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Jason Collins blog
Subject notes on behavioural economics
Each year I teach an undergraduate subject in behavioural economics.
Aug 8, 2024
Jason Collins
The illusion of evidence-based nudges
From a recent Journal of Political Economy paper by Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim and Elizabeth Linos
(2024)
:
Aug 1, 2024
Jason Collins
Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record
In 2012, I wrote a post titled Chimps 1, Humans 0 after seeing videos of a chimp named Ayumu. Ayumu could recall the location of numbers, in order, flashed briefly on a…
Jul 25, 2024
Jason Collins
Using generative AI as an academic - July 2024 edition
I first wrote a version of this post in April 2023. A lot has changed since then in both the tools and how I use them.
Jul 15, 2024
Jason Collins
The psychological and genes’ eye view of ergodicity economics
This post was my plan for a presentation at the Foundation of Utility and Risk Conference. I drew on my previous posts laying out the foundations of ergodicity economics and…
Jul 8, 2024
Jason Collins
Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education: A Review
My first job out of university was as a lawyer. Later, when I switched to a non-legal role, I enrolled in a Master of Laws. I selected some subjects relevant to my new job…
Apr 19, 2024
Jason Collins
The preregistration halo
When we analyse experimental data, we have many choices. What observations do we exclude? What variables do we compare? What statistical tests do we use? And so on. These…
Jan 26, 2024
Jason Collins
A bunch of links
Social science a mess, journals no good, the meaningless of the label “misinformation”, Flipper Zero, and cleaning up the list of named “biases”:
Jan 19, 2024
Jason Collins
Books I read in 2023
These are the books I enjoyed the most in 2023, although they were published in different years:
Jan 18, 2024
Jason Collins
Behavioral science policy recommendations early in the pandemic were LARGELY CORRECT, if you ignore those that were not
In late April 2020, a group of behavioural scientists
(Van Bavel et al., 2020)
published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, “Using social and behavioural science to support…
Dec 22, 2023
Jason Collins
Do students learn less from experts?
I firmly believe in going straight to the source before sharing a story I’ve heard elsewhere. Here is another example of why.
Nov 2, 2023
Jason Collins
John List’s The Voltage Effect: A review
Over a decade ago when I started reading the behavioural economics literature, John List quickly became one of my favourite academics. Whenever I read an interview with List…
Jul 5, 2023
Jason Collins
Using large language models as an academic
This post started as a draft email to my colleagues about how I was using large language models in my work to achieve some fairly large efficiency gains. I realised that…
Apr 28, 2023
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2022
The best books I
read
in 2022 - generally released in other years - were:
Jan 10, 2023
Jason Collins
Why I don’t believe that signs with fatality numbers cause more crashes
In a paper in Science, Jonathan Hall and Joshua Madsen proposed that dynamic signs that reported Texas road fatalities - “1669 deaths this year on Texas roads” - caused more…
Aug 19, 2022
Jason Collins
Please not another bias: Take two
In my last post I discussed how I would like to redo my article “Please Not Another Bias! An Evolutionary Take on Behavioural Economics”. Apart from the removing the weak…
Jul 28, 2022
Jason Collins
Please not another bias: correcting the record
In 2015 I gave a presentation titled “Please Not Another Bias! An Evolutionary Take on Behavioural Economics” at the Marketing and Science Ideas Exchange (MSIX) conference.…
Jul 11, 2022
Jason Collins
Revised course notes on Consumer Financial Decision Making
Last year I posted some notes for a course on Consumer Financial Decision Making.
Jul 4, 2022
Jason Collins
Megastudy scepticism
In December last year Katherine Milkman and friends published a “megastudy” testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000 experimental participants. But more…
May 27, 2022
Jason Collins
Explaining base rate neglect
In a seminar for a team from an investment manager I described how base rates are often neglected when people are grappling with conditional probabilities. My description…
Apr 12, 2022
Jason Collins
A bunch of links
A past regular feature of this blog was “A week of links’. Primarily, it was a useful way to aggregate interesting articles - I often search my blog posts for material (they…
Mar 17, 2022
Jason Collins
Bankers are more honest than the rest of us
In an oft-quoted and cited Nature paper,
Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry
, Cohn and colleagues argue that the culture in banking weakens and…
Mar 10, 2022
Jason Collins
My podcast appearances
Over the last few years I have appeared on several podcasts, the most recent being a discussion with Phil Agnew on the Nudge podcast. I am definitely more a writer than a…
Mar 3, 2022
Jason Collins
The outsider to the narrow-minded profession
I have always been a sucker for stories about an outsider tearing down what everyone believes to be true. With that, it’s no surprise that I have fond memories from my first…
Feb 24, 2022
Jason Collins
Replicating scarcity
In
Scarcity: Why having too little means so much
, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir tell the following (now famous) story:
Feb 17, 2022
Jason Collins
How big is the effect of a nudge?
Last month a new meta-analysis of ‘nudges’ by Stephanie Mertens and friends was published, with a headline finding that:
Feb 11, 2022
Jason Collins
The academic experiment
This week I finally took the plunge and joined academia. It’s a possibility that has been lurking over me for close to ten years, although recently I had been of the view…
Feb 4, 2022
Jason Collins
A critical behavioural economics and behavioural science reading list
This reading list is a balance to the one-dimensional view in many popular books, TED talks, or conferences. For those who feel they have a good understanding of the…
Jan 27, 2022
Jason Collins
The 1/N portfolio versus the optimal strategy: Does a simple heuristic outperform?
Gerd Gigerenzer is fond of telling a story about Harry Markowitz, modern portfolio design pioneer and winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Jan 21, 2022
Jason Collins
A default of disbelief
It was easy to see why many behavioural practitioners loved the idea that you could induce honesty by getting someone to sign a form at the top, not the bottom. It was…
Jan 13, 2022
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2021
The best books I
read
in 2021 - generally released in other years - were:
Jan 6, 2022
Jason Collins
Course notes on Applied Consumer Financial Decision Making
These notes are now out-of-date. See the updated notes here.
Sep 5, 2021
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2020
The best books I
read
in 2020 - generally released in other years - were:
Jan 6, 2021
Jason Collins
Aren’t we smart, fellow behavioural scientists
Below is the text of my presentation at Nudgsestock on 12 June 2020.
Jun 12, 2020
Jason Collins
The limits of behavioural science: coronavirus edition
Most articles on how behavioural science (or “behavioural economics”) can explain “X” are rubbish. “How behavioural economics explains Donald Trump’s election” or the…
Apr 7, 2020
Jason Collins
Risk and loss aversion in ergodicity economics
In a previous post I posed the following bet:
Feb 18, 2020
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2019
Better late than never….
Jan 28, 2020
Jason Collins
Ergodicity economics: a primer
In my previous posts on loss aversion (here, here and here), I foreshadowed a post on how “ergodicity economics” might shed some light on whether we need loss aversion to…
Jan 22, 2020
Jason Collins
The case against loss aversion
Summary: Much of the evidence for loss aversion is weak or ambiguous. The endowment effect and status quo bias are subject to multiple alternative explanations, including…
Dec 5, 2019
Jason Collins
The next decade of behavioural science: a call for intellectual diversity
Behavioral Scientist put out the call to share hopes, fears, predictions and warnings about the next decade of behavioral science. Here’s my contribution:
Nov 14, 2019
Jason Collins
What can we infer about someone who rejects a 50:50 bet to win $110 or lose $100? The Rabin paradox explored
Consider the following claim:
Nov 6, 2019
Jason Collins
My latest article at Behavioral Scientist: Principles for the Application of Human Intelligence
I am somewhat slow in posting this - the article has been up more than a week - but my latest article is up at Behavioral Scientist.
Oct 9, 2019
Jason Collins
Kahneman and Tversky’s “debatable” loss aversion assumption
Loss aversion is the idea that losses loom larger than gains. It is one of the foundational concepts in the judgment and decision making literature. In Thinking, Fast and Slow…
Sep 10, 2019
Jason Collins
David Leiser and Yhonatan Shemesh’s How We Misunderstand Economics and Why it Matters: The Psychology of Bias, Distortion and Conspiracy
From a new(ish) book by David Leiser and Yhonatan Shemesh, How We Misunderstand Economics and Why it Matters: The Psychology of Bias, Distortion and Conspiracy:
Aug 5, 2019
Jason Collins
Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind
Nick Chater’s
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind
is a great book.
May 13, 2019
Jason Collins
Three algorithmic views of human judgment, and the need to consider more than algorithms
From Gerd Gigerenzer’s The bounded rationality of probabilistic mental models (PDF) (one of the papers mentioned in my recent post on the Kahneman and Tversky and Gigerenzer…
Apr 30, 2019
Jason Collins
Gigerenzer versus Kahneman and Tversky: The 1996 face-off
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gerd Gigerenzer and friends wrote a series of articles critiquing Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on heuristic and biases.…
Apr 1, 2019
Jason Collins
Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
I typically find the argument that increased choice in the modern world is “tyrannising” us to be less than compelling. On this blog, I have approvingly quoted Jim Manzi’s…
Feb 25, 2019
Jason Collins
Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Summary:
An important book describing how many experts make decisions, but with a lingering question mark about how good these decisions actually are.
Jan 17, 2019
Jason Collins
A review of 2018 and some thoughts on 2019
As a record largely for myself, below are some notes in review of 2018 and a few thoughts about 2019.
Jan 14, 2019
Jason Collins
Carol Dweck’s Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential
I did not find Carol Dweck’s
Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential
to be a compelling translation of academic work into a popular book. To all the…
Jan 10, 2019
Jason Collins
Books I read in 2018
The best books I
read
in 2018 - generally released in other years - are below. Where I have reviewed, the link leads to that review.
Jan 3, 2019
Jason Collins
Gary Klein on confirmation bias in heuristics and biases research, and explaining everything
In Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein writes:
Dec 27, 2018
Jason Collins
In contrast to less-is-more claims, ignoring information is rarely, if ever optimal
From the abstract of an interesting paper Heuristics as Bayesian inference under extreme priors by Paula Parpart and colleagues:
Dec 20, 2018
Jason Collins
My latest in Behavioral Scientist: Simple heuristics that make algorithms smart
My latest contribution at Behavioral Scientist is up. Here’s an excerpt:
Dec 14, 2018
Jason Collins
A problem in the world or a problem in the model
In reviewing Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, John Kay writes:
Dec 7, 2018
Jason Collins
The Rhetoric of Irrationality
From the opening of Lola Lopes’s 1991 article The Rhetoric of Irrationality (pdf) on the heuristics and biases literature:
Nov 30, 2018
Jason Collins
Genoeconomics and designer babies: The rise of the polygenic score
When genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were first used to study complex polygenic traits, the results were underwhelming. Few genes with any predictive power were…
Nov 23, 2018
Jason Collins
How happy is a paraplegic a year after losing the use of their legs?
From Dan Gilbert’s 2004 TED talk, now viewed over 16 million times:
Nov 16, 2018
Jason Collins
How likely is “likely”?
From Andrew Mauboussin and Michael Mauboussin:
Nov 9, 2018
Jason Collins
Avoiding trite lists of biases and pictures of human brains on PowerPoint slides
From a book chapter by Greg Davies and Peter Brooks, Practical Challenges of Implementing Behavioral Finance: Reflections from the Field (quotes taken from a pre-print):
Nov 1, 2018
Jason Collins
Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it
Summary:
Interesting ideas on how to approach negotiation, but I don’t know how much weight to give them. How much expertise could be developed in hostage negotiations? Can…
Oct 25, 2018
Jason Collins
Me on Rationally Speaking, plus some additional thoughts
My conversation with Julia Galef on Rationally Speaking is out, exploring territory on how behavioural economics and its applications could be better.
Oct 18, 2018
Jason Collins
An evolutionary projection of global fertility and population: My new paper (with Lionel Page) in Evolution & Human Behavior
Forecasting fertility is a mug’s game. Here is a picture of fertility forecasts by the US Census Bureau through the baby boom and subsequent fertility drop (from Lee…
Oct 11, 2018
Jason Collins
The Paradox of Trust
In a chapter of Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market, he makes some interesting arguments about how we should…
Oct 4, 2018
Jason Collins
Nudging and the problem of context dependent preferences
In my recent post on Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market, I noted a couple of papers in which Sugden and Cass…
Sep 28, 2018
Jason Collins
Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market
There are few books critiquing behavioural economics that I find compelling. David Levine’s Is Behavioral Economics Doomed? attacks too many straw men. Gilles Saint-Paul’s Th…
Sep 26, 2018
Jason Collins
Do nudges diminish autonomy?
Despite the fact that nudges, by definition, do not limit liberty, many people often have a feeling of discomfort about governments using nudges. I typically find it…
Sep 19, 2018
Jason Collins
A New Useless Class?
Yuval Noah Harari writes:
Sep 12, 2018
Jason Collins
Has the behavioural economics pendulum swung too far?
Over at Behavioral Scientist, as part of their “Nudge Turns 10” special issue, is my latest article When Everything Looks Like a Nail: Building Better “Behavioral Economics”…
Sep 5, 2018
Jason Collins
The three faces of overconfidence
I have complained before about people being somewhat quick to label poor decisions as being due to “overconfidence”. For one, overconfidence has several distinct forms. It…
Aug 29, 2018
Jason Collins
Concern about the “tyranny of choice”? Or condescension towards others’ preferences?
I have been reading Robert Sugden’s book The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market in preparation for an upcoming webinar with Robert about…
Aug 24, 2018
Jason Collins
Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making
For many years I have been influenced by Gerd Gigerenzer’s arguments about the power of simple heuristics and the underlying rationality to many human decisions. But I have…
Aug 22, 2018
Jason Collins
Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty
Gerd Gigerenzer’s collection of essays
Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty
covers most of Gigerenzer’s typical turf: ecological rationality, heuristics…
Aug 15, 2018
Jason Collins
The difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something
In an excellent article over at Behavioral Scientist (read the whole piece), Koen Smets writes:
Aug 8, 2018
Jason Collins
Michael Mauboussin’s Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
Michael Mauboussin’s
Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
is a multi-disciplinary book on how to improve your decision making. Framed around eight common…
Aug 1, 2018
Jason Collins
Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers
Before tackling Robert Sapolsky’s new book
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
, I decided to read Sapolsky’s earlier, well-regarded book
Why Zebra’s Don’t…
Jul 25, 2018
Jason Collins
Tom Griffiths on Gigerenzer versus Kahneman and Tversky. Plus a neat explanation on why the availability heuristic can be optimal
From an interview of Tom Griffiths by Julia Galef on the generally excellent Rationally Speaking podcast (transcript here):
Jul 18, 2018
Jason Collins
Opposing biases
From the preface of one print of Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgement (hat tip to Robert Wiblin who quoted this passagein the introduction to an 80,000 hours podcast…
Jul 11, 2018
Jason Collins
Hypotheticals versus the real world: The trolley problem
Daniel Engber writes:
Jul 4, 2018
Jason Collins
Explaining the hot-hand fallacy fallacy
Since first coming across Joshua Miller and Adam Sanurjo’s great work demonstrating that the hot-hand fallacy was itself a fallacy, I’ve been looking for a good way to…
Jun 28, 2018
Jason Collins
Wealth and genes
Go back ten years, and most published attempts to link specific genetic variants to a trait were false. These candidate-gene studies were your classic, yet typically…
Jun 21, 2018
Jason Collins
Is the marshmallow test just a measure of affluence?
I argued in a recent post that the conceptual replication of the marshmallow test was largely successful. A single data point - whether someone can wait for a larger reward…
Jun 13, 2018
Jason Collins
Does a moral reminder decrease cheating?
In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Dan Ariely describes an experiment to determine how much people cheat:
Jun 7, 2018
Jason Collins
The marshmallow test held up OK
A common theme I see on my weekly visits to Twitter is the hordes piling onto the latest psychological study or effect that hasn’t survived a replication or meta-analysis.…
May 31, 2018
Jason Collins
Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophesies
I first came across the idea of teacher expectations turning into self-fulfilling prophesies more than a decade ago, in Steven Covey’s
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
:
May 24, 2018
Jason Collins
Noise
Daniel Kahneman has a new book in the pipeline called Noise. It is to be co-authored with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony, and will focus on the “chance variability in…
May 9, 2018
Jason Collins
Behavioural economics: underrated or overrated?
Tyler Cowen’s Conversations with Tyler feature a section in which Cowen throws a series of ideas at the guest, and the guest responds with whether each idea is overrated or…
May 2, 2018
Jason Collins
My blogroll
After my recent post on how I focus, I received a couple of requests for the blogs I follow. Here are my current subscriptions in Feedly, with occasional comments.
Apr 27, 2018
Jason Collins
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
In 2011, Thorstein Veblen was ranked seventh in a poll of economists on their favourite, dead, 20th century economist. He ranked behind Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Hayek…
Apr 25, 2018
Jason Collins
How I focus (and live)
This post is a record of some strategies that I use to focus and be mildly productive. It also records a few other features of my lifestyle.
Apr 19, 2018
Jason Collins
Michael Mauboussin’s More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
Michael Mauboussin’s message in
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
is that we need an interdisciplinary toolkit to give us the diversity…
Apr 12, 2018
Jason Collins
Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
I have mixed views about Susan Cain’s
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
.
Apr 5, 2018
Jason Collins
Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie’s Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter
Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie’s
Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter
is not an exciting read. However, it is a good catalogue of group decision-making…
Mar 28, 2018
Jason Collins
Some podcast recommendations
What I’ve been listening to recently:
Mar 21, 2018
Jason Collins
People should use their judgment … except they’re often lousy at it
My Behavioral Scientist article, Don’t Touch The Computer was in part a reaction to Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson’s book
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and…
Mar 14, 2018
Jason Collins
Mike Walsh interviews me on algorithm aversion
Mike Walsh recently interviewed me for his Between Worlds Podcast, and here is the result. I largely talk about the material in two of my Behavioral Scientist articles on…
Mar 7, 2018
Jason Collins
Philip Tetlock on messing with the algorithm
From an 80,000 hours podcast episode:
Feb 28, 2018
Jason Collins
Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed The World
My journey into understanding human decision making started when I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball in 2005. The punchline - which, as it turns out, has been known across…
Feb 21, 2018
Jason Collins
Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth argues that outstanding achievement comes from a combination of passion - a focused approach to something…
Feb 14, 2018
Jason Collins
Dealing with algorithm aversion
Over at Behavioral Scientist is my latest contribution. From the intro:
Feb 7, 2018
Jason Collins
Dan Ariely’s Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations
If you have read Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality, there will be few surprises for you in his TED book
Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations
. TED…
Jan 31, 2018
Jason Collins
AI in medicine: Outperforming humans since the 1970s
From an interesting a16z podcast episode Putting AI in Medicine, in Practice (I hope I got the correct names against who is saying what):
Jan 24, 2018
Jason Collins
Is there a “backfire effect”?
I saw the answer hinted at in a paper released mid last-year (covered on WNYC), but Daniel Engber has now put together a more persuasive case:
Jan 17, 2018
Jason Collins
Benartzi (and Lehrer’s) The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behaviour
The replication crisis has ruined my ability to relax while reading a book built on social psychology foundations. The rolling sequence of interesting but small sample and…
Jan 10, 2018
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2017
The best books I
read
in 2017 - generally released in other years - are below (in no particular order). Where I have reviewed, the link leads to that review.
Jan 3, 2018
Jason Collins
Paul Ormerod on Thaler’s Misbehaving
I have been meaning to write some notes on Richard Thaler’s
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
for some time, but having now come across a review by Paul Ormerod…
Nov 20, 2017
Jason Collins
Unchanging humans
One interesting thread to Don Norman’s excellent
The Design of Everyday Things
is the idea that while our tools and technologies are subject to constant change, humans stay…
Nov 16, 2017
Jason Collins
Getting the right human-machine mix
Much of the storytelling about the future and humans and machines runs with a theme that machines will not replace us, but that we will work with machines to create a…
Nov 13, 2017
Jason Collins
Coursera’s Data Science Specialisation: A Review
As I mentioned in my comments on Coursera’s Executive Data Science specialisation, I have looked at a lot of online data science and statistics courses to find…
Nov 8, 2017
Jason Collins
Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
A typical story in Charles Perrow’s
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
runs like this.
Nov 2, 2017
Jason Collins
The benefit of doing nothing
From Tim Harford:
Oct 9, 2017
Jason Collins
Adam Alter’s Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching
I have a lot of sympathy for Adam Alter’s case in
Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching
. Despite the abundant benefits of being online…
Oct 5, 2017
Jason Collins
Rats in a casino
From Adam Alter’s
Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching
:
Oct 3, 2017
Jason Collins
Greg Ip’s Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
Greg Ip’s framework in
Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
is the contrast between what he calls the ecologists and engineers. Engineers seek…
Sep 28, 2017
Jason Collins
Does presuming you can take a person’s organs save lives?
I’ve pointed out several times on this blog the confused story about organ donation arising from Johnson and Goldstein’s
Do Defaults Save Lives?
(ungated pdf). Even greats…
Aug 30, 2017
Jason Collins
Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
In her interesting
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
, Cathy O’Neil defines Weapons of Math Destruction based on three…
Aug 22, 2017
Jason Collins
Is it irrational?
Over at Behavioral Scientist magazine my second article, Rationalizing the ‘Irrational’, is up.
Aug 16, 2017
Jason Collins
Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
In preparation for my recent column in The Behavioral Scientist, which opened with the story of world chess champion Garry Kasparov’s defeat by the computer Deep Blue, I…
Jul 19, 2017
Jason Collins
Humans vs algorithms
My first column over at the Behavioral Scientist is live.
Jul 14, 2017
Jason Collins
The “effect is too large” heuristic
Daniel Lakens writes:
Jul 6, 2017
Jason Collins
Behavioral Scientist is live
The folks at ideas42, the Center for Decision Research, and the Behavioral Science and Policy Association have kicked off a new online magazine, The Behavioral Scientist.
Jun 23, 2017
Jason Collins
Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd and the ABC Research Group’s Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
I have recommended Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd and the ABC Research Group’s
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
enough times on this blog that I figured it was time to post…
Mar 13, 2017
Jason Collins
Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
My view of Pedro Domingos’s
The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
depends on which part of the book I am thinking about.
Feb 27, 2017
Jason Collins
Coursera’s Executive Data Science Specialisation: A Review
As my day job has shifted toward a statistics and data science focus, I’ve been reviewing a lot of online materials to get a feel for what is available – both for my…
Jan 23, 2017
Jason Collins
Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths’s Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
In a sea of books describing a competition between perfectly rational decision makers and biased humans who make systematic errors in the way they decide, Brian Christian…
Jan 20, 2017
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2016
The best books I
read
in 2016 - generally released in other years - are below (in no particular order). For the non-fiction books, the links lead to my reviews.
Jan 17, 2017
Jason Collins
Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
I suspect I would have enjoyed Cal Newport’s
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
more if it had been written by a grumpy armchair economist. Newport’s advice is just what you…
Nov 30, 2016
Jason Collins
Rosenzweig’s Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions
I was triggered to write my recent posts on overconfidence and the illusion of control - pointing to doubts about the pervasiveness of these “biases” - by Phil Rosenzweig’s…
Nov 25, 2016
Jason Collins
The illusion of the illusion of control
In the spirit of my recent post on overconfidence, the illusion of control is another “bias” where imperfect information might be a better explanation for what is occurring.
