Luke Ford

In her 2010 paper on diverging family structure, Amy Wax names the traits and stops. Discount rate, executive function, self-control, future orientation, conscientiousness, cognitive ability. She correlates them with education, occupation, and demographic group. She observes that they determine who thrives under normative deregulation. Then she declines to say where they come from. She knows what the next question is. Everyone reading the paper knows what the next question is. She writes that the source of the observed differences, whether grounded in culture or individual characteristics, warrants further investigation, and leaves the sentence to do the work of a chapter.

Prudence explains part of it. A working paper for an Elgar volume on family law cannot carry a full treatment of behavior genetics and survive as a paper about family law. Any paper that takes on the heritability of self-regulation across populations becomes a paper about that, and the local-versus-global model gets read as a vehicle rather than as a claim. Wax had already written enough to guarantee hostility. Adding the origins question would have guaranteed that nothing else in the paper got discussed.

Legal scholarship has no procedure for adjudicating this kind of empirical dispute. A law review cannot referee a quarrel among statistical geneticists. What it can do is cite, and citation in a contested field is taken as endorsement. Wax’s choices were to cite the hereditarian literature and be read as endorsing it, cite the environmentalist literature and be read as endorsing that, or cite neither. She cited neither, with two exceptions buried in footnotes: a 1981 Sandra Scarr volume on race, social class, and individual differences in IQ, and a reference to average racial and ethnic differences in personality profiles on employment screening tests.

Her argument runs: a latent distribution of self-regulatory capacity existed before 1960; strong norms masked it; deregulation revealed it; the revealed differential now compounds across generations. A theory that explains how a latent difference becomes manifest after a regime change is incomplete without a theory of where the latent difference came from. Without one, the framework risks circularity. Populations differ in outcomes because they differ in decision style; we infer the decision style from the outcomes.

Start with what the three literatures say.

The first literature, on within-population heritability of cognitive ability and personality, is about as settled as anything in social science. Twin, adoption, and sibling designs across many Western samples converge on adult heritability estimates for measured cognitive ability in the range of fifty to eighty percent, with the estimate rising through childhood and adolescence and stabilizing in adulthood. Personality traits, including conscientiousness, run lower, in the range of forty to fifty percent. These are variance-partitioning results within the populations sampled, and they do not say what any individual’s score is caused by. They are also not seriously contested by anyone who works with the data. Robert Plomin (b. 1948) has spent a career establishing them and Eric Turkheimer, who dislikes almost every use to which they are put, does not dispute them.

The second literature, on between-population differences, is where the confidence collapses. The classic point from Richard Lewontin (1929-2021) holds: within-group heritability licenses no inference about between-group causes. Two batches of seed with identical genetic variance, grown in different soils, produce mean differences that are entirely environmental while heritability within each batch stays high.

The obvious response is that molecular genetics should settle what quantitative genetics cannot. It has not. Polygenic scores for cognitive ability and educational attainment, built from genome-wide association studies conducted almost entirely in European-ancestry samples, lose most of their predictive power when applied to other ancestry groups. The loss comes from differences in linkage disequilibrium patterns, differences in allele frequencies, and confounding by population structure that within-sample controls do not remove. Comparing mean polygenic scores across ancestry groups, which several authors have attempted, is a procedure that statistical geneticists reject on the grounds that that the tools currently cannot do the job.

Against the persistence of measured gaps stands the Flynn effect. James Flynn (1934-2020) documented gains in measured cognitive ability across the twentieth century of roughly three points per decade in many countries, which is to say that the environmental headroom on population means exceeds the size of the differences under dispute. Whatever produced those gains was not genetic change. Some portion of the American Black-White gap has narrowed over the same period, by amounts that vary by test and cohort. Transracial adoption studies exist on both sides of the question and all of them are small, old, and confounded.

The between-population question is open, the confidence expressed on both sides exceeds what the data support, and anyone who tells you it is settled is telling you about his coalition.

