Institute For The Future

Please Complete a Genome Scan with Your Mortgage Application

Certain genetic mutations can significantly contribute to the amount of credit card debt a person holds, according to a new study by Jan-Emmanuel DeNeve and James Fowler. Specifically, DeNeve and Fowler report a link between mutations on the MAOA gene--which have also been associated with "lack of conscientiousness, impulsivity... addictive behavior" and violence--highlighting a growing trend in finding relationships between genes and behavior, as well as raising a set of increasingly important questions about how to understand genetic information in non-medical contexts.

In conducting their research, DeNeve and Fowler looked at data from the Add Health study, which gave them genetic data for some of the participants as well as survey data on levels of credit card debt. Compared to their control group, individuals with a single low-efficiency MAOA mutation were 7.8 percent more likely to have credit card debt, while those with two low-efficiency copies were 15.9 percent more likely to carry credit card debt.

Their study is preliminary, and as with pretty much any genetic study, it's important to reproduce the results before taking the findings as much more than a curiosity. And they note that income levels and other socioeconomic factors seem to mitigate the importance of genes in contributing to the risk of debt.

That said, DeNeve and Fowler raise an important point in their discussion that deserves some attention:

Of course, genes would have no in?uence on debt behavior if credit cards were not available. So in some sense, the environment should still be the primary focus of economic inquiry. However, the evidence we report here suggests that in the context of a particular institutional environment (the availability of credit cards), di?erent genotypes can yield different outcomes. Even if they could carry debt, many people do not, and this is at least partly due to genetic di?erences. So just like social institutions, genes constrain individual behavior. In other words, genes are the institutions of the human body —and any attempt to understand human behavior without them would be like studying politics without laws or markets without regulation.

Right now, most people think of genetic data in terms of treating disease, but as the authors note above, the same sorts of analyses that can show predispositions to disease risk can also show a predisposition to a type of behavior.

Unlike in health, however, where understanding the genetic basis of disease risks comes with the potential promise of tailored treatments, the incentives here don't line up. Will my bank scan my genome before giving me a car loan or lower my credit score because of a genetic mutation?

I certainly don't like that idea. But if researchers keep finding these sorts of links between behavior and genetic mutations, it strikes me a future that's eminently plausible.

(Found via Ryan Sager's excellent Neuroworld blog.