Nurture, not nature, makes you rich: study

IF YOUR parents are rich, then you’re more likely to be wealthy too.

Scientists have long debated whether this is down to genetics or the culture in which children are raised.

Now a new study claims to have finally settled the debate. Nurture, it says, is far more important than nature when it comes to amassing wealth.

“Innate biology is only a small factor in wealth,” Kaveh Majlesi, a professor of economics at Lund University in Sweden and co-author of the study told fivethirtyeight.com.

Previous studies have tried to find a “rich gene” which might explain how genetic characteristics that cause people to be wealthy are passed down.

The latest research, however, found that the wealth of an adopted child – before receiving an inheritance – is similar to that of their adoptive parents rather than their biological ones.

The study included data from 2 519 Swedish children who were adopted between 1950 and 1970.

The researchers then compared this to data on adults’ overall wealth in Sweden between 1999 and 2007.

This allowed scientists to compare the wealth of the adult adoptees to the wealth of potential biological and adoptive parents.

The biological parents tended to be younger, poorer and less educated than the adoptive parents.

Researchers found the adoptive parents had 1.7 to 2.4 times more of an effect than the biological parents did on the adopted child’s adult wealth.

Majlesi, however, said the trend could be even more potent in countries such as the US because of greater economic inequality.

“Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented,” the researchers write.

“Even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth.”

The tendency for smart people to live longer is down to their genes, scientists have revealed for the first time.

Researchers analysing data from twins found that 95 percent of the link between intelligence and life expectancy is genetic.

They found that the brighter twin tended to live longer and noted the pattern was more pronounced in fraternal twins than in identical pairs.

Rosalind Arden, a research associate at the London School of Economics, said: “We know that children who score higher in IQ-type tests are prone to living longer.

“Also, people at the top of an employment hierarchy, such as senior civil servants, tend to be long-lived.

“But, in both cases, we have not understood why.

“Our research shows that the link between intelligence and longer life is mostly genetic.” – Daily Mail