The behavior-genetic literature does contain a finding that wounds Wax’s argument. Wax’s fallback, and the fallback her sympathetic readers reach for, is the developmental loop. Family structures produce the developmental environments of children; those children acquire the traits; the traits reproduce the family structures. She writes that restraint, moderation, emotional control, trustworthiness, persistence, and sobriety develop best when children live with both biological parents in stable marital homes. The loop generates path-dependent equilibria without invoking any heritable substrate difference, which is exactly why it appeals.

The trouble is that the loop specifies a shared-environment effect, and shared environment is the component that behavior genetics has had the hardest time finding. In standard designs, the shared environment contribution to adult cognitive ability in Western samples shrinks toward zero. For personality traits including conscientiousness it is near zero at most ages. Siblings raised in the same home resemble each other on these traits at about the rate predicted by their genetic relatedness and little more. Adoptive siblings, who share the home and not the genes, correlate near zero as adults. If growing up with a married father transmitted self-command through the home environment, the designs that measure home environment should find it. They mostly do not.

The dissolution is available. Judith Rich Harris (1938-2018), in The Nurture Assumption, argued that the near-zero shared environment finding does not mean environment fails to socialize children. It means the socializing environment is the peer group. Children calibrate conduct to the group they expect to live among, and the calibration happens outside the family. From the standpoint of a twin design conducted within neighborhoods, peer influence loads onto the non-shared component, or vanishes into the residual, because siblings in the same home often occupy different peer positions and because the design cannot see variance that a whole community shares.

Harris’s account fits Wax’s framework better than Wax’s own account does. A normative regime operates at the level of a community. The pre-1960s architecture Wax describes worked because everyone in the neighborhood was following the same rule, which is what made following it cheap. That is a community-level variance component, and a twin study conducted inside a single normative environment measures nothing about it. Ask a twin design what fraction of variance in age at first intercourse is attributable to shared environment in Utah, and the answer tells you about differences among Utah families.

Shared environment estimates differ sharply by outcome. For measured intelligence and for personality traits, shared environment washes out. For behaviors like religiosity, political attitudes, smoking initiation, age at first intercourse, and fertility timing, shared environment persists into adulthood at levels that are not trivial. This is the structure Wax’s theory requires. Norms govern conduct, and conduct is the thing on which community-level environment continues to register.

Trait distribution may be substantially heritable, and the question of its cross-population structure may remain open, and neither fact touches the claim that a normative regime converts a given trait distribution into a given behavioral distribution. Wax’s argument is about a conversion. The origins question determines the ceiling on what environmental intervention might achieve.

Behavior geneticists have a term for what a strong normative regime does: it suppresses gene-environment correlation. When a rule pushes everyone toward the same conduct regardless of disposition, dispositional variance stops expressing itself in behavior, and the heritability of the behavioral outcome falls. When the rule goes, dispositional variance expresses itself, and the heritability of the outcome rises. The same logic appears in the Scarr-Rowe finding, where heritability of cognitive ability is lower in low-socioeconomic-status American samples, and where the interaction shows up less consistently in European samples with stronger institutional floors. Constraint compresses heritability. Freedom releases it.

Wax’s thesis predicts that the heritability of family-structure outcomes should have risen across birth cohorts. For Americans born in the 1930s and 1940s, who married under the old architecture, twin designs should find low heritability for age at first marriage, marital stability, and nonmarital childbearing, because the rule was carrying almost everyone to the same place regardless of individual disposition. For Americans born after 1960, who chose under moral improvisation, the same designs should find substantially higher heritability for the same outcomes, because the outcome now tracks the dispositions the rule used to override. The rise should be steeper in populations where the old architecture collapsed most completely, and shallower in populations that retained their own norm-producing institutions.

This is testable now. The Minnesota, Virginia, Swedish, Danish, and Australian twin registries hold cohorts on both sides of the break, with marital and fertility histories attached. Someone has probably examined a piece of it under a different description, since cohort variation in heritability of fertility timing has been studied. Nobody, as far as I can find, has framed the test as an evaluation of a normative-deregulation hypothesis, and the framing is what turns a demographic curiosity into a discriminating test. A structural account predicts no cohort change in heritability, since it locates causation in wages and sex ratios that fall on families rather than on individual dispositions. Wax’s account predicts a rise. The two theories separate on a number that a graduate student could compute.

