When I saw the title...

...of Noah Smith's piece in Bloomberg, "Nurture Counts as Much as Nature in Success," you know I clicked on it right away.

If you're not a regular reader of this blog you wouldn't know that "Nature vs. Nurture" is one of my favorite topics. If there's a heaven, and if I get there (stop laughing!), one of my first questions will be what is the correct ratio in that debate. (Two others would be, "Who killed Kennedy?" and, "Are markets efficient?")

My current guess -- yes, current -- is that Nurture has some role, perhaps ten or twenty percent, but that it's far outweighed by Nature. No matter how hard I worked at it, for example, I was probably destined to never make the NBA. Conversely, they probably should have just given me a college degree at birth because there was really never any doubt I'd get one someday. (Or was that nurture? I was born into a solidly middle-class family in which all four of my older siblings graduated from college.)

Mr. Smith begins his piece by saying (all emphasis mine):

As a result, it’s hard to know what people really think about the nature-versus-nurture question. My impression is that most Americans subscribe to a casual, reflexive faith in the primacy of inborn ability.

And, right away, I have to take issue with that. I'd say that most people believe just the opposite: that with hard work, etc., one can do or be anything one wants. Isn't that right? Haven't you ever heard someone say, "If I had only done X (or hadn't done X) I'd by Y today"? Or, in relation to their kids, "If we'd only pulled this lever or pushed that button our kid would have turned out [better]"? I mean, really, isn't that human nature? If someone puts a pot of water on the stove, turns on the gas, and the water boils, aren't they correct in assuming that they "made that happen"? And don't people feel they have that kind of control over just about everything else in life? I'll bet my parents went to their graves thinking it was their fault somehow that their kids didn't turn out perfectly. "If only I had done [fill in the blank]..."

Smith goes on to say:

...people whose parents are inventors tend to become inventors themselves.

And while he uses this as an argument for Nurture, I think it could cut both ways. When I was growing up, if someone became a doctor or a lawyer people would often say that "his father was a doctor (or a lawyer)" as if to imply that the child observed the parent close up, liked what they saw, and decided to become a doctor (or a lawyer) too. But couldn't Nature be the reason? If someone is a doctor, they were probably good at math and science and worked hard in school. Couldn't those traits be hereditary? If a doctor's kid became a doctor, wouldn't it be a reasonable assumption that he or she was also good at math and science and had a tendency to work hard in school (and not screw around like I did)?

Smith concludes by saying:

So many different kinds of nurture matter in determining success. Effort matters. Education matters. And social environment matters. Americans discount these factors too much. The country would be a better, richer, more equal place with less emphasis on natural talent and more on humans’ potential to improve each other and themselves.

Yes, it would. And the country might be a better place if everyone had a pony. But this reminds me of what my friend Jamie (who grew up in Scotland and has lived all over the world, including Chicago) once told me: America's greatest strength is also one of its greatest weaknesses -- the idea that anyone can grow up to be anything. It's obviously a strength because, unlike the Old World, an individual isn't stuck into the class in which he was born, but through hard work and determination can become president of the United States (think Bill Clinton), a billionaire (think Steve Jobs) or pretty much anything he or she wants. It's a weakness, however, in that people are also led to believe that anyone can achieve these things despite not having innate intelligence, innate social skills, etc. and it makes for a lot of very disappointed people. And a lot of people who -- wrongly -- blame themselves for not achieving such dizzying heights of success. This, in turn, leads to a lot of discontent.

So, should I beat myself up for never having made it to the NBA? Probably not; I'm only 5'7". (But maybe with a little more hard work I could have made my high school team. Or is the tendency to work hard innate? And, anyway, I was never very passionate about basketball in the first place. Is that something you can change about yourself?) Should I hold myself responsible for never having become a billionaire? Maybe. I don't know. What do you think?