A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the distribution of the psychological trait) can map onto to enormous between society variation in macroeconomic indices which one might adduce derive from the minor individual differences. I was struck by this because it formally and clearly elucidated a major issue I've noted across many domains of the human sciences.
In short this is simply a wider elaboration of the same problem which crops up when one is talking about genotype ⇒ phenotype mapping.
Idealized models where a gene leads to a protein product which performs a specific and precise function don't really apply to a lot of the variation that we're interested in. This is why ...