Where the origins question bites is on policy. If the trait distribution responds to environment, environmental intervention can compress it, and the pessimism about the post-deregulation equilibrium is overstated. If the distribution has a substantial heritable component that intervention cannot reach, the only arrangement that compensates for the differential is one that restores external rules, and the argument for restoration is arithmetic.

A paper that names the traits, correlates them with racial groups, and refuses to say where they come from leaves the reader to supply the missing term. Readers tend to supply the one that is convenient. The hostile reader concludes she means heredity and is hiding it. The friendly reader concludes she means heredity and is being brave about it. Both conclusions are inferences from a gap, and both are unfalsifiable, since she wrote nothing to check them against. Silence in a combustible field transfers authorship of the missing paragraph to whoever wants to write it.

The alternative she had available was to state the disjunction and show that her argument survives both branches. That paragraph runs about two hundred words. It says the origins of the trait distribution are contested. It says molecular methods have not settled the contest and may not for some time. It says the descriptive claim holds under either resolution, and that the policy implications diverge, with the environmental branch supporting intervention and the heritable branch supporting institutional restoration. Writing it would have cost her the accusation of hiding something and gained her the accusation of raising it. Whether that trade made sense in 2010 is a judgment about the field she was writing in rather than about the evidence, and the field has moved enough since that the calculation might come out differently now.

Nobody knows the cross-population structure of the traits Wax describes. The tools that could answer the question do not work across ancestry groups yet, and the inferential shortcut from within-group heritability is invalid. The within-population heritability of the traits is high and not in dispute. The shared-environment finding rules out the simplest family-transmission story and leaves community-level normative transmission standing, which is the story Wax needs and the one she should have told.

Her framework, stripped of the origins question, then makes a prediction.

The heritability of family-structure outcomes rose across the birth cohorts that straddle the deregulation. The reasoning is ordinary behavior genetics. When a rule carries everyone to the same conduct regardless of temperament, temperament stops appearing in the outcome. A man with a high discount rate and a man with a low one both marry at twenty-three, both stay, and both have their children inside the marriage, because the alternatives carry costs neither will pay. The dispositional variance sits there with nowhere to express. Heritability of the outcome runs low, and the shared environment, meaning the community rule the siblings grew up under, does the work. Remove the rule and the same two men diverge, because the outcome now tracks the disposition and nothing else is steering. Heritability rises.

The test follows from the claim. Take twin pairs born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, who married under the old architecture. Take twin pairs born in the late 1960s and the 1970s, who chose under moral improvisation. Run the same variance decomposition on both cohorts for age at first marriage, marital dissolution, age at first birth, and childbearing outside marriage. Wax predicts a substantially larger additive genetic component in the later cohort and a substantially smaller shared-environment component. The Minnesota, Virginia, Danish, Swedish, and Australian registries hold cohorts on both sides of the break with marital and fertility histories attached.

Wilson predicts nothing of the kind. Wages, sex ratios, and the disappearance of manufacturing work fall on neighborhoods and families, and siblings share neighborhoods and families. A structural account predicts stable heritability across cohorts, or a rise in the shared-environment component as the economic shock lands. Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz point the same way, since a technological shock to contraceptive availability reaches both twins in a pair. Geronimus points the same way. Two families of theory that have argued past each other for forty years separate on a number, and the number is computable from data already collected.

A second prediction rides on the first. The rise should run steepest in the populations where the old architecture collapsed hardest and flattest in the populations that kept their own norm-producing institutions. Any registry carrying religious affiliation can check it, and the check discriminates between the normative account and any account that locates the cause in traits alone.

Two things about the result before anyone runs it. A within-cohort heritability estimate is a within-population number in both cohorts, so the finding says nothing about differences between groups in either direction. That is the feature rather than the limitation. The test can confirm Wax’s thesis while confirming nothing that either camp in the origins dispute wants to carry away. And some of the demography may already exist under another description, since work on Danish twins has reported rising heritability of fertility outcomes for post-1950 cohorts. Anyone building on this should read that literature before claiming the ground is empty. What has not been done is the framing: nobody has treated the cohort shift in heritability as a test of normative deregulation against its structural rivals.

