Round-up: Has economic growth made Asia liberal?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Nature, nurture and nonshared environment in cognitive development. Robert Plomin and Kaito Kawakam review the literature on the influence of genes and family environment on cognitive ability and educational attainment. Although family environment explains 20–30% of the variance in cognitive ability in childhood, this diminishes to zero by adulthood. By contrast, the influence of family environment on educational attainment persists into adulthood—driven by university attendance.

The Vanishing White Male Writer. Jacob Savage documents the increasing absence of white males from the literary world. He notes that since 2020, not a single white man has been nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion’s Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize or the National Book Award. The prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows.