Could half of Americans be carrying genes that predispose them to going into debt? At least one team of researchers thinks so. For some time, people have argued that obesity is genetic. But if it’s true that slim wallets and thick waistlines are closely interrelated, then this research adds an interesting piece to that puzzle. Our genes may predispose us to poor financial or physical health, and our behavior in one realm certainly affects the other. [%comments]
Overconsumption in Your DNA?
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Debt genes? If so, then there are probably genetic predispositions to bad investing, obsessive blogging, and wearing Jimmy Choo shoes. But in the end, we do exercise some measure of control over our predispositions. Choice and discipline. Loraine Antrim
greed plus immediate gratification equals overconsumption. Research says our country consumes $2 billion more than it produces per day. We’re trading away a piece of our country every day thanks to China and Japan’s willingness to take our debt.
Obesity is seems more likely to be nature instead of nurture. If it were nurture, then why does all of the advertising we see for health and fitness seem to minimal impact, while we assume McDonald’s advertising must be the sole reason why people are fat. Also, it would have been beneficial to have a gene for over consumption in an environment where resources are scarce–you wouldn’t know when your next meal would come, so you would be better off to take as big of portion as possible. That doesn’t mean exercise doesn’t help, but that we are hard-wired not to want to do it.
You are a product of your environment. Some can overcome, some cannot.
This is only tangentially related to obesity, but it is important to many current debtors. The ABA is lobbying for student loan relief.
Given the economy, there are quite a large number of new lawyers, approximately 120,000, who, whether due to heredity or to watching too many Jimmy Stewart movies, took on substantial debt to become a lawyer.
If the lawyers default on private loans, the government has to repay the lenders, under the idiotic terms of the FFEL program, which is basically a subsidy to banks. (Libertarians might recognize it as the fabled “regulatory capture”).
http://www.abajournal.com/news/aba_lobbies_for_student_loan_relief_for_unemployed_attorneys/
Hmmm…. I inadvertently implied that many new lawyers are fat. I did not mean to mock lawyers for their weight. Merely for their debt, which was funded by the taxpayers, and which is about to cost taxpayers a lot more money if it isn’t fixed quickly.
Let’s just get science to STOP until people get their mythological beliefs about the “individual” sorted out. I’d recommend Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” as a good place to start.
I really do not feel that a predisposition to being fat or having a hole in the pocket in ones genes are in the genetic makeup of the people who crossed the Atlantic and against all odds built one of the greatest countries the world has ever seen