Notes

On Wax’s own record. The paper under discussion is Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. The two footnote citations described above appear at notes 76 and 99 of that draft. The earlier statement of the demographic argument is “Engines of Inequality: Class, Race, and Family Structure,” 41 Family Law Quarterly 567 (2007). Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2009) is the book where she walks through the exogenous explanations for the test score gap and declines the hereditarian step, at https://archive.org/details/racewrongsremedi0000waxa. The paper that shows the agnosticism doing positive work is “The Poverty of the Neuroscience of Poverty: Policy Payoff or False Promise?“, 57 Jurimetrics 239 (2017), at https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1711/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2888600. Her argument there turns on the point that imaging research cannot separate innate from environmental causes of brain characteristics, which she uses against interventionist optimism while asserting nothing about origins. “Educating the Disadvantaged,” National Affairs (Summer 2017), sits at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/educating-the-disadvantaged. Her faculty listing, which still carries rational choice and family structure among works in progress, is at https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/awax/.

On the within-population findings. Eric Turkheimer, “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean,” 9 Current Directions in Psychological Science 160 (2000), states the two propositions the essay leans on: traits are heritable, and the effect of being raised in the same family runs smaller than the effect of genes. Journal version at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8721.00084, author copy at https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/eric-turkheimer/files/three_laws_of_behavior_8.pdf. Turkheimer’s own reading of the laws differs sharply from the use hereditarian writers make of them, and his Substack is the place to see him say so. Christopher Chabris and colleagues added a fourth law in 2015, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721415580430. For the heritability estimates and their rise with age, Robert Plomin and Ian Deary, “Genetics and Intelligence Differences: Five Special Findings,” Molecular Psychiatry (2014), at https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105, and Thomas Bouchard’s account of the age gradient at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/wilson-effect-the-increase-in-heritability-of-iq-with-age/FF406CC4CF286D78AF72C9E7EF9B5E3F.

On the shared-environment problem and its resolution. Judith Rich Harris, “Where Is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development,” 102 Psychological Review 458 (1995), and The Nurture Assumption (Free Press, 1998), carry the argument that the socializing environment is the peer group. Harris is the least-cited figure in this dispute relative to her usefulness, largely because both camps read her as conceding to the other. On the interaction between socioeconomic position and heritability, see the Scarr-Rowe literature and the failure to replicate it outside the United States: Ken Hanscombe and colleagues, “Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Intelligence,” PLoS ONE (2012), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270016/. The Dickens and Flynn model of environmental multipliers, which explains how high heritability coexists with large environmental movement in population means, sits here.

On why the cross-population question stays open. The logical point is Richard Lewontin’s, most accessibly in his 1970 reply to Arthur Jensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For the technical reason molecular methods cannot currently answer it, see Alicia Martin and colleagues, “Clinical Use of Current Polygenic Risk Scores May Exacerbate Health Disparities,” Nature Genetics (2019), at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-019-0379-x, with the open preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/441261v3, and the companion survey of the field’s ancestry composition at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11112-0. More recent work shows prediction accuracy falling continuously along the ancestry continuum rather than in discrete population steps, at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06079-4, which further undercuts any procedure that compares group mean scores. A recent review of the open problems in portability is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68565-3. For the skeptical case stated at full strength, Jonathan Kaplan and colleagues, “Genes, Heritability, ‘Race’, and Intelligence,” Genes (2022), at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/13/2/346.

On the cohort-heritability test, which requires the most care. The relevant literature exists and it points in the predicted direction, so the honest framing is that the demography has been partly done and the argument has not. Hans-Peter Kohler, Joseph Lee Rodgers, and Kaare Christensen, “Is Fertility Behavior in Our Genes? Findings from a Danish Twin Study,” 25 Population and Development Review 253 (1999), and the same authors’ “Between Nurture and Nature: The Shifting Determinants of Female Fertility in Danish Twin Cohorts, 1870-1968,” 49 Social Biology 218 (2002), at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14652919/, report that genetic influence on female fertility runs high in cohorts born around 1880, falls through the middle of the twentieth century, and rises again for cohorts born after 1955. They tie the movement to changing socioeconomic and normative conditions rather than to normative deregulation as such. Daniel Briley and colleagues, “Genotype by Cohort Interaction on Completed Fertility and Age at First Birth,” Behavior Genetics (2015), at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9693-3, extends the cohort analysis. The Danish twin fertility design is at https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/38/1/29/170416/Behavior-genetic-modeling-of-human-fertility, and a two-registry treatment of completed fertility at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-016-9805-3.

Anyone running the test should read Michael Rutter’s skeptical chapter in Offspring: Human Fertility Behavior in Biodemographic Perspective (National Academies Press, 2003), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/, which argues that secular trends in heritability estimates have proved inconsistent across traits and countries and that the interpretive temptation runs ahead of the evidence. His example is the rise in heritability of educational attainment in Norway for males and not females over a period when opportunity widened for both. That objection applies to the prediction advanced here with full force, and the prediction is worth more if it survives the objection than if it never meets it. Note also that the existing work covers fertility outcomes rather than marriage timing, marital dissolution, and childbearing outside marriage, and covers Denmark rather than the United States, where the normative collapse the argument describes ran furthest.

Further reading. On the older quantitative-genetic critique, David Layzer, “Heritability Analyses of IQ Scores: Science or Numerology?“, Science (1974), at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.183.4131.1259, states the case against inference from heritability estimates in a form that most later criticism restates. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023), carry the descriptive picture forward from where Wax leaves it. Orlando Patterson’s writing on culture and agency, and William Julius Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report in the opening chapter of The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), supply the disciplinary context for the omission this essay examines.

The phrase “moral economy” comes from two authors. E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) used it in 1971 for the customary expectations that governed what an eighteenth-century English crowd would tolerate from a grain market. A merchant could hold a legal right to charge what the market would bear and still violate the moral economy, because the offense lay in breaching an unwritten understanding about what people owed one another. Lorraine Daston (b. 1951) carried the term into the history of science in 1995, defining a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values that regulates practice from the inside. She insisted on two features. Such economies are historically specific, arising and dissolving with the disciplines they govern. And they live in the practitioner, who experiences them as the sense that a finding smells wrong.

Robert Merton (1910-2003) described the scientific ethos in terms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Those are rules for evaluating claims once claims are on the table. A moral economy operates earlier. It is a schedule of prices attached to hypotheses. Two explanations can carry comparable empirical support and impose sharply different costs on the scholar who advances them.

Contemporary social science has such an economy, and Amy Wax’s 2010 paper on family structure violates it. What produced the hostility was the sense that the paper was doing something illegitimate with the materials.

The central rule it broke was that responsibility flows uphill while causation flows downhill.

When certain people had bad outcomes, explanations that locate the cause in institutions, markets, discrimination, history, neighborhoods, schools, employers, or policy carry a presumption of legitimacy. Explanations that locate any part of the causal chain in genetics, behavior, norms, preferences, family organization, self-command, or cognition face a surcharge. The first class directs attention toward actors with power. The second appears to blame the victim.

The surcharge shows up as a difference in the price of evidence, and Wax’s own review of her field displays it. The marriageable-men hypothesis of William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) attributes the collapse of Black marriage to the disappearance of stable working-class employment. By the estimates of demographers across the methodological spectrum, male earning power and sex-ratio imbalance account for somewhere between five and twenty-five percent of the racial gap, with several estimates far lower. The hypothesis explains a fifth of the phenomenon at its best, and it remains the default account on syllabi. Arline Geronimus’s argument that early nonmarital childbearing constitutes an adaptive response to compressed life expectancy rests on a restricted counterfactual, comparing early nonmarital births to later nonmarital births while never comparing nonmarital to marital, on a sample unrepresentative of the population it describes. It circulated for two decades. Neither survives a week at that standard of fit if the conclusion runs the other way.

