From A Man in Love:

When I discuss such topics with Geir, with whom I talk on the telephone for an hour every day, he is wont to quote Sven Stolpe, who has written somewhere about Bergman claiming that he would have been Bergman irrespective of where he had grown up, implying, in other words, that you are who you are whatever your surroundings. What shapes you is the way you are towards your family rather than the family itself. When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions, and phenomena in the environment in which they originated. Biological or genetic determinants, the givens, that is, barely existed as an option, and when they did they were viewed with suspicion. Such an attitude can at first sight appear humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born, empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings.

Perhaps Bergman (harder to pin Knausgaard down) was overstating, but one lesson from these childhood mover papers is that the experience of society makes people more similar.¹ Those estimators measure common effects of place that make people experiencing the same environment more similar. In a segregated society, variation in treatment emerges. But what are the common experiences of society, generationally, nationally, or globally, for which we can't approximate the counterfactual?

1. I heard Chuck Klosterman say this in an interview years ago. I now wonder if he was thinking about this Knausgaard passage. ↩