Health and heritability

Public health puts a lot of weight on SES in explaining disease. I don't think it's a strawman to generally characterise the field as arguing for sharp increases in redistribution to improve health outcomes.

Lakhani et al used ACS and health insurance data (724,513 sibling pairs; 56,396 twin pairs) to tease out the relative contributions of heritable factors, shared environment, and socioeconomic status across a whole pile of disorders; it's in Nature: Genetics.

Here's a decent write-up.

They also put up a great site letting you look at the relative contributions over a range of disorders.

Here's what things look like for morbid obesity. h2 (green bar) is genetics. c2 (peach bar) is shared environment, adjusting for SES factors. SES (small purple bar) is SES.

Previously:

• Physician, consult an economist
• Fundamental causes