Scientific racism, eugenics, and theories of inherited inferiority gave behavioral and genetic explanation a bad reputation after the Nazis. Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students displaced that anthropology by establishing culture as the explanatory unit, and the displacement was not accomplished through the accumulation of evidence.

The decisive American episode arrived in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) and his report on the Black family. William Ryan (1923-2002) supplied the phrase “blaming the victim” that outgrew the controversy that produced it. To describe a behavior that contributed to disadvantage was shifting responsibility from the society that produced the conditions to the people living under them. Wilson wrote later that the controversy made liberal social scientists reluctant to describe behavior that might be regarded as stigmatizing, and that fear of the accusation discouraged investigation of the genetic, cultural and behavioral dimensions of urban poverty.

In 2010, the same year Wax circulated her paper, Mario Luis Small, David Harding, and Michèle Lamont announced in the Annals that culture was back on the poverty agenda. The new cultural sociology analyzed frames, repertoires, identities, perceptions, and meaning-making, in interaction with structural circumstances.

Culture was readmitted under conditions. It could influence how people perceived their options. It could supply repertoires that made some actions easier to imagine. It could mediate responses to structural disadvantage. What stayed hard to say was that some norms and habits produce worse outcomes than others at securing ends that nearly everyone in the population wants.

Wax published into that environment and crossed the line in four places at once. She puts characteristics of actors inside the causal model. She entertains average differences among sociodemographic populations. She describes recurring patterns of conduct as self-defeating even when the people engaged in them are poor. And she argues that traditional moral norms performed useful work because they restricted individual choice.

The fourth is the one that stings. Wax describes pre-1960s sexual mores as heuristics. Clear rules about marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and divorce reduced the foresight and self-command required to produce a stable family. Their removal transferred the burden of regulation from institutions to individuals. People who could supply their own discipline adapted. People who leaned on the external script did not.

That makes the paper more disruptive than a conventional appeal to personal responsibility. Wax asks what arrangements let ordinary people avoid solving the optimization problem at all. Her account of norms runs parallel to behavioral economics. A default enrollment rule gets people to save without requiring them to compute an optimal savings path every payday. A marriage norm does similar work. It sustains a long-term cooperative strategy.

The two paternalisms sit in different places in the moral economy. Automatic retirement enrollment gets called choice architecture and sounds technocratic. Marital fidelity gets called a social norm and sounds moralistic. Steering people away from sugar is public health. Attaching shame to abandoning one’s children is judgment. The behavioral logic is the same in each pair. Only the vocabulary and the price differ. Contemporary social science is full of paternalism. What it will not tolerate is paternalism that speaks in moral language.

A second asymmetry runs through the treatment of individual traits. Dispositional explanations of high-status outcomes are welcome, marketable, and honored. A large body of work on grit, growth mindset, and delay of gratification explains professional and academic success by traits located inside the successful, and it sells to the parents of the successful and gets taught in their schools. Angela Duckworth (b. 1970) and Carol Dweck (b. 1946) built careers on it. The marshmallow paradigm of Walter Mischel (1930-2018) circulated for four decades as a story about what self-command does for a child’s future.

Hold the variable and the measurement constant and point them at the bottom of the distribution, and the reception inverts. Self-command explaining why the children of professors do well is a finding. Self-command explaining part of a group gap is a provocation requiring extraordinary evidence. The methodological critiques of the marshmallow work that arrived after 2018 raised real questions about socioeconomic confounding, and I do not dispute their substance. What tracked the variable’s migration from one use to the other was the energy behind them.

A standard that depends on the status of the population explained rather than on the evidence is a standard of manners. And the manners run in a direction: agency is a compliment paid to people already doing well, and its withdrawal is the courtesy extended to people who are not.

Lee Ross (1942-2021) named the fundamental attribution error in 1977. Observers over-attribute conduct to disposition and under-attribute it to situation, reliably, and worse for people they do not know.

This protects subjects. Findings about populations get used, and the use is rarely gentle. Publish that a group’s members exhibit shorter time horizons and you have produced a sentence that will appear, stripped of qualifications, in the mouth of someone who wants to deny that group a loan.

