I feel a bit uncertain of the sign, even if the impact is real. I’ll be upfront that I haven’t read the material, but figured I’d write this anyway mostly on priors.
I see two potential pitfalls:
First, I have a bit of a deontologist flag: the health downsides of consanguinity seem unrelated to the reason why you think the intervention would be important (which, according to you, is “creating a more individualistic, entrepreneurial, and high-trust culture”). I’d be worried about intentionally ‘lying’ to people (by focusing on the easier-to-sell message about health effects) in order to effect a cultural change; it seems vaguely undignified (I can point to all sorts of second-order bad ways that starting a misleading PR campaign could go wrong)
Second, “individualistic” culture is not obviously a good thing! Maybe it has some positive impact, for sure, but I can see ways in which Western individualistic culture leads (for example) to bad mental health outcomes which don’t seem to be nearly as prevalent in more familial cultures. I’m not that thrilled that the kinship index definition you’re using points at “co-residence of extended families” as a contributor.
I feel a bit uncertain of the sign, even if the impact is real. I’ll be upfront that I haven’t read the material, but figured I’d write this anyway mostly on priors.
I see two potential pitfalls:
First, I have a bit of a deontologist flag: the health downsides of consanguinity seem unrelated to the reason why you think the intervention would be important (which, according to you, is “creating a more individualistic, entrepreneurial, and high-trust culture”). I’d be worried about intentionally ‘lying’ to people (by focusing on the easier-to-sell message about health effects) in order to effect a cultural change; it seems vaguely undignified (I can point to all sorts of second-order bad ways that starting a misleading PR campaign could go wrong)
Second, “individualistic” culture is not obviously a good thing! Maybe it has some positive impact, for sure, but I can see ways in which Western individualistic culture leads (for example) to bad mental health outcomes which don’t seem to be nearly as prevalent in more familial cultures. I’m not that thrilled that the kinship index definition you’re using points at “co-residence of extended families” as a contributor.