Nov 21, 2016
Jason Collins
Overconfident about overconfidence
In 1995 Werner De Bondt and Richard Thaler wrote “Perhaps the most robust finding in the psychology of judgment and choice is that people are overconfident.” They are hardly…
Nov 18, 2016
Jason Collins
Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
When humans compete against chimps in tests of working memory, information processing or strategic play, chimps often come out on top. If you briefly flash 10 digits on a…
Nov 14, 2016
Jason Collins
Jones’s Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Garett Jones has built much of his excellent
Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
on foundations that, while relatively well established, are…
Nov 4, 2016
Jason Collins
Mandelbrot (and Hudson’s) The (mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward
If you have read Nassim Taleb’s
The Black Swan
you will have come across some of Benoit Mandelbrot’s ideas. However, Mandelbrot and Hudson’s
The (mis)Behaviour of Markets: A…
Oct 12, 2016
Jason Collins
Why prediction is pointless
One of my favourite parts of Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is his chapter examining the reasons for “radical skepticism” about forecasting. Radical skeptics…
Sep 27, 2016
Jason Collins
Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
Phil Rosenzweig’s
The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
is largely an exercise of shooting fish in a barrel, but is an entertaining…
Sep 21, 2016
Jason Collins
Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
doesn’t quite measure up to Tetlock’s superb Expert Political Judgment (read EPJ first)…
Sep 12, 2016
Jason Collins
Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
A common summary of Philip Tetlock’s
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
is that “experts” are terrible forecasters. There is some truth in that…
Aug 25, 2016
Jason Collins
Bias in the World Bank
Last year’s World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behaviour from the World Bank documents many of what seem to be successful behavioural interventions. Many of…
Jul 25, 2016
Jason Collins
Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
While I suggested in my post on Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting that reading about demographics in developed countries was not uplifting, the…
Jul 22, 2016
Jason Collins
Three podcast episodes
Here are three I recently enjoyed:
Jul 20, 2016
Jason Collins
Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster
I’ve recently read a couple of books on demographic trends, and there don’t seem to be a lot of silver linings in current fertility patterns in the developed world. The…
Jul 18, 2016
Jason Collins
Baumeister and Tierney’s Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
After the recent hullabaloo about whether ego depletion was a real phenomenon, I decided to finally read Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s
Willpower
cover to cover (I’ve…
Jul 15, 2016
Jason Collins
The Behavioural Economics Guide 2016 (with an intro by Gerd Gigerenzer)
The Behavioural Economics Guide 2016 is out (including a couple of references to yours truly), with the introduction by Gerd Gigerenzer. It’s nice to see some of the debate…
Jul 4, 2016
Jason Collins
Re-reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
A bit over four years ago I wrote a glowing review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I described it as a “magnificent book” and “one of the best books I have…
Jun 29, 2016
Jason Collins
Levine’s Is Behavioural Economics Doomed?
David Levine’s Is Behavioural Economics Doomed? is a good but slightly frustrating read. I agree with Levine’s central argument that rationality is underweighted in many…
Jun 23, 2016
Jason Collins
Replicating anchoring effects
The classic Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec experiment (ungated pdf) ran as follows. Students are asked to think of the last two digits of their social security number -…
May 27, 2016
Jason Collins
Saint-Paul’s The Tyranny of Utility: Behavioral Social Science and the Rise of Paternalism
The growth in behavioural science has given a new foundation for paternalistic government interventions. Governments now try to help “biased” humans make better decisions -…
May 26, 2016
Jason Collins
Bad Behavioural Science: Failures, bias and fairy tales
Below is the text of my presentation to the Sydney Behavioural Economics and Behavioural Science Meetup on 11 May 2016. The talk is aimed at an intelligent non-specialist…
May 11, 2016
Jason Collins
Evolutionary Biology in Economics: A Review
I’ve just had a new article published in the Economic Record - Evolutionary Biology in Economics: A Review (pdf).
May 10, 2016
Jason Collins
Ariely’s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
I rate the third of Dan Ariely’s books,
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
, somewhere between his first two books.
Apr 22, 2016
Jason Collins
The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development
Oded Galor has pointed me to his forthcoming article with Quamrul Ashraf in The Journal of Economic Literature.
Apr 20, 2016
Jason Collins
Failure to replicate: ego depletion edition
Ego depletion is the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower. As we use it through the day, we become depleted and more likely to experience a willpower failure.
Apr 15, 2016
Jason Collins
Notes on a few books
The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour
by Adam Ferrier
Apr 13, 2016
Jason Collins
Masel’s Bypass Wall Street: A Biologist’s Guide to the Rat Race
Tyler Cowen described Joanna Masel’s
Bypass Wall Street: A Biologist’s Guide to the Rat Race
as “Darwin plus Fred Hirsch on positional goods as applied to finance and…
Apr 6, 2016
Jason Collins
Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal
In
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
, Jonathan Gottschall asks why we live and breathe stories. We are prolific storytellers. We consume movies, novels and…
Apr 1, 2016
Jason Collins
My first biology publication
For pitching in to help my PhD supervisor on a paper, I’ve scored my first biology publication:
Mar 31, 2016
Jason Collins
Gigerenzer on system one and system two
If you have read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, you will be familiar with the concepts of System One and System Two. Gerd Gigerenzer is not a fan of the…
Mar 17, 2016
Jason Collins
Kay’s Other People’s Money
John Kay’s
Other People’s Money
is generally an excellent book. Kay argues that the growth in the size of the financial system hasn’t been matched by improvements in the…
Mar 8, 2016
Jason Collins
Thiel’s Zero to One
I am sympathetic to many of Peter Thiel’s arguments in
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
, but this is not a book where the arguments are buttressed…
Feb 15, 2016
Jason Collins
Kenrick and Griskevicius’s The Rational Animal
I am in two minds about Doug Kenrick and Vlad Griskevicius’s
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
. As an introduction to evolutionary psychology…
Feb 8, 2016
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2015
A touch late, but as for earlier years, my list comprises the best books I read in the year, not the best of those released in the year (in fact, almost every book I read…
Jan 18, 2016
Jason Collins
PhD thesis passed
A couple of months ago I was notified that my PhD thesis had been passed (full pdf here). I have posted about each chapter before:
Nov 16, 2015
Jason Collins
Evonomics is live!
The web magazine Evonomics is now live. The blurb:
Oct 12, 2015
Jason Collins
Economics and Biology of Contests Conference 2016
The Cooperation and Conflict in the Family conference of early last year has resulted in a follow-up event - the Economics and Biology of Contests Conference 2016:
Oct 6, 2015
Jason Collins
Another #MSiX reading list
Yesterday was the second edition of the Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX). It was a more eclectic set of speakers than last year, extending from the first…
Jul 31, 2015
Jason Collins
Please, not another bias! An evolutionary take on behavioural economics
Below is a transcript of my planned presentation at today’s Marketing Science Ideas Xchange. The important images from the slide pack are below, but the full set of slides is …
Jul 30, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 3, 2015
Jason Collins
Sam Bowles on the death of ‘Homo Economicus’
A few straw men are burnt along the way, but interesting all the same.
Jul 2, 2015
Jason Collins
A grumpy take on behavioural economics
I missed this when it was first posted, but John Cochrane has posted a great rant (not that I agree with it all) in response to a couple of articles on Richard Thaler’s new…
Jun 30, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 26, 2015
Jason Collins
We have no idea
I have been listening to a podcast of an excellent talk by David Spiegelhalter on “Thinking and Feeling About Risk”. The video of the lecture is below.
Jun 24, 2015
Jason Collins
Please experiment on us
Michelle Meyer and Christopher Chabris write:
Jun 23, 2015
Jason Collins
The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics
I released this working paper a few months ago, but neglected to blog about it - I’ve written (with my supervisors) a review of the literature incorporating evolutionary…
Jun 22, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 19, 2015
Jason Collins
The human factor in accidents
The below passage is from a neat article on how mistakes can save lives.
Jun 17, 2015
Jason Collins
Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX) 2015
The 2015 Marketing Science Ideas Xchange - MSiX - has been announced for 30 July in Sydney. As it says in the blurb, MSiX “is dedicated to exploring how brands can benefit…
Jun 15, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 12, 2015
Jason Collins
The winner effect in humans
I am using some material from John Coates’s excellent The Hour Between Dog and Wolf for a presentation I am giving next week, and decided it was worth sharing here:
Jun 11, 2015
Jason Collins
Family friendly backfires
Last month a NYT article by Claire Cain Miller documented some of the backfires associated with family friendly policies. For instance:
Jun 9, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 5, 2015
Jason Collins
Merton on retirement incomes
There is a neat article by Robert Merton (from July last year) in the Harvard Business Review on the shift to defined contribution plans when saving for retirement.
Jun 4, 2015
Jason Collins
Measurement error in 23andme
As a broad indication of the effects of measurement error in 23andme, ancestry analysis for two identical twins is below. It suggests the decimal point isn’t yet justified.…
Jun 2, 2015
Jason Collins
Ration information and avoid news
I am rereading Nassim Taleb’s
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
. The first time I read it was during a series of long-haul flights, so some parts of the book are…
Jun 1, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 29, 2015
Jason Collins
Fifty years of twin studies
If you’re familiar with the literature, this is unsurprising. A meta-analysis in Nature Genetics of 2,748 twin study publications points to the strong role of genetics and…
May 28, 2015
Jason Collins
Conspicuous consumption and economic growth
A paper of mine has just been published in the Journal of Bioeconomics - Sexual selection, conspicuous consumption and economic growth (pdf).
May 26, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week (or more like two weeks):
May 17, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 1, 2015
Jason Collins
Bad nudges - organ donation edition
It’s a favourite behavioural science story. Countries that have opt-in organ donation have lower rates of organ donation than countries where you have to opt out of being an…
Apr 27, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week (or more like two weeks):
Apr 24, 2015
Jason Collins
Returns to self control - unemployment edition
A new paper in Psychological Science by Michael Daly and friends:
Apr 15, 2015
Jason Collins
Uncertainty and understanding behaviour
From Cameron Murray on the trolley problem:
Apr 13, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 10, 2015
Jason Collins
Predicting replication
The Behavioural Economics Replication Project:
Apr 10, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 3, 2015
Jason Collins
The law of law’s leverage
Last week I posted on Owen Jones’s 2000 article Time-Shifted Rationality and the Law of Law’s Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology and his argument that…
Apr 2, 2015
Jason Collins
The gender reading gap and love of learning
Two interesting education snippets.
Mar 30, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 27, 2015
Jason Collins
An evolutionary perspective on behavioural economics
I often complain that behavioural economics (behavioural science) often appears to be no more than a loosely connected set of heuristics and biases, crying out for…
Mar 25, 2015
Jason Collins
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect
I spotted this in a tweet from Abe List yesterday, and love the idea. The original source is a speech by Michael Crichton (which is worth reading in itself).
Mar 23, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 20, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 13, 2015
Jason Collins
The patience of economists
Over four years since release of the working paper (and two and half years since I posted about it), Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel’s paper The Origin of Savings Behavior…
Mar 12, 2015
Jason Collins
The other gender gap
The Economist discusses a new OECD report on a growing gender gap in schools:
Mar 10, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 6, 2015
Jason Collins
Overcoming implicit bias
I have been working through
The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy
, edited by Eldar Shafir, and have mixed views so far. As I go through, I will note some interesting…
Mar 4, 2015
Jason Collins
Introducing Evonomics
What is Evonomics?
Mar 2, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 27, 2015
Jason Collins
Accepting heritability
At Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow writes:
Feb 25, 2015
Jason Collins
Wisdom from Tolstoy
I have just finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and along the way marked a couple of passages.
Feb 23, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week (a slightly sparse list as I didn’t find much time to see what was out there):
Feb 20, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 13, 2015
Jason Collins
Charts that don’t seem quite right - organ donation edition
Organ donation rates are an often used example of the power of defaults. Take the following passage by Dan Ariely, explaining this (also often used) chart from Johnson and…
Feb 11, 2015
Jason Collins
The death of defaults?
Late last year I went to a presentation by Schlomo Benartzi on how people think differently when they are using a screen. The punchline was that many of the classic…
Feb 9, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 6, 2015
Jason Collins
Obesity is not a public health problem
It has taken a while for this month’s Cato Unbound, “Can Public Policy Stop Obesity?”, to warm up. But Christopher Snowdon’s latest post is full of good material. He takes…
Feb 5, 2015
Jason Collins
Durant’s The Paleo Manifesto
As someone whose diet broadly (in an 80:20 way) reflects paleo principles, I consume the occasional book on the subject. The latest is John Durant’s
The Paleo Manifesto…
Feb 4, 2015
Jason Collins
Nudging for freedom
“Nudges” change the decision environment so that people make “better” decisions, while retaining freedom of choice. Fitting within what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler call …
Feb 2, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 30, 2015
Jason Collins
Manzi’s Uncontrolled
In social science, a myriad of factors can affect outcomes. Think of all the factors claimed to affect school achievement - student characteristics such as intelligence…
Jan 28, 2015
Jason Collins
Manzi on the abortion-crime hypothesis
My recent reading of David Colander and Roland Kupers’s Complexity and the Art of Public Policy prompted me to re-read James Manzi’s Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of…
Jan 26, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 23, 2015
Jason Collins
Grade inflation and the Dunning-Kruger effect
The famous Dunning-Kruger effect, in the words of Dunning and Kruger, is a bias where:
Jan 21, 2015
Jason Collins
The benefits of cognitive limits
Cleaning up some notes recently, I was reminded of another interesting piece from Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals:
Jan 19, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 16, 2015
Jason Collins
That chart doesn’t match your headline - fertility edition
Under the heading “Japan’s birth rate problem is way worse than anyone imagined”, Ana Swanson at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog shows the following chart:
Jan 14, 2015
Jason Collins
Bad statistics - cancer edition
Are two-thirds of cancer due to bad luck as many recent headlines have stated? Well, we don’t really know.
Jan 12, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 9, 2015
Jason Collins
The blogs I read
Although RSS seems to be on the way out, I’ve found myself explaining feed readers to a few people recently. They asked for some suggestions of blogs to follow, so below are…
Jan 8, 2015
Jason Collins
Self evident but unexplored - how genetic effects vary over time
A new paper in PNAS reports on how the effect of a variant of a gene called FTO varies over time. Previous research has shown that people with two copies of a particular FTO…
Jan 5, 2015
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 2, 2015
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2014
Continuing my tradition of giving the best books I read in the year - generally released in other years - the best books I read in 2014 are below (albeit from a smaller pool…
Dec 30, 2014
Jason Collins
Complexity and the Art of Public Policy
The basis of David Colander and Roland Kupers’s book
Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up
is that the economy is a complex…
Dec 29, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 27, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 19, 2014
Jason Collins
Complexity versus chaos
Another clip from David Colander and Roland Kupers’s Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up - a nice description of how two…
Dec 18, 2014
Jason Collins
More praise of mathematics
Following my post last week on the need for more complicated models in economics, a new paper in PLOS Biology argues for the importance of mathematical models in showing…
Dec 16, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 12, 2014
Jason Collins
My year
In the day job, for most of this year I was seconded onto the Australian Government’s Financial System Inquiry. The Inquiry was established to provide a broad review of the…
Dec 11, 2014
Jason Collins
We need more complicated mathematical models in economics
I am half way through David Colander and Roland Kupers’s book Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up. Overall, it’s a good…
Dec 8, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 6, 2014
Jason Collins
The unrealistic assumptions of biology
Biologists are usually among the first to tell me that economists rely on unrealistic assumptions about human decision making. They laugh at the idea that people are…
Dec 4, 2014
Jason Collins
The power of heuristics
Gerd Gigerenzer is a strong advocate of the idea that simple heuristics can make us smart. We don’t need complex models of the world to make good decisions.
Dec 2, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 28, 2014
Jason Collins
Four perspectives on human decision making
I have been rereading Gerd Gigerenzer’s collection of essays Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty. It covers most of Gigerenzer’s typical turf -…
Nov 25, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 22, 2014
Jason Collins
Genetics and education policy
Philip Ball has an article in the December issue of Prospect (ungated on his blog) arguing that consideration of the genetic basis to social problems is a distraction from…
Nov 19, 2014
Jason Collins
The beauty of self interest
In my review of E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, I quoted this passage which captures Wilson’s conception of the origin of cooperation in humans.
Nov 18, 2014
Jason Collins
E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth
The re-eruption of the war of words between E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins has occurred just as I have come around to reading Wilson’s 2012 book
The Social Conquest of Earth
…
Nov 17, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 14, 2014
Jason Collins
Ignorance feels so much like expertise
In the Pacific Standard, David Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect writes:
Nov 12, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 7, 2014
Jason Collins
Genome Wide Association Studies and socioeconomic outcomes
A few months back, I posted about a Conference on Genetics and Behaviour held by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago. …
Nov 4, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 31, 2014
Jason Collins
Improving behavioural economics
A neat new paper has appeared on SSRN from Owen Jones - Why Behavioral Economics Isn’t Better, and How it Could Be (HT: Emanuel Derman via Dennis Dittrich). My favourite…
Oct 29, 2014
Jason Collins
An updated economics and evolutionary biology reading list and a collection of book reviews
I have updated my economics and evolutionary biology reading list, with a few new additions including John Coates’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Gregory Clark’s new book…
Oct 27, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 25, 2014
Jason Collins
Finding taxis on rainy days
A classic story on the play-list of many behavioural economics presentations is why you can’t find taxis on rainy days. The story is based on the idea that taxi drivers work…
Oct 23, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 19, 2014
Jason Collins
The invisible hand of Jupiter
I’m note sure how I hadn’t come across this before (one need only read the Wikipedia entry “invisible hand”), but Adam Smith used the phrase “invisible hand” three times. It…
Oct 14, 2014
Jason Collins
Lazy analysis - inequality edition
Over at WSJ Real Time Economics, Josh Zumbrun turns the following chart into a claim that “the SAT is just another area in American life where economic inequality results in…
Oct 11, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 10, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 4, 2014
Jason Collins
Tamed by an influx of women
Perusing through some of my bookmarks in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I was reminded of the following passage. It’s worth…
Oct 2, 2014
Jason Collins
The genetic basis of social mobility
In 2007’s
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
, Gregory Clark argued that the higher fertility of the rich in pre-industrial England sowed the seeds for…
Sep 30, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 27, 2014
Jason Collins
Kahneman’s optimistic view of the mind
In the Gerd Gigerenzer versus Daniel Kahneman wars, most of the projectiles seem to fly one way. Gigerenzer attacks directly, Kahneman expends little effort in defence.
Sep 24, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 20, 2014
Jason Collins
Scarcity of time, money, friends and bandwidth
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
is full of interesting insight and experimental results. It presents a novel way of…
Sep 18, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 12, 2014
Jason Collins
Gerd Gigerenzer’s Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions
I should start this review of Gerd Gigerenzer’s least satisfactory but still interesting book,
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions
, by saying that I am a huge Gigerenzer…
Sep 10, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 5, 2014
Jason Collins
The biology of boom and bust
John Coates’s excellent
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust
tells the story of the effect of hormones on decision…
Sep 4, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 31, 2014
Jason Collins
Twin studies stand up to the critique, again
The history of twin studies is littered with attempts to discredit them - such as this bit of rubbish. Yet every challenge has been met, with a couple of newish studies…
Aug 28, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 22, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 17, 2014
Jason Collins
Shaping the brain and humans as complex systems
I linked to this interview with Robert Sapolsky a couple of weeks ago, but after glancing through it again, I felt it worth highlighting two paragraphs (both for your…
Aug 12, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 8, 2014
Jason Collins
Not the jam study again
Go to any behavioural science conference, event or presentation, and there is a high probability you will hear about “the jam study”. Last week’s excellent MSiX was no…
Aug 6, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 1, 2014
Jason Collins
An MSiX reading list
Yesterday was day one of the Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX). As I mentioned in a previous post, it has been an interesting opportunity to see behavioural science…
Jul 31, 2014
Jason Collins
Gigerenzer versus nudge
Since I first came across it, I have been a fan of Gerd Gigerenzer’s work. But I have always been slightly perplexed by the effort he expends framing his work in opposition…
Jul 29, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 25, 2014
Jason Collins
Our visual system predicts the future
I am reading John Coates’s thus far excellent The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind. There are many highlights and interesting pieces…
Jul 24, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 18, 2014
Jason Collins
The wisdom of crowds of people who don’t believe in the wisdom of crowds
MIT Technology reports new research on the “wisdom of the confident”:
Jul 17, 2014
Jason Collins
The behaviour genetics to eugenics to Nazi manoeuvre
Recently, I’ve tended to roll my eyes rather than respond to poor commentary on behaviour genetics. But areview by Kate Douglas at New Scientist, in which she pulls the…
Jul 16, 2014
Jason Collins
MSiX: Marketing Science Ideas Xchange
For those in or near Sydney at the end of July, there’s an interesting conference in the works - the Marketing Science Ideas Exchange. From the blurb:
Jul 11, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week (or closer to a month):
Jul 7, 2014
Jason Collins
Genes and socioeconomic aggregates
In April, a Conference on Genetics and Behaviour was held by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago.
Jun 24, 2014
Jason Collins
The benefit of uncertainty
John Coates writes:
Jun 15, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 9, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 19, 2014
Jason Collins
Doubling down
First, from Andrew Leigh, discussing Gregory Clark’s work showing that low social mobility persists across countries and policy environments:
May 13, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 11, 2014
Jason Collins
Becker on evolution and economics
Gary Becker was one of the first economists to seriously contemplate the role that evolutionary biology could play in economics. In 1976, he wrote:
May 6, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 3, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 18, 2014
Jason Collins
Humbling wingnuts
I have just read Cass Sunstein’s short collection of essays
How to Humble a Wingnut and Other Lessons from Behavioral Economics
. It is a decent summary of the behavioural…
Apr 11, 2014
Jason Collins
The magic of commerce
A re-read of The Malay Archipelago reminded me of Alfred Russel Wallace’s occasional bleeding-heart libertarian leanings. From his time in remote Dobo in the Aru Islands of…
Apr 9, 2014
Jason Collins
Ignore the sunk costs
Edge has a great set of short notes by various authors on how Daniel Kahneman has influenced them. It is worth flicking through them all, but excerpts from my two favourites…
Apr 7, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Again, closer to a month of links:
Apr 6, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
More like a month of links, but here goes:
Mar 12, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 11, 2014
Jason Collins
Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference wrap
Over the past year I have posted several times about the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference, which was held in Sydney this week. It turned out to be a great…
Feb 9, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 2, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 27, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 19, 2014
Jason Collins
The interplay of genetic and cultural evolution
In my last post, I discussed the framework for cultural evolution laid out by Claire El Mouden and colleagues in a new article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (ungated …
Jan 16, 2014
Jason Collins
Doing cultural evolution right
A sojourn into the literature on cultural evolution can be confusing. Authors use the same terms in different ways. Unique models are used to reach opposite conclusions. And…
Jan 14, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jan 11, 2014
Jason Collins
The origin of the phrase “sneaky f**cker”
When low-status males have no chance of accessing females via traditional routes such as fighting or signalling their prowess, they may attempt more deceptive means of…
Jan 9, 2014
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week (or two):
Jan 5, 2014
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2013
As is my habit, each year I give a list of the best books I have read during the year. I tend not to focus on the newest releases, so most of the list was not published this…
Dec 24, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 21, 2013
Jason Collins
The benefits of math skills to forager-farmers
In a new article by Eduardo Undurraga and colleagues (HT: Neuroskeptic):
Dec 19, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 16, 2013
Jason Collins
The theoretical ambition of behavioural science
From Richard Posner (HT: Ryan Murphy):
Dec 12, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Dec 9, 2013
Jason Collins
Neoclassical theory won because it backed the right horse
An interesting idea in Herb Gintis’s review of The Origin of Wealth (pdf):
Dec 3, 2013
Jason Collins
Natural selection and saving
In the academic literature at the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology, evolution of time preference (patience) is one area that has received much attention.…
Nov 30, 2013
Jason Collins
Sexual selection on the American frontier
It seems obvious that having multiple wives is a good thing for the fitness of a man. Similarly, having the women in a population monopolised by a small number of men is not…
Nov 28, 2013
Jason Collins
Conspicuous consumption as a handicap
In a recent post, I discussed Gianni De Fraja’s paper in which he proposed that sexual selection shaped the nature of conspicuous consumption by men. In his model…
Nov 25, 2013
Jason Collins
An evolutionary explanation of consumption
Since Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class, the economics profession has taken a somewhat mixed approach to consumption. In areas such signalling theory…
Nov 22, 2013
Jason Collins
Does mathematical training increase our risk tolerance?
Humans are inherently risk averse. When offered a coin toss with a reward of $10,000 for heads but a loss of $10,000 for tails, most people would decline. They would likely…
Nov 21, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 16, 2013
Jason Collins
Why isn’t economics evolutionary?
Despite the massive influence of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change within evolutionary economic circles, the book and the body of…
Nov 14, 2013
Jason Collins”
Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s
An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
is the book on which modern “evolutionary economics” is built. Published in 1982, Nelson and…
Nov 12, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 9, 2013
Jason Collins
Is intelligence at the root of cooperation?
From Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (references removed):
Nov 7, 2013
Jason Collins
Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge
In the process of listening to audio versions of some of the less arduous books on my reading list, I have just listened to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s
Nudge
.
Nov 5, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Nov 1, 2013
Jason Collins
“Behavioural economics” versus “behavioural science”
In the comments, Rory Sutherland writes:
Oct 31, 2013
Jason Collins
Six signs you’re reading good criticism of economics
After reading Chris Auld’s 18 signs you’re reading bad criticism of economics (I agree with most, although by viewing them as “signs” with exceptions), I was thinking about…
Oct 29, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 26, 2013
Jason Collins
Warfare and the transition to agriculture
As I pointed out in my last post, Jared Diamond called the transition to agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Yet despite evidence that the early…
Oct 25, 2013
Jason Collins
Life expectancy and the dawn of agriculture
Relative to their hunter-gatherer counterparts, early Neolithic farmers were short, had poor dental health due to malnutrition, bone lesions suggestive of disease and…
Oct 22, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 19, 2013
Jason Collins
In praise of Malcolm Gladwell
While Malcolm Gladwell bashing season is still in full swing and before the mob burns the Gladwell effigy, I want to record a few thoughts that I feel are under-appreciated…
Oct 15, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 12, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Oct 4, 2013
Jason Collins
Defending economics from the anthropologists
Well, one anthropologist anyway. I’m normally the first person to admit that economics would benefit from incorporating findings from other fields into its understanding of…
Sep 30, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 27, 2013
Jason Collins
Silver’s The Signal and the Noise
I’d recommend Nate Silver’s
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don’t
to anyone looking for a layman’s tour of applied statistics. It is not a…
Sep 25, 2013
Jason Collins
Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality
I rate Dan Ariely’s
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic
lower than Predictably Irrational. Like Predictably Irrational, The Upside of…
Sep 23, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 20, 2013
Jason Collins
What is evolutionary economics?
I am called an evolutionary economist often enough that I have been tempted to write a post titled “Why I am not an evolutionary economist”. In the absence of that post, Pete…
Sep 18, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 13, 2013
Jason Collins
Design principles for the efficacy of groups
In Tim Harford’s article contrasting Lin Ostrom and Garrett Hardin’s approaches to the tragedy of the commons, he writes:
Sep 11, 2013
Jason Collins
Monkeys respond to the Malthusian limit
From Smithsonian magazine (HT: John Hawks):
Sep 9, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Sep 6, 2013
Jason Collins
Galor’s Unified Growth Theory
In 1798, Thomas Malthus described a world where technological progress did not increase per person income. Any additional income was consumed by population growth. It…
Sep 4, 2013
Jason Collins
Ariely’s Predictably Irrational
After sitting in my reading pile for the best part of three years, I have finally read (or more accurately, listened to) Dan Ariely’s
Predictably Irrational
. One of the most…
Sep 2, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 30, 2013
Jason Collins
Economic cosmology - Equilibrium
Although most of my interest in integrating evolutionary biology into economics concerns treating people as evolved (or evolving) animals, economists can also learn a lot…
Aug 29, 2013
Jason Collins
Economic cosmology - The invisible hand
Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand is one of the more abused ideas in economics. Mentioned only once in The Wealth of Nations, and only then in the context of…
Aug 26, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 23, 2013
Jason Collins
Economic cosmology - The rational egotistical individual
The social sciences have recently become a common battleground for debates about group selection. From Jonathan Haidt’s use of group selection to explain “groupish” traits…
Aug 20, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 16, 2013
Jason Collins
Four reasons why evolutionary theory might not add value to economics
In the lead article to a recent Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization special issue,
Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy
, David…
Aug 12, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 9, 2013
Jason Collins
The love principle
In my recent post reviewing Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster’s
An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks
, I flagged that they considered their new theoretical…
Aug 7, 2013
Jason Collins
An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks
My assessment of
An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks
by Paul Frijters with Gigi Foster varies with the objective I assess it against. On the one hand…
Aug 5, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Aug 2, 2013
Jason Collins
The intergenerational transmission of economic development
In my last post, I noted one of the major themes of a new Journal of Economic Literature paper, How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development (ungated pdf). Enrico Spolaore…
Jul 31, 2013
Jason Collins
The deep roots of economic development
I first flagged this article a year or so ago when it was released as a working paper, but the new Journal of Economic Literature paper How Deep Are the Roots of Economic…
Jul 29, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 26, 2013
Jason Collins
Social Darwinism is back
A couple of weeks ago I flagged the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization’s (JEBO) special issue Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and…
Jul 24, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 19, 2013
Jason Collins
Darwin’s Conjecture - Generalising Darwinism
Over the last couple of months I have been a silent participant in Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen’s reading group for their book
Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for…
Jul 18, 2013
Jason Collins
Genetic diversity, economic development and policy
It has been a few months since I wrote most of my series of posts on Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and…
Jul 15, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 12, 2013
Jason Collins
Observations on happiness, biases and preferences
This year’s Australian Conference of Economists had a few behavioural/experimental economists among the invited speaker list. This post is a short record of some of the main…
Jul 11, 2013
Jason Collins
Grandparents affect social mobility
In his research on social mobility using surnames, Gregory Clark has found lower levels of social mobility than many other studies. Clark has defended this finding on the…
Jul 9, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jul 5, 2013
Jason Collins
Economic growth and evolution: Parental preference for quality and quantity of offspring
My first publication, Economic Growth and Evolution: Parental Preference for Quality and Quantity of Offspring, has just been released electronically in Macroeconomic…
Jul 4, 2013
Jason Collins
Population, technological progress and the evolution of innovative potential
In his seminal paper Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990, Michael Kremer combined two basic concepts to explain the greater than exponential…
Jul 2, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 28, 2013
Jason Collins
Accelerating adaptive evolution in humans
In my last post, I noted R.A. Fisher’s argument that a larger population leads to more mutations and greater potential for adaptive evolution. As human populations have…
Jun 26, 2013
Jason Collins
More people means more ideas AND mutations
A core ideas in economics is that more people means more ideas. To take an extreme case, you would expect a population of one person to generate fewer ideas that a…
Jun 24, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 21, 2013
Jason Collins
When your neighbour wins the lottery
I’m not sure if the format of the Dutch postcode lottery is common, but it certainly creates some interesting incentives. In this lottery, a random postcode is drawn from…
Jun 19, 2013
Jason Collins
Height through the millennia
For the last year or so, I have had sitting in my “to blog” pile a 2004 New Yorker article about the increasing height of Europeans relative to Americans. It has a lot of…
Jun 17, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 14, 2013
Jason Collins
World economic history in two diagrams
Gregory Clark opens
A Farewell to Alms
with a strong claim:
Jun 12, 2013
Jason Collins
Genetics and the increase in obesity
In a discussion on the rise of mental health issues at Core Economics, Paul Frijters touches on the increase in obesity over the last 50 years.
Jun 10, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Jun 7, 2013
Jason Collins
Paleo-hypotheses
In my post on Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy, I referred to a review by John Hawks. Hawks suggested that Zuk’s fantasies should be thought of as hypotheses to be tested. I was…
Jun 5, 2013
Jason Collins
Zuk’s Paleofantasy
For some time, the “Paleo” lifestyle has been due for a decent critique from the perspective of growing evidence about the rapid rate of human evolution. Humans have evolved…
Jun 3, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 31, 2013
Jason Collins
Modelling versus theory
While looking for something completely unrelated, I came across this 2007 Econ Journal Watch paper Model Building versus Theorizing: The Paucity of Theory in the Journal of…
May 28, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 24, 2013
Jason Collins
A science of intentional change
If nothing else, David Sloan Wilson is ambitious. He’s been pushing the multilevel selection wheelbarrow with not much support for close to forty years (although support…
May 22, 2013
Jason Collins
Sexual selection and entrepreneurship
From Neil Niman’s article Sexual Selection and Economic Positioning:
May 20, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Were the Victorian’s cleverer than us? Patrick Rabbit pulls it apart.
May 17, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 10, 2013
Jason Collins
Cluelessness
Some of the reviews of Michael Chwe’s
Jane Austen, Game Theorist
suggest that it is worth a read (such as Diane Coyle ). One idea in the book that I like the sound of is…
May 8, 2013
Jason Collins
Impatience and aggregate risk
Imagine two populations of asexually reproducing people (asexual reproduction is where each child comes from a single parent, not a couple). In the first population, each…
May 6, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
May 3, 2013
Jason Collins
Selection during pregnancy
Carl Zimmer writes about a new paper in Trends in Genetics where the authors argue that natural selection during pregnancy is an important driver of recent evolutionary…
May 2, 2013
Jason Collins
Hwang and Horowitt’s The Rainforest
A couple of months ago I linked to a piece by Ronald Coase about the state of economics. Coase wrote:
Apr 30, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 26, 2013
Jason Collins
Altruists and the knowledge problem
I have posted before about Gary Becker’s argument that the evolution of altruism can be explained by a version of his rotten kid theorem. In short, if an altruist cares…
Apr 25, 2013
Jason Collins
Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making
Even though I consider that I am across the literature at the boundary of economics and evolutionary biology, now and then an article pops up that I somehow missed. The…
Apr 22, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 19, 2013
Jason Collins
Evolution of time preference by natural selection
One of the few areas where there is active research on the link between evolutionary biology and economics is the evolution of economic preferences (some papers in this area…
Apr 18, 2013
Jason Collins
A unified behavioural theory of economic activity
John Brockman has wheeled out another good bunch of experts for the newest Edge question “What’s the question about your field that you dread being asked?”
