Income’s Heritability
Income is very heritable.
A study by Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis (”The Inheritance of Inequality,” 2002) found that identical twins’ incomes have a correlation of .56, versus .36 for fraternal twins. Using standard formulae, this implies that genetic factors explain 40% of the variance of income, family environment 16%, and non-shared environment 44%.
Using different data, David Cesarini gets income correlations of .54 for identicals versus .27 for fraternals, implying that genes explain 56% of the variance, shared environment -1%, and non-shared environment 45%.