Your Choices are Preordained!

Well, no, not quite, rather (via Greg Mankiw) this paper, which shows that your propensity to make certain choices is genetically determined, at least in part.

Our estimates provide strong prima facie evidence that economic preferences are heritable.

That's the meat of it (they looked specifically at appetite for risk and altruism) and there's two things I rather like about the finding. The first is that this is yet another nail in the (often associated with certain lefties) idea that we are at birth simply a blank slate which society then writes upon.

The second is that it provides the beginnings of a mechanism for Greg Clark's theory in "A Farewell to Alms". His thought was (to paraphrase wildly) that the Industrial Revolution started in England because over the preceeding 600 years or so of relative economic stability those bourgeois values necessary for it spread throughout the society as those very bourgeois outbred both the poor and the aristocracy.

Until now I've taken this to be "Lamarckian" (as in the inheritance of an acquired characteristic, something we know doesn't happen with genes but does very much so with cultural values) but this paper states (at least as far as their results go) that there could be a Darwinian element to such inheritance as well.

All of which of course goes to show that Flanders and Swann were indeed correct, even if they aren't aware of the very latest science (clearly, their being dead hinders this knowledge acquisition):

The English are noble, the English are nice
     And worth any other at double the price
And all the world over each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice before hand which spoils all the fun
     The English the English the English are best
     I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest
It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad
It's just that they're foreign that makes them so mad
The English are all that a nation should be
And the pride of the English are Chipper and me
     The English the English the English are best
     I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest