An influential book on 21st Century nature versus nurture arguments was 1998’s The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (with a foreword by Steven Pinker). Harris downplayed the idea that parenting has much impact on their children. For example, children grow up with the accents of their playground peers, not their parents. (Of course, parents play a role in who their children’s playground peers are, as we’ve seen with all the hysteria among Manhattan and Brooklyn parents over getting their scions to ace the IQ test to get into the $35,000 tuition elite kindergartens.)

My review of Harris’s book in National Review 18 years ago took a somewhat different approach:

To show that peers outweigh parents, she repeatedly cites Darwinian linguist Pinker’s work on how young immigrant kids automatically develop the accents of their playmates, not their parents. True, but there’s more to life than language. Not until p. 191 does she admit — in a footnote — that immigrant parents do pass down home-based aspects of their culture like cuisine, since kids don’t learn to cook from their friends. (How about attitudes toward housekeeping, charity, courtesy, wife-beating, and child-rearing itself?) Not until p. 330 does she recall something else where peers don’t much matter: religion! Worse, she never notices what Thomas Sowell has voluminously documented in his accounts of ethnic economic specialization. It’s parents and relatives who pass on both specific occupations (e.g., Italians and marble-cutting or Cambodians and donut-making) and general attitudes toward hard work, thrift, and entrepreneurship. Nor can peers account for social change among young children, such as the current switch from football to soccer, since preteen peer groups are intensely conservative. (Some playground games have been passed down since Roman times). Even more so, the trend toward having little girls play soccer and other cootie-infested boys sports did not, rest assured, originate among peer groups of little girls. That was primarily their dads’ idea, especially sports-crazed dads without sons.

It’s almost as if life is pretty complicated. So instead of arguing about Nature Versus Nurture in the generalized abstract, a more productive research agenda would be too look for different topics where either nature or nurture are more important.

For example, there’s decent evidence that young people tend to imprint on the type of landscape they’re living in around puberty and thus that parent decision has a lifetime effect on where they feel most at home. So, where you choose to live with your children can have a sizable influence on where they will choose to live decades later.

You can see this in Raj Chetty’s data that says the best place to grow up in the U.S. for working class kids is in the North Central (e.g., South Dakota). Some of this is a permanent cultural difference, but some of this is regional economic cycles — the cold parts of the Great Plains have done well in this century due to global demand for resources and technological advances, such as the Great Plains. But another aspect is that the place is so cold and bleak looking to people who didn’t grow up there — an East Coast character in a Jay McInerney novel says that the problem with the Midwest is that there’s nothing to see and nothing to keep you from seeing it — that there hasn’t been much in-flow of workers from outside the region, especially not from South of the Border. This allowed local blue collar workers to prosper from the long regional boom (which is likely now ending).

So, in Chetty’s data, the parents who chose to raise their kids in the North Central in the 1990s can look back with satisfaction because they helped their kids imprint on the place, which has helped them prosper in the 2010s.

In contrast, lots of people moved to North Carolina, a state that’s more broadly attractive in looks — not too cold, not too hot, lots of trees, some elevation changes — a place that’s not too severe looking for whatever you imprinted upon. And, in Chetty’s study, their kids got hammered. In part due to regional economic cycles (wood and furniture went out of demand with the collapse of the Housing Bubble), and in part due to a big influx of people from the rest of America and from Latin America.

Of course, what parents really want to know is what to do that will give their children permanent advantages. Chetty sells his study to the media on the idea that he’s about to discover Permanent Truths, because that’s what Science is, like, you know, gravitational waves. And indeed sometimes he comes up with findings that really are long term, like the conservative Dutch culture of Sioux County, Iowa is really better for kids than the culture of the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation.

But much of what he’s discovered is that blue collar parents should try to have your kids imprint on parts of the country that will be more prosperous in 15 years than they are now.

Good luck with that.