Apr 15, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 13, 2013
Jason Collins
Evolutionary psychology, fertility and economic ambition
Since the time of Darwin, the same evolutionary psychology debates have played out over and over. Here is Ronald A. Fisher in
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
(1930)…
Apr 10, 2013
Jason Collins
The evolution of happiness
When we experience positive events, we feel happy. But happiness adjusts, with the effects of a positive event normally short-lived. Over the long-term, happiness tends to…
Apr 8, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Apr 6, 2013
Jason Collins
Economics from a biological viewpoint
One of the earlier advocates of using evolutionary biology in economics was Jack Hirshleifer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.…
Apr 1, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 30, 2013
Jason Collins
Using the Malthusian model to measure technology
Underlying much of Ashraf and Galor’s analysis of genetic diversity and economic development is a Malthusian model of the world. The Malthusian model, as the name suggests…
Mar 28, 2013
Jason Collins
The success of the productive
In another great section from the
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
, R.A. Fisher argues that the free exchange of goods and private property rights are triumphs of…
Mar 26, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 23, 2013
Jason Collins
Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference
I’m excited that I can finally announce the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference.
Mar 20, 2013
Jason Collins
Business adaptation
Rafe Sagarin blogs at the Harvard Business Review:
Mar 18, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 15, 2013
Jason Collins
Genetic distance and income differences - evidence from China
In a paper in Economic Letters (ungated version here), Ying Bai and James Kung test Spolaore and Wacziarg’s hypothesis on genetic distant and economic development:
Mar 14, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 9, 2013
Jason Collins
Genetic diversity, phenotypic diversity and the founder effect
In two recent posts I examined the causative mechanisms underlying Ashraf and Galor’s hypothesis linking genetic diversity to economic growth (innovation and conflict). In…
Mar 7, 2013
Jason Collins
Victorian naturalists
Being a naturalist in the Victorian era was a different exercise to today. From Darwin’s The Descent of Man:
Mar 4, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Mar 2, 2013
Jason Collins
Publishing on genetic diversity and economic growth
Should Ashraf and Galor’s paper The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development have been published?
Feb 28, 2013
Jason Collins
Flynn’s Are We Getting Smarter?
James Flynn of Flynn effect fame has a relatively new book out,
Are We Getting Smarter?
I have found Flynn’s earlier books to be easy but not great reads, and this book…
Feb 26, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 23, 2013
Jason Collins
Does genetic diversity increase conflict?
Ashraf and Galor’s hypothesis linking genetic diversity to economic growth has two limbs. The first, which I posted about last week, is that genetic diversity pushes out the…
Feb 22, 2013
Jason Collins
Fisher on the evolution of time preference
I am re-reading Fisher’s
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
and was reminded of this passage that predates modern economic arguments about the evolution of the rate…
Feb 19, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Links this week:
Feb 16, 2013
Jason Collins
Social mobility across the generations
The Economist reports on Greg Clark’s work using surnames to track social mobility. I have posted about this work before, but The Economist piece makes an important point.…
Feb 15, 2013
Jason Collins
Does genetic diversity increase innovation?
Last week I presented a summary of the method and findings of Ashraf and Galor’s American Economic Review paper The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and…
Feb 12, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Four links this week:
Feb 9, 2013
Jason Collins
The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development
Although the debate it triggered has been going for a few months (see here, here, here and here.), Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis…
Feb 8, 2013
Jason Collins
A model of the quantity-quality trade-off
Following my last post suggesting that there was no quality-quantity trade-off in modern societies (at least to an extent that mattered), I wanted to point to a nice model…
Feb 6, 2013
Jason Collins
There is no quantity-quality trade-off
Following his disappearance from Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa has reappeared in big think (with not all happy with this move [Update: he’s now gone again, along with…
Feb 4, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
Four links this week:
Feb 1, 2013
Jason Collins
Fertility is going to go up
In my latest working paper, co-authored with Oliver Richards, we argue that recent fertility increases in developed countries may only be the beginning. From the abstract:
Jan 31, 2013
Jason Collins
Spontaneous order
Another interesting old paper off my reading pile has been Robert Sugden’s Spontaneous Order.
Jan 29, 2013
Jason Collins
A week of links
This week we have paleo for dogs, irrational consumers and the question of what is the right size:
Jan 25, 2013
Jason Collins
Updating Maddison
Angus Maddison’s estimates of per capita GDP - from 1 AD through to the 2000s - are one of the most commonly used data sets in the examination of long-term economic growth.…
Jan 23, 2013
Jason Collins
James Crow on the quality of people
Working through my reading pile, I finally read this great 1966 article by James Crow - The Quality of People: Human Evolutionary Changes. For those unfamiliar with Crow’s…
Jan 21, 2013
Jason Collins
The benefits of Chinese eugenics
Edge’s annual question for 2013 - What
should
we worry about? - has generated a bunch of interesting responses. First in the list is Geoffrey Miller’s response, Chinese…
Jan 18, 2013
Jason Collins
Evolution, the Human Sciences and Liberty meeting
I had the following Mont Pelerin Society Special Meeting pointed out to me. It has a great bunch of speakers - Robert Boyd, Robin Dunbar, Leda Cosmides, Matt Ridley, Richard…
Jan 17, 2013
Jason Collins
Is poverty in our genes? From the comments
In response to the critique in Current Anthropology on Ashraf and Galor’s paper on genetic diversity and economic growth, C.W. writes:
Jan 15, 2013
Jason Collins
O-ring and foolproof sectors
In my last post, I described Kremer’s O-ring theory of economic development. Kremer’s insight was that if production in an economy consists of many discrete tasks and…
Jan 14, 2013
Jason Collins
Kremer’s O-ring theory of economic development
The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization has a new paper by Garett Jones (ungated version here) on the O-ring theory of economic development.…
Jan 11, 2013
Jason Collins
Consensus in economics and biology
Despite the common public brawls, a paper presented at the American Economic Association annual meeting by Gordon and Dahl shows high levels of consensus between economists…
Jan 9, 2013
Jason Collins
Who will invade economics?
Justin Fox has asked whether the age of economic imperialism is coming to an end and whether economics may be vulnerable to imperialism itself:
Jan 6, 2013
Jason Collins
Is poverty in our genes?
Is Poverty in Our Genes? is the title of a new extended critique of Ashraf and Galor’s forthcoming American Economic Review paper on genetic diversity and economic development…
Jan 3, 2013
Jason Collins
The best books I read in 2012
As is normally the case, my annual list comprises the best books
I have read
in the past year, irrespective of their date of release. I read fewer books this year than…
Dec 28, 2012
Jason Collins
The rationale of the family
John Kay writes:
Dec 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Exploring genes
David Dobbs has written a great National Geographic piece on the human compulsion to explore. At the centre of the article is the question of genetic influence.
Dec 19, 2012
Jason Collins
The bright tax
The Smithsonian magazine has an interview with James Flynn about his book Are We Getting Smarter? (HT: Annie Murphy Paul) First, Flynn on the “bright tax:
Dec 17, 2012
Jason Collins
Krugman on Gould and Maynard Smith
I’ve posted before about Paul Krugman’s dislike of the work of Stephen Jay Gould, but I have come across another old essay in which Krugman weighs in on the question of…
Dec 14, 2012
Jason Collins
Failure to respond as a measure of conscientiousness and IQ
A few weeks ago, Bryan Caplan pointed out this great working paper by David Hedengren and Thomas Stratmann:
Dec 12, 2012
Jason Collins
Religion, personality and fertility
Tomas Rees points to an interesting paper by Marcus Jokela, who examined how the fertility rates of Americans born between 1920 and 1960 were affected by their personality.
Dec 10, 2012
Jason Collins
A flood of new genetic variation
A new Nature paper by Fu and colleagues has been the subject of a few good write-ups. First, from Brandon Keim at Wired:
Dec 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Positive eugenics
In Forbes, Jon Entine discussesthe rise of “positive eugenics”:
Dec 4, 2012
Jason Collins
Boyd and Richerson’s group selection
In my review of Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, I noted that I was not completely happy with their treatment of group selection. This post…
Nov 26, 2012
Jason Collins
Genoeconomics at the AEA Annual Meeting
The preliminary program for January’s American Economic Association annual meeting is available, with a session dedicated to genoeconomics. I’ve posted on the first of the…
Nov 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Sexual selection and inequality
From Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal:
Nov 19, 2012
Jason Collins
The decline in intelligence?
Two papers in which Gerald Crabtree argues that human intelligence has declined since a peak thousands of years ago (Part I and Part II) have been the subject of the popular…
Nov 16, 2012
Jason Collins
Critique of conspicuous consumption and economic growth
Last week, I presented my paper on conspicuous consumption and economic growth at the annual PhD Conference in Economics and Business. The basic argument of the paper is…
Nov 13, 2012
Jason Collins
Genes, economics and happiness
From the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics (ungated prepublication version here):
Nov 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
When I asked for suggestions for my evolutionary biology and economics reading list earlier this year, Boyd and Richerson’s
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
was one of…
Nov 5, 2012
Jason Collins
Using neuroeconomics in economics
An article by Josh Fischman in the Chronicle suggests that economists have been slow to take up the insights of neuroeconomics.
Oct 31, 2012
Jason Collins
Deriving the demand for children
I’ve been working through Gary Becker’s
A Treatise on the Family: Enlarged Edition
over the last couple of weeks. One interesting section included Becker’s thoughts on why…
Oct 29, 2012
Jason Collins
Genetics without genes
A couple of weeks ago, Razib Kahn wrote a post in which he argued that “you don’t need to know the exact gene of major effect to conclude that a trait is genetic.” Where a…
Oct 25, 2012
Jason Collins
Long-term social mobility is low
There have been a few recent pointers to Gregory Clark and Neil Cummin’s work on long-term social mobility using surnames (papers here, here and here). The basic method used…
Oct 23, 2012
Jason Collins
Trivers on Romney’s sons and Obama’s daughters
In a National Review article a couple of months ago, Kevin Williamson questioned Obama’s status relative to Mitt Romney’s because Obama’s children were daughters, while…
Oct 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Nobel prizes and marriage markets
The committee for selecting the 2012 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (remember, it is not an original Nobel Prize)…
Oct 16, 2012
Jason Collins
Genetic diversity and economic development: Ashraf and Galor respond
As I noted in a postscript to my last post, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor have prepared a response [Update: the response is no longer online] to the Harvard academic…
Oct 13, 2012
Jason Collins
Harvard academics on genetic diversity and economic development
A group of Harvard academics have penned a short response to Ashraf and Galor’s forthcoming American Economic Review paper,
The Out of Africa Hypothesis, Human Genetic…
Oct 10, 2012
Jason Collins
The benefits of competition
I recently came across a review of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy by Ted Bergstrom. Frank’s argument is largely based on the concept that a person is made worse off when…
Oct 8, 2012
Jason Collins
Ayn Rand and altruism
While I find the occasional Ayn Rand (or Ayn Rand fan) bashing amusing, critics of Rand typically mis-characterise her writings (as many of her ardent fans also do). A Slate…
Oct 4, 2012
Jason Collins
Cooperation is intuitive
From a recent letter in Nature by Rand, Greene and Nowak:
Oct 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Inequality and declining fertility
The Economist notes a new working paper (pdf) by Bloom and colleagues of the Harvard School of Public Health, which shows that a short-term implication of reduced fertility…
Oct 1, 2012
Jason Collins
Haidt’s group selection
Having given my thoughts on Haidt’s generally excellent The Righteous Mind in my last post, I want to turn to Haidt’s use of group selection in the last third of his book.…
Sep 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Haidt’s The Righteous Mind
I am going to give my thoughts on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion over two posts as I want to split the good from…
Sep 26, 2012
Jason Collins
Socioeconomic status versus fitness
One common explanation for fertility declines over the last 200 years is that parents have shifted to investing in quality of children, rather than quantity. What is…
Sep 24, 2012
Jason Collins
Videos for the Biological Basis of Preferences and Behavior Conference
Videos of the presentations at the Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference have been put online. Many are worth watching. I hope to write more detailed…
Sep 21, 2012
Jason Collins
Kelly’s What Technology Wants
Technology wants increasing efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialisation, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure and…
Sep 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Agriculture and population growth
Over the last few months, I have heard the phrase “agriculture creates excess population” or other words to that effect from several sources. The latest is at Evolvify, where …
Sep 17, 2012
Jason Collins
Henrich on markets, trust and monogamy
The Edge has put up video and transcript of a great interview with Joe Henrich (the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution at UBC). The whole interview is…
Sep 14, 2012
Jason Collins
Genetic diversity and economic development
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper linking genetic diversity and economic development has been available as a working paper for a few years, but it has now found a home…
Sep 12, 2012
Jason Collins
Age-dependent evolution
At the Consilience Conference earlier this year I bumped into evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, whose research interests include examining ageing through the lens of…
Sep 10, 2012
Jason Collins
Genoeconomics and the ENCODE project
The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project is an international collaboration that intends “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human…
Sep 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Economy-IQ feedback
Scientific American has an excellent podcast of an interview with James Flynn on his new book, Are We Getting Smarter? The podcast accompanies an article from the latest issue…
Sep 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Does equality increase conspicuous consumption?
