alt Hacker NewsThis article reminds me of an old longitudinal study that analyzed various metabolites from people and found that those with higher creatinine levels in urine early in life had overall higher income across their life. Creatinine as a marker indicates energy production and expenditure, and higher creatinine levels are correlated with higher energy levels.
Now I'm not arguing for biological determinism, but atleast some of the working style individuals have comes down to individual bio-psycho-social factors. Many people here have ADHD or other neurodivergence and will struggle with any kind of prescriptive - 'just work faster outputting higher quality work'. If only it were that easy.
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Creatinine as a marker also indicates more abundant early-life nutrition, and subsequently a healthier starting environment and socioeconomic status. That's a much better explainer of higher incomes than any kind of armchair biological determinism.
This consideration reminds me of two other lines of research:
- Producing organisms with capable, healthy mitochondria requires mitonuclear compatibility (mitochondrial genome is from mother, nuclear genome is from both parents, energetic capacity and regulation requires both genomes to coordinate) and evidence is that organisms select highly for offspring that have higher mitonuclear compatibility and more capable mitochondria. Offspring that don't have capable enough mitochondria don't make it to term. For example, mammals are more permissive about mitonuclear compatibility than birds (who have extremely high energetic requirements) so mammals are more fecund, but we're also more likely to get cancer from inefficient mitochondria throwing off reactive oxygen species.
- Chris Palmer, a Harvard medical school MD psychiatrist, put out a book a few years ago hypothesizing most mental disorders as brain metabolic disorders — brain mitochondria problems. I've seen mixed reviews on the hypothesis (which I like) but it sure is interesting.
Taken together these imply: 1) some people get more energy than others at a biological level, 2) that impacts mental health, 3) there are interventions that can improve the energy baseline we each were given (as discussed in Palmer's book/talks).