those things. That’s why pro hockey players tend to be born in the early months of the year, or why so many bobsledders are from Upstate New York.
- People respond differently to training, and how quickly one improves influences a lot of whether that person intends to continue putting in the work.
- People’s ceilings are in different places. For many sports, being world class literally requires certain genetic coding: very long limbs, very accurate eyesight, very high Achilles tendons, certain biological adaptations for altitude or holding one’s breath, etc. Someone who is only slightly taller than average will struggle to make it into the NBA, no matter how much practice.
- The internal drive to practice possibly has a genetic component, too.
But outside of all of that, it also matters whether we’re talking about becoming a world class athlete or just a hobbyist. For weekend warriors running a 5k in a pack of thousands of participants who paid to be there, practice and training are going to be far more important predictors of their performance than any kind of genetic or innate talent. The genetic or innate bottlenecks might show up in the Olympics, but not the amateur hobbyist runners.
Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.
Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.
They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.
As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.
So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.
Here’s a write up of the collaboration