In an interesting paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Nailya Ordabayeva and Pierre Chandon propose that conspicuous consumption may be higher in a more equal society…
Aug 30, 2012
Jason Collins
Hunter-gatherer workouts
The idea that modern sedentary lifestyles are leading to obesity has come under attack in a New York Times article in which Herman Pontzer writes about a recent PLoS ONE paper…
Aug 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Keeping economists honest
Paul Frijters has written an interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow over at Club Troppo. In the review, Frijters suggests that Kahneman’s main…
Aug 27, 2012
Jason Collins
Not quite paleo
Peter Turchin, advocate of Cliodynamics, has posted on his recent success in adopting the “paleo diet”. The diet is based on the food presumably eaten by our evolutionary…
Aug 24, 2012
Jason Collins
The intelligent inheriting the earth
From a working paper by Garett Jones released earlier this year:
Aug 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Recent selection for height
As noted by Steve Hsu and Razib Khan, a new paper in Nature Genetics reports evidence of recent selection on existing variation in height in European populations. The…
Aug 20, 2012
Jason Collins
Ongoing selection against violent behaviour
From Mark Pagel, author of
Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind
, in a RSA podcast:
Aug 18, 2012
Jason Collins
Models without data
A new paper in PNAS suggests that the similarity between European and Neanderthal genomes is due to population structure in Africa (500,000 odd years ago), not recent…
Aug 16, 2012
Jason Collins
The Stigler diet
In a 1945 paper, George Stigler, the 1982 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, examined what would be the cheapest way in which a 154 pound man could…
Aug 14, 2012
Jason Collins
Sexual selection, conspicuous consumption and economic growth
Around ten years ago, I was rummaging through books in a bargain bookshop under Sydney’s Central Station when I came across a $2 copy of Geoffrey Miller’s
The Mating Mind
.…
Aug 10, 2012
Jason Collins
Cliodynamics and complexity
At the Consilience Conference earlier this year, I saw Peter Turchin’s presentation on cliodynamics - the mathematical modelling of historical dynamics. I was relatively…
Aug 6, 2012
Jason Collins
The evolution of cornets
In my recent review of Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail, I asked if Ormerod’s comparison between the extinction of species and the death of firms was the right analogy.…
Jul 31, 2012
Jason Collins
Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail
After sitting on my reading list for a few years, I have finally read Paul Ormerod’s
Why Most Things Fail
. Ormerod’s basic argument is that failure is all around us and…
Jul 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Selective sweeps in humans
From a new paper in PLOS Genetics:
Jul 24, 2012
Jason Collins
Eugenics versus economics
In outing Irving Fisher as a Social Darwinist, Bryan Caplan writes on how Fisher reconciled eugenics and economics. First, Caplan quotes Fisher:
Jul 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Groups, kin and self interest
In my last post on group selection, I described how multilevel selection differed from more traditional (and popular) concepts of group selection. One difference is that the…
Jul 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Simon’s Models of My Life
Herbert Simon’s autobiography is probably not the best introduction to his work (I would suggest other starting points), but below are two paragraphs that caught my eye.
Jul 16, 2012
Jason Collins
What is multilevel selection?
The arguments in the group selection debate at The Edge, as kicked off by Steven Pinker, contain some useful descriptions on what is meant by multilevel selection in a…
Jul 14, 2012
Jason Collins
Labelling cultural group selection
Steven Pinker’s essay on group selection (my initial post on it here) has now attracted a raft of interesting responses that are well worth reading. While it is hard to…
Jul 12, 2012
Jason Collins
The Origins of Savings Behaviour
Bryan Caplan points out a paper by Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel on the genetic and parental influences on savings behaviour. The first part of the abstract reads:
Jul 10, 2012
Jason Collins
Charity as conspicuous consumption
At the end of Moav and Neeman’s paper on conspicuous consumption and poverty traps, about which I posted yesterday, the authors suggest an experiment:
Jul 8, 2012
Jason Collins
Conspicuous consumption and poverty traps
Poverty is no barrier to conspicuous consumption. As Banerjee and Duflo wrote in
Poor Economics
:
Jul 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Is biology easier than physics?
Steve Hsu has pointed out an interesting old interview with Noam Chomsky. Hsu highlights Chomsky’s views on the limits of human intelligence.
Jul 5, 2012
Jason Collins
The lipstick effect
Sarah Hill has posted at Scientific American on a new paper (pdf) that she (and colleagues) has written on the lipstick effect. The lipstick effect is a phenomena where…
Jul 1, 2012
Jason Collins
Inequality persistence circa 5000 BCE
An article by Bentley and colleagues published in PNAS last month points to some very early evidence of persistent inequality. The study headline is the uncovering of the…
Jun 29, 2012
Jason Collins
The deep roots of development
Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have put out a nice review article on long-term economic growth and the intergenerational transmission of development. Below are some of…
Jun 25, 2012
Jason Collins
Pinker takes on group selection
I was surprised at the easy run that group selection has recently had in social science circles, so I am pleased to see that Steven Pinker has waded into the fray with an…
Jun 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Population, connectivity and innovation
Near the close of his acceptance speech for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian Simon Memorial Award, Matt Ridley suggests that the total number of people is not…
Jun 21, 2012
Jason Collins
Europeans and economic growth
A new NBER paper by Bill Easterly and Ross Levine proposes that a large proportion of global development is attributable to European settlement, even where Europeans formed…
Jun 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Evolutionary science as the new “classics”
Carole Jahme at the Guardian reports on Richard Dawkins’s proposition that evolutionary science will be the new “classics”:
Jun 17, 2012
Jason Collins
Evolutionary policy making
Project Syndicate has published one of the last pieces by Elinor Ostrom, in which she gives her views on the upcoming Rio+20 summit. The article reflects Ostrom’s wariness…
Jun 16, 2012
Jason Collins
Some perspectives on Elinor Ostrom
Below are three passages that capture a small part of the evolutionary flavour of the now late Elinor Ostrom’s work.
Jun 13, 2012
Jason Collins
Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason
Since reading Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy, I have been working through his back catalogue. The original and innovative
Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of…
Jun 11, 2012
Jason Collins
Economists on autopilot
One blog in my feed is the excellent synthesis blog, which brings you the musings of Greg Fisher, Paul Ormerod and others. From their about page:
Jun 8, 2012
Jason Collins
Economists are different?
In Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (this is another snippet pending my finding time to write a decent review), Frank describes the…
Jun 6, 2012
Jason Collins
Hayek, planning and eugenics
In Friedrich Hayek’s magnificent essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek writes:
Jun 4, 2012
Jason Collins
A critique of behavioural economics from 1988
In the closing section to Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, Frank writes of the failure of critics of the self-interest model of…
Jun 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Shrinking brains and intelligence
Average human brain size has declined for 20,000 years, a stark contrast to the steady increase over the preceding millions. While I would argue that translation of this…
Jun 1, 2012
Jason Collins
The consequences of shrinking brains
Matt Ridley writes on the fossil evidence that human brains have shrunk from around 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres over the last 20,000 years:
May 30, 2012
Jason Collins
Eugenics and regression to the mean
Richard Conniff’s Yale Alumni Magazine articleon Irving Fisher’s support of eugenics has some great stories (HT Arnold Kling), but one of the closing paragraphs caught my…
May 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Conflict and social evolution
Last week’s edition of Science has an interesting article by Sam Bowles on the role of conflict on human social evolution. Bowles covers some familiar ground on the debate…
May 26, 2012
Jason Collins
Markets and morals
I enjoyed the responses to Michael Sandel’s critique of markets in the How Markets Crowd Out Morals forum on the Boston Review website. Sandel’s essay follows in the wake of…
May 24, 2012
Jason Collins
Seabright’s The War of the Sexes
When measured against his fantastic
The Company of Strangers
, Paul Seabright’s new book
The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from…
May 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Institutions are endogenous
From Jared Diamond’s review of
Why Nations Fail
:
May 20, 2012
Jason Collins
Entanglement
There is an interesting podcast on Science Talk titled The Coming Entanglement, with Fred Guterl interviewing Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis.
May 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Could this critique apply to economics?
From an excellent article in Nature News by Ed Yong on problems with replication in psychology:
May 18, 2012
Jason Collins
Chimps 1, Humans 0
See an update here.
May 16, 2012
Jason Collins
While we wait for the genoeconomics revolution
Following the publication of two new articles in the Annual Review of Economics and PNAS (my summary here), genoeconomics has been getting some press. From the Boston Globe:
May 15, 2012
Jason Collins
Maladaptive ideas
Following the Consilience Conference and some suggestions for additions to my reading list, I have been convinced to read some more work by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson.…
May 14, 2012
Jason Collins
The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences
Evidence from twin studies implies that economic and political traits have a significant heritable component. That is, some of the variation between people is attributable…
May 11, 2012
Jason Collins
Game theory and the peacock’s tail
Over at Cheap Talk, Jeff Ely has posted on a presentation by Balazs Szentes at The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behavior conference. Ely writes:
May 9, 2012
Jason Collins
Rubin’s Darwinian Politics
The application of evolutionary biology to politics and policy spans the political spectrum. From Peter Singer’s
A Darwinian Left
to Larry Arnhart’s
Darwinian Conservatism
to…
May 8, 2012
Jason Collins
The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference
I have just attended The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. It was a good conference…
May 7, 2012
Jason Collins
IQ as a necessary but not sufficient condition for genius
A quote from Arthur Jensen (From Steve Hsu. A fuller version of the interview can be found here):
May 4, 2012
Jason Collins
Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash’s Economics as an Evolutionary Science
The fundamental insight that utility in economics should be based on the concept of fitness from evolutionary biology lies at the heart of Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash’s
Eco…
May 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Consilience conference afterthoughts
The Consilience Conference on evolution in biology, the social sciences and the humanities wrapped up on Saturday, and it was generally a high quality conference. It’s…
May 1, 2012
Jason Collins
Group selection and the social sciences
The first day of the Consilience Conference has strengthened my feeling that support for group selection is growing in the social sciences. While the slant of speakers such…
Apr 27, 2012
Jason Collins
The recent evolution of musical talent
From a debate between Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller on the biological basis for musical talent:
Apr 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Why do we work less?
