10,000 hours of practice — or genes?

Last updated on: September 28, 2014 at 10:12 pm by Jane the Actuary

10,000 hours of practice — or genes? 2014-09-28T22:12:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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There’s a worthwhile piece in Slate.com on this topic today (yeah, I know, who’d have thought that they’d have something other than clickbait meant to get you outraged), the gist of which is that the now-popular notion that what makes someone great at a skill is incessant practice, is overblown, and that the largest factor in someone’s success in a field, whether sports, the arts, or an academic endeavor, is genetics.

And I can kind of buy that the correlation between practice and success is really that an individual who doesn’t experience success at an endeavor along the way isn’t going to keep plugging away at it.

They demonstrate this with a variety of studies, including various twin studies, and it’s all fairly persuasive.

And these are their bottom lines: first, ” It makes more sense to pay attention to people’s abilities and their likelihood of achieving certain goals, so people can make good decisions about the goals they want to spend their time, money, and energy pursuing.” And, second, ” If we acknowledge that people differ in what they have to contribute [that is, in their underlying abilities to succeed, or not, in high-paying jobs], then we have an argument for a society in which all human beings are entitled to a life that includes access to decent housing, health care, and education, simply because they are human.”

The trouble is that the authors (because it’s three authors writing together) move from the question of what enables some people to achieve extraordinary things, to whether or not all people (other than those with true intellectual disabilities) can be expected to work at a job that involves some specialized skill and pays well enough to provide a decent, ordinary standard of living. Are there a significant number of people (again, outside the intellectually disabled for whom it’s clear that we need to provide support) for whom a minimum wage job is the best they’ll ever be able to manage? Whether this is correct or not is the difference between considering the minimum wage to be a starting wage, or a wage (by itself or with routine government supplements) that is sufficient to support not just a single person but a family (perhaps as one of two earners). After all, in plenty of third world countries, the masses of the poor earn minimum wage their whole life long, and no one dreams that their failure to get a better job is due to their lack of initiative.

As to high earners and whether they “deserve” their high pay because of their hard work or whether it’s just luck, or genetic “luck” — I don’t think this matters all that much. The reason why we accept people being paid very high amounts is not in the name of “fairness” but out of a believe that this system, in the long run, is a system that will “work” and a “fair” one won’t.

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