Progress Daily

K. Anders Ericsson studied pianists and violinists in their early 20s at the Music Academy of West Berlin, Germany. He asked the music professors to nominate the best young musicians, those who they thought had the potential for careers as international soloists, as well as others whose potential they regarded as not quite so great, and a third group who were most likely to become music teachers.

The best musicians had simply practiced more across their lives than the next best ones, who in turn had practiced more than the ones likely to become music teachers. Each of the musicians was asked to estimate approximately how many hours a week they had practiced each year since the outset of their musical training, and these estimates yielded cumulative totals of about 10,000 hours for the best musicians, followed by 8,000 for the next best ones and 5,000 for the least accomplished. The musicians also kept diaries for a week, recording their exact amounts of practice, and these yielded comparable differences, suggesting that the retrospective estimates were roughly accurate.

There is now abundant evidence that roughly 10,000 hours of practice is needed to achieve international levels of performance. For instance, it has been estimated that about this many hours of practice is usually completed between the time of first learning the rules of chess and becoming an international master. Ericsson has argued that similar amounts of practice are seen in first-rate sportspeople, writers and scientists.

John Sloboda & Michael Howe at the Unit for the Study of Musical Skill and Development at the University of Keele, England, studied a large number of children between 8 and 18, some of whom were sufficiently good musicians to have won places at a selective music school. The remainder were divided into further groups of differing musical ability, with the least musical group comprising children who had been relatively unsuccessful in learning an instrument, most giving up after less than a year.

Sloboda & Howe asked the students to estimate how many hours of practice per day they had engaged in each year since taking up their instrument, just as Ericsson and his colleagues had done in their study. Since the musicians were regularly taking musical grade exams, Sloboda, Howe and their colleagues were able to use this as a measure of musical progress and could therefore calculate the amount of practice that took place between successive grades. The surprising result was that the most gifted children required just as much practice as the less gifted ones: in fact, if anything, there was a tendency for them to require more. For instance, the most gifted group required on average 971 hours of cumulated practice to reach Grade 4, while a less talented group took 656 hours. The high figure in the former group is boosted by a small number of young people who practiced for exceptionally long periods of time, but even when these individuals are excluded, there is still no evidence that more gifted people can get by on less practice.

“Outstanding Performers: Created, Not Born?” by David R. Shanks

Some good genes can’t be passed on.

Female flies that pick mates “fitter” than themselves have very little chance of passing that fitness on to their daughters, and the same goes for males that mate with women fitter than themselves: sons born from such a union are actually less fit than sons born to low-fitness ladies. In the genetic war between the sexes, genes that are good for one sex aren’t necessarily good for the opposite-sex children who inherit them. Alison Pischedda and Adam K. Chippindale discovered this by forcing fruit flies to have sex in various combinations of fit and unfit. Fitness was measured by how many offspring a fly could have.

Conventional wisdom holds that sexual selection is usually good for a species: it creates babies that are stronger, prettier, fitter, since sexual creatures tend to be attracted to mates who are fit in one way or another.

But Pischedda and Chippindale found that seeking out the perfect mate can be detrimental to offspring.

It turns out that certain fitness genes shared by male and female flies on the X chromosome express themselves differently depending on sex. So a gene on a male’s X chromosome might make him an incredibly prolific father, but that same gene expressed in his daughter would prevent her from reproducing in large numbers. Because males only pass along their Y chromosome to male babies, they never pass along their beneficial X genes to sons either.

Pischedda and Chippindale speculate that these genes are acting selflessly. They’re keeping the population diverse. Imagine if fit parents bred only fit children. If their children inherited the fitness gene, they would also spawn lots of children, and so on.

By cutting off fitness after one generation, we’re guaranteed a population whose genes come from a wide variety of sources. If Pischedda and Chippindale are right, sometimes genes work for the good of the species rather than the good of individuals.

Interestingly, the fittest fruit flies come from parents who are not very fit themselves.

“When sex sucks” by Annalee Newitz

Rarely are the long-range implications of economic growth taken seriously.

If a country grows at 2% per annum, rather than one percent, the difference in wealth or welfare in a single year is relatively small. Over time the difference becomes very large. For instance, had America grown one percentage point less per year, between 1870 and 1990, the America of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.

Growth laggards fall behind. If we compare a one percentage point differential in the growth rate, and start at real income parity, we need a time horizon of 110.4 years to establish a 3:1 ratio of superiority of per capita income. If we are comparing a two percentage point boost in the growth rate we need a time horizon of only 55.5 years to establish a 3:1 superiority in per capita national income.

“Is Social Democracy a viable model for the European future?” by Tyler Cowen

In A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (pdf file here), Gregory Clark identifies the quality of labor as the fundamental factor behind economic growth. Poor labor quality discourages capital from flowing into a country, which means that poverty persists. Good institutions never have a chance to develop.

As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks.

For instance, when it came to “doffing” (periodically removing spindles of yarn from machines), American workers were often 6 or more times as productive as their Indian counterparts, according to measures from the early to mid-20th century. Importing Western managers did not in general narrow these gaps. As a result, India failed to attract comparable capital investment.

Wealthy countries face the most serious competitive challenges from other wealthy regions, or from nations on the cusp of development, and not from places with the lowest wages.

As late as the 18th century, most Europeans had not exceeded the standard of living in hunter-gatherer societies. Until recent times, the early advantages of Europe did not allow it to escape the Malthusian trap, in which rising populations periodically offset temporary gains in living standards.

The turning point came when England, and some other parts of Europe, managed a small but persistently positive rate of growth, starting around the 17th century. Pro-business values spread through English society. The explosion of technology came only in the late 19th century, well after many incremental gains.

The world’s poorest countries now have about one-fiftieth the per capita incomes of the wealthiest countries. The relative advantage of a highly disciplined and properly acculturated work force is greater for the more complex production processes of the modern world. The poorer countries remain stuck at the bottom as growing populations mean fewer resources for everyone else. Paradoxically, advances in sanitation and medical care, by saving lives, have driven down well-being for the average person. The population is rising in most of sub-Saharan Africa, but living standards have fallen below hunter-gatherer times and 40% below the average British living standard just before the Industrial Revolution.

An independent estimate by Rodolfo E. Manuelli and Ananth Seshadri, (”Human Capital and the Wealth of Nations”; pdf file here) suggests that if variations in the quality of labor across nations are taken into account, other productivity factors need differ by only 27% to explain differences in per capita income.

“Makes a Nation Wealthy? Maybe It’s the Working Stiff” by Tyler Cowen