I think it's impeded important progress in the same way as biology and ethology would be impaired if they insisted upon methodological cellulism. 1/

The convention of methodological individualism, very strong in angloamerican social science, has made it difficult to properly conjecture and model, and therefore to hypothesize, detect, and observe, differences in quality of collectivities that can't be modeled from "microfoundations". 2/

So it's easy to argue Garrett-Jones-style for IQ among constituent individuals as explanations for social outcomes and instruments of social improvement than for plausible institutional interventions, unless the interventions attach to very crude "incentives-matter"-style mechanisms. /fin