I feel like this post is kind of lonely due to having too few answers, so I’m going to cheat and post an answer to my own post. These were some general factors I was thinking of back when I wrote the post:
Money is the general factor of affordability, and income is the general factor of money. That is, whether you can afford some product may be influenced by multiple factors, such as local product-specific shortages, but the main factor influencing the affordability of all products is money. You might decide to use the degree to which someone owns a lot of expensive visible things like yachts or fancy cars as a proxy for how much money they have, but this runs into the problem of conspicuous consumption; some people might buy expensive things to show off their wealth, while others may not. Therefore, naive estimates of money may not always be right.
A CEO is the general factor of in the social network of a company. They set the policy for the entire company, and so their decisions end up multiplied out over all of the employees in the company. Note that the CEO is of course not identical to the company; general factors are different from the sum of their outputs, because each individual employee takes individual decisions. Rather, the CEO is an individual who has a disproportionate influence over the company due to making decisions for the entire company, rather than just parts of it. (One place where this example brings down is that there will be correlations across an entire company for other reasons than the CEO, e.g. because of hiring practices or strategic factors or the history of the company; so the CEO is the general factor of the social network but not necessarily more generally.)
Genes are the general factor of a person. At any given time, your behavior is mostly environmentally determined. However, somehow, twin studies tend to find that broad outcomes and long-term behavioral tendencies have a substantial genetic component. Why? I think it’s because your genes will continually have a roughly consistent influence on you across many contexts, while the environmental influence varies over time, so the genes “add up” more than the environment does. (This is somewhat contingent; twin studies suggest that when the long-term stable properties of a person are measured well, most of the variance is genetic. However, it didn’t have to be this way, e.g. if you had a population of clones, they of course wouldn’t have genetic variance, but there might be some environmental factors like assigned role that would make them differ.)
I feel like this post is kind of lonely due to having too few answers, so I’m going to cheat and post an answer to my own post. These were some general factors I was thinking of back when I wrote the post:
Money is the general factor of affordability, and income is the general factor of money. That is, whether you can afford some product may be influenced by multiple factors, such as local product-specific shortages, but the main factor influencing the affordability of all products is money. You might decide to use the degree to which someone owns a lot of expensive visible things like yachts or fancy cars as a proxy for how much money they have, but this runs into the problem of conspicuous consumption; some people might buy expensive things to show off their wealth, while others may not. Therefore, naive estimates of money may not always be right.
A CEO is the general factor of in the social network of a company. They set the policy for the entire company, and so their decisions end up multiplied out over all of the employees in the company. Note that the CEO is of course not identical to the company; general factors are different from the sum of their outputs, because each individual employee takes individual decisions. Rather, the CEO is an individual who has a disproportionate influence over the company due to making decisions for the entire company, rather than just parts of it. (One place where this example brings down is that there will be correlations across an entire company for other reasons than the CEO, e.g. because of hiring practices or strategic factors or the history of the company; so the CEO is the general factor of the social network but not necessarily more generally.)
Genes are the general factor of a person. At any given time, your behavior is mostly environmentally determined. However, somehow, twin studies tend to find that broad outcomes and long-term behavioral tendencies have a substantial genetic component. Why? I think it’s because your genes will continually have a roughly consistent influence on you across many contexts, while the environmental influence varies over time, so the genes “add up” more than the environment does. (This is somewhat contingent; twin studies suggest that when the long-term stable properties of a person are measured well, most of the variance is genetic. However, it didn’t have to be this way, e.g. if you had a population of clones, they of course wouldn’t have genetic variance, but there might be some environmental factors like assigned role that would make them differ.)