And it buys access. Ethnography runs on entrée. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed a hundred and sixty-two single mothers in Philadelphia and produced a book whose empirical value survives its interpretive frame. They could not have done that work while publishing that the central obstacle was the conduct of the men these women chose. The interviews record the women saying so, at length, about infidelity, violence, drug use, and desertion. The book attributes the conduct to bad schools and absent opportunity. The gap between what the subjects said and what the authors concluded is the price of admission, paid in explanatory currency, and every fieldworker knows the exchange rate without having seen it posted.

Mancur Olson (1932-1998) argued that enforcement of a norm is a public good. The benefit diffuses across a population that includes almost nobody the enforcer knows. The cost concentrates on him, in the room, at the time: the awkwardness of judging a colleague’s divorce, the risk of saying in a seminar that children do better with a father at home, the demotion that attaches to anyone who moralizes about sex. Every individual therefore has reason to withhold enforcement while hoping others supply it, and provision settles below what even the enforcers privately believe correct. The same arithmetic governs the scholarly version. Each researcher who declines to publish the uncomfortable finding gains a private benefit and imposes a small diffuse cost on the field’s stock of knowledge. Nobody defects from the economy because defecting is expensive and the returns go to strangers.

Joanna Kempner, Jon Merz, and Charles Bosk (1948-2020) documented how the enforcement runs. They interviewed forty-one academic researchers about knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce, and found that the constraints were largely informal and self-imposed rather than codified. What marked the boundaries were the narrative legacies of past controversies, which working scientists used to locate the lines. Researchers learned where the edges were when their own work or a colleague’s drew rebuke.

This is how a moral economy should operate. Graduate students observe which questions make advisers uneasy. Scholars learn which formulations require three paragraphs of disclaimer. Referees demand alternative structural accounts with more insistence when the conclusion is uncomfortable. Investigators anticipate the reaction and redesign the project before anyone has to object.

The costs.

A class of true propositions becomes unpublishable, and a field that cannot publish a proposition cannot test or correct it. Suppression does not produce silence on a question. It produces relocation. The question migrates to writers with no data, no training, no review, and no stake in the population’s welfare, who answer it badly and loudly to an audience that has noticed the professionals declining to speak. Wilson said as much about the years after Moynihan.

Theories with poor fit survive on moral standing. A field that keeps the marriageable-men hypothesis at the center of its account while a fifth of the variance supports it has stopped optimizing for fit, and has lost the ability to tell whether it is making progress.

The economy patronizes. Powerful people get treated as agents. Disadvantaged people get treated as respondents to conditions. The employer discriminates, the landlord excludes, the school fails, the market dislocates, the neighborhood constrains, and the disadvantaged individual adapts. Sometimes that is what happened. When the grammar becomes a default theory of causation, agency itself becomes stratified: people at the top hold enough of it to cause social outcomes, and people at the bottom hold enough to experience outcomes without helping to cause them. Orlando Patterson (b. 1940) has pressed this from a position that makes it hard to wave off, arguing that the refusal to discuss culture and conduct among Black Americans amounts to a denial that they are agents in their own lives.

And morally congenial explanations have victims. Suppose a destructive behavior responds strongly to norms and weakly to the economic variable researchers prefer. A generation spent improving the economic variable while declining to investigate the normative one does not protect the affected population. It withholds a useful explanation from them. Compassion attached to the wrong causal model is not compassionate in its consequences.

Where the moral economy causes the most damage is in the conflation of explanation with exculpation. Discrimination contributing to an outcome leaves open whether every person experiencing it acted wisely. Behavior contributing to an outcome leaves open whether discrimination is present. A norm proving socially useful leaves open whether those who violate it are wicked. A population differing on average in some trait leaves open where the difference came from, whether it is mutable, and what anyone owes anyone else about it. None of these propositions entails the moral conclusion habitually attached to it.

Wax’s empirical case for population differences in local and global decision-making runs far weaker than her theoretical model. She concedes that the time-discounting literature is messy, that the measurements are inconsistent, and that the evidence linking psychological traits to intimate conduct is thin. That is where to attack the argument. Are the traits measured well? Do the group differences survive controls? Which way does causation run? How much variance do they carry? Can the model outperform its rivals out of sample? Does the normative environment change conduct through the route she specifies?

Those are scientific objections. That hypothesis blames the victim is a statement about the hypothesis’s position in a moral economy.

Researchers choose subjects because some outcomes weigh more with them than others. Societies regulate experiments because knowledge is not worth every price. What a science can demand is that the ledgers stay separate.

The causal ledger asks what produces the outcome. It lets institutions, incentives, history, culture, norms, cognition, personality, choice, inheritance, developmental feedback, and chance compete for explanatory power. No variable earns immunity because its implications are unpleasant, and none earns a presumption because its implications are humane. The moral ledger opens afterward and asks what people owe one another given what turns out to be true.

Separation works because human dignity does not require causal innocence. A poor man need not be a passive product of structures to deserve help. A man who made a disastrous choice keeps his claim on compassion. A group difference is not deserved merely because behavior mediates it. An institution is not innocent merely because individuals act. A society can ask responsibility of people while recognizing that the capacity for responsibility is partly socially produced. Grant those propositions and most of the moral pressure on causal explanation drains away.

Notes

On the term. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24, at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/368740 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/301910. Daston’s definition of a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values is the sentence the essay leans on, and her insistence that these economies are historically specific is what makes the present one a subject rather than a scandal. For the concept’s wider career, Norbert Götz, “‘Moral Economy’: Its Conceptual History and Analytical Prospects,” at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449626.2015.1054556. Robert Merton’s four norms come from “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), reprinted in The Sociology of Science (1973).

On the Wax paper and its field review. Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. Her demolition of the structural accounts runs through the paper’s third section, and her own summary of the demographic estimates on marriageable men appears at notes 30 and 31. The Wilson hypothesis is stated in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), whose opening chapter also carries Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep (2005), is the ethnography discussed above.

On the Moynihan aftermath. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (1971), supplied the phrase. Readers who want the controversy reconstructed rather than summarized should start with James Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough (2010).

On culture readmitted under conditions. Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (May 2010): 6-27, at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2131376, with the Harvard open copy at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lamont/files/reconsidering_culture_and_poverty.pdf and the full volume at https://archive.org/details/reconsideringcul0629unse. The volume includes a contribution from Wilson. Note the timing: this appeared the same season Wax circulated her draft, which makes the pair a natural comparison for anyone who wants to see the permitted and the forbidden versions of the same move side by side.

On how the boundaries get enforced. Joanna Kempner, Jon F. Merz, and Charles L. Bosk, “Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge,” Sociological Forum 26 (2011): 475-500, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2011.01259.x, with an open copy here. The earlier and shorter statement is Kempner, Clifford Perlis, and Merz, “Forbidden Knowledge,” Science 307 (2005): 854, at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/307/5711/854. Their finding that most constraints are informal or self-imposed, and that memories of past controversies mark the lines, is the empirical backbone of the argument here. For the collective-action engine, Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965).

On the trait literature and its asymmetric reception. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip Peake’s original delay-of-gratification papers ran in Science (1989) and Developmental Psychology (1990). The conceptual replication is Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan, “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” Psychological Science 29 (2018): 1159-1177, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661, with an open copy here. Their bivariate correlation ran half the size of the original and fell by two thirds under controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment. The exchange that followed is worth reading in full, since it shows the field arguing about controls rather than about politics: Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, and Pia Pinger, “Re-Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” here with the Watts and Duncan reply on confounding and construct clarity. Lee Ross’s “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings” (1977) is where the attribution error gets its name.

Further reading. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration (1997) and Rituals of Blood (1998), argue the agency point from inside the sociology of race; his 2006 New York Times essay “A Poverty of the Mind” states it compactly. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023). Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values and taboo tradeoffs supplies a psychology for the reaction described here, and readers who want it should start with “The Psychology of the Unthinkable” (2000). For a companion piece on who selects a normative regime and who bears its costs, see the essay on status hierarchy and normative selection that shares this argument’s premises.