I am sympathetic to the argument by Robert Frank and others that competition for positional goods is a major factor driving our behaviour. The natural outcome of this is…
Apr 20, 2012
Jason Collins
Selfish herding
Nicholas Gruen writes:
Apr 18, 2012
Jason Collins
Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist
A common recommendation for an addition to my evolution and economics reading list is Matt Ridley’s
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
. These thoughts are…
Apr 16, 2012
Jason Collins
Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth
In
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
, Eric Beinhocker argues that the economy should be studied as a complex adaptive system…
Apr 11, 2012
Jason Collins
The three stages of evolutionary economics
Many of the suggested additions to my reading list in evolution and economics came from the fields of evolutionary economics and complexity theory.
Apr 9, 2012
Jason Collins
Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption
Over the last three to four decades, the social sciences have been subject to increasing examination under an evolutionary framework. Leading the charge into consumer and…
Apr 5, 2012
Jason Collins
The return of group selection
In 2010, Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O Wilson had their paper The evolution of eusociality published in Nature. They argued that inclusive fitness could not…
Apr 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Economics and evolutionary biology reading list
Below is a suggested reading list for someone interested in the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology. If you have any recommendations for additions, please let…
Apr 1, 2012
Jason Collins
An economics and evolutionary biology reading list
I have added a new page with a suggested reading list for those interested in the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology. It is here, and you can see it in the…
Apr 1, 2012
Jason Collins
Teaching evolution in economics
At the start of the concluding chapter in Gad Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, Saad quotes Kenrick and Simpson as follows:
Mar 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Bowles and Gintis’s A Cooperative Species
Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have an interesting reputation within the fields of economics and evolutionary biology. The recent paper of Nowak and colleagues has given Bowles…
Mar 26, 2012
Jason Collins
Education, income and children
In my recent post on whether children are normal goods (demand for children increasing with income), I dodged questions around the effect of education. Most recent studies…
Mar 21, 2012
Jason Collins
The political implications of group selection
Group selection advocates often describe how human cooperation could only have evolved through competition between groups. I have wondered how these advocates view modern…
Mar 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Subsidise the rich for the good of our species
From Michael Shermer’s review of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy:
Mar 17, 2012
Jason Collins
Are children normal goods?
I finished a post last week with the question of whether children are normal goods. Below I want to lay out some economic arguments on this, before putting in an…
Mar 14, 2012
Jason Collins
New books on the evolution of cooperation
Diane Coyle has noted the release of three new books on the evolution of cooperation:
Wired for Culture
by Mark Pagel,
Beyond Human Nature
by Jesse Prinz and
Together
by…
Mar 12, 2012
Jason Collins
Male income and reproductive success
As happens occasionally, I have just come across an article that I should have seen years ago. In an article titled Natural Selection on Male Wealth in Humans, Daniel Nettle…
Mar 9, 2012
Jason Collins
The eugenics of contraception
After copping some criticism for his comments on the coverage of female contraception in health insurance, Steven Landsburg has noted that some arguments in its favour may…
Mar 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Why do married men earn more?
Even after controlling for observable traits such as IQ, married men earn more. Bryan Caplan suggests there are three economic explanations for this male marriage premium:
Feb 29, 2012
Jason Collins
Kahneman on the price of freedom
From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Feb 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Foresight by H. G. Wells
From When the Sleeper Wakes (1910):
Feb 24, 2012
Jason Collins
Parental income and SAT scores
To make his point that socioeconomic status is a major driver of educational outcomes, Dan Pink made the following chart. SAT scores are on the vertical axis, and family…
Feb 22, 2012
Jason Collins
Evolutionary strategies
In Tim Harford’s discussion in Adapt of the benefits to experimentation , Harford notes that experimentation by individuals is often at great potential cost. As when a…
Feb 21, 2012
Jason Collins
Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
Natural selection operates through heritable variation in traits and differential reproductive success due to those traits. Many combinations of genes and mutations are…
Feb 17, 2012
Jason Collins
Quantifying children
In the New York Times profile of Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, Motoko Rich writes:
Feb 15, 2012
Jason Collins
Population genetics and economic growth
The title of this post comes from a 2002 paper by Paul Zak and Kwang Woo Park. The title is mildly deceptive, as the paper has many elements and ideas crammed into it beyond…
Feb 13, 2012
Jason Collins
Risk aversion is not irrational
Several times over the last few years, I have come across someone willing to claim that risk aversion is a bias or that standard economics cannot explain it (such as this…
Feb 9, 2012
Jason Collins
Trivers on biology in economics
In The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Robert Trivers asks “Is economics a science?” He answers:
Feb 7, 2012
Jason Collins
Trivers’s The Folly of Fools
Robert Trivers is one of the giants of biology. His work in altruism, parental investment and parent-offspring conflict is seminal. For this, he has been justly rewarded.
Feb 3, 2012
Jason Collins
Strength by outbreeding
I am reading Robert Trivers’s The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I will review in the next few days, but these passages on the…
Feb 2, 2012
Jason Collins
Payment for winning the genetic lottery
One of the more interesting issues in the inequality debate is how we should treat the genetic lottery that contributes to unequal outcomes.
Jan 31, 2012
Jason Collins
Absolute improvement
Fernando Teson writes:
Jan 29, 2012
Jason Collins
Frank’s Luxury Fever
Following my reading of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy, I decided to read some of Frank’s back catalogue. I started with
Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess
, which…
Jan 28, 2012
Jason Collins
Excess males
Robin Hansen writes on the sex selective abortion of females:
Jan 24, 2012
Jason Collins
Consilience Conference
Have just discovered the upcoming Consilience Conference. From the blurb:
Jan 21, 2012
Jason Collins
Economic mobility and reproductive success
Tyler Cowen writes:
Jan 20, 2012
Jason Collins
The mating reservation wage
Bryan Caplan makes an excellent point:
Jan 19, 2012
Jason Collins
Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
[See my 2016 update]
Jan 18, 2012
Jason Collins
Crime, abortion and genes
First, from Donohue and Levitt’s The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, which argued that the legalisation of abortion contributed to later declines in crime:
Jan 16, 2012
Jason Collins
Evolution and education policy
A couple of months ago, David Sloan Wilson posted on a project he has been involved in with in the Binghamton City School District, which is also the subject of an article…
Jan 13, 2012
Jason Collins
Dysgenics and war
Bryan Caplan has picked up on an interesting interview of Irving Fisher in the New York Times archives. Fisher states:
Jan 11, 2012
Jason Collins
Status, signalling and the handicap principle
Robin Hanson writes:
Jan 9, 2012
Jason Collins
Intelligence and assortive mating
Arnold Kling writes:
Jan 6, 2012
Jason Collins
Garon’s Beyond Our Means
The core message of Sheldon Garon’s
Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves
is that people’s savings behaviour responds to incentives and in particular…
Jan 4, 2012
Jason Collins
A Nobel Prize for biology
At the beginning of a lecture by Robert Trivers at the London School of Economics on his book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life…
Jan 2, 2012
Jason Collins
Not so irrational
In Freeman Dyson’s interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dyson describes a couple of examples of the biases identified by Kahneman. One of them is…
Dec 30, 2011
Jason Collins
Best books I read in 2011
As for last year, this year’s top book list comprises the best books I
have read
this year. I haven’t read enough books published in 2011 to be able to apply a decent…
Dec 27, 2011
Jason Collins
IQ externalities
Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil focuses on a message that the situation is more important than the person’s disposition. Good…
Dec 22, 2011
Jason Collins
Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect
The situation is more important than a person’s disposition. This message permeates through Philip Zimbardo’s
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
…
Dec 19, 2011
Jason Collins
The perfection of man
From 100 years ago, Scientific American calls for more research into human evolution:
Dec 18, 2011
Jason Collins
Genoeconomics: molecular genetics and economics
The Journal of Economic Perspectives has an excellent article by Beauchamp and colleagues titled Molecular Genetics and Economics (ungated pdf here). It is a nice contrast…
Dec 16, 2011
Jason Collins
The use of heritability in policy development
The heritability straw man has copped another bashing, this time in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In it, Charles Manski picks up an old line of argument by Goldberge…
Dec 13, 2011
Jason Collins
A passion for equality?
In Benoit Debreuil’s Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies, the opening chapter contains the interesting argument that egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were…
Dec 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Human evolution goes on
I missed it when it first went up, but over at The Crux, Discover’s new group blog, Razib Khan has pointed to a couple of interesting papers on the heritability of…
Dec 8, 2011
Jason Collins
Dubreuil’s Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies
Benoit Dubreuil’s
Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies
seeks to explain two historical transitions in social hierarchies in human (and pre-human) history. The…
Dec 6, 2011
Jason Collins
An evolutionary Occupy
In an evolutionary sense, resource inequality affects survival and access to mates. While the current “Occupy” debates about growing inequality and the power of the 1 per…
Dec 3, 2011
Jason Collins
Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order
I have finally finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
, several months after my initial comments.
Nov 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Two articles on genetics and economics
From Charles Manski in the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives (pdf):
Nov 18, 2011
Jason Collins
Intelligence changes
Scott Haufman has written a post on the variation in IQ over a person’s life. He writes:
Nov 15, 2011
Jason Collins
Monkey inequality
Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer has written a post in which he looks at a couple of lines of evidence about the innate response of humans to inequality. The first line, based on…
Nov 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Malthus and the feast
I have been trying to find an electronic version of Thomas Malthus’s second edition of his
An Essay on the Principle of Population
. The second edition is significantly…
Nov 11, 2011
Jason Collins
The IQ taboo
While IQ research seems to be be emerging from its taboo phase, Anneli Rufus has written an article in Alternet which asks why the study of human intelligence was off the…
Nov 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Is loss aversion a bias?
From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Nov 5, 2011
Jason Collins
Take the evolutionary economics pill
Frances Wooley writes:
Nov 2, 2011
Jason Collins
Variation in reproductive success
Flipping through Ronald Fisher’s
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
this morning, I was reminded of this quite stunning factoid from the 1912 Australian Census:
Oct 22, 2011
Jason Collins
Two perspectives on sex differences
First, from Rob Brooks:
Oct 21, 2011
Jason Collins
Whitfield on the Darwin Economy
There have been a few reviews of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good recently, but John Whitfield’s in Slate is one of the more…
Oct 17, 2011
Jason Collins
Is Darwin or Smith the father of economics?
In his new book, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, Robert Frank argues that within the next century, Charles Darwin will become known as the…
Oct 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy
Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor is one of the most powerful ideas in economics. Individual action, even in the pursuit of pure self-interest, can serve the interests of…
Oct 8, 2011
Jason Collins
Hunting, gathering and comparative advantage
From an article by Gijsbert Stoet in the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behaviour:
Oct 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Beauty as a fitness indicator
A study by Berri and colleagues on quarterback performance and their attractiveness has gained some attention over the last couple of months:
Oct 1, 2011
Jason Collins
Is it human nature to riot?
In a post earlier this month, Eric Johnson put together an interesting argument on the evolution of collective violence (I recommend reading his whole post).
Sep 30, 2011
Jason Collins
Markets and family values
Larry Arnhart’s recent post at Darwinian Conservatism makes a couple of interesting points on family values and classical liberalism. The piece is largely a response to…
Sep 29, 2011
Jason Collins
Disease and liberalisation
Ronald Bailey has written an article for Reason on Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher’s work linking disease and liberalisation. Bailey writes:
Sep 28, 2011
Jason Collins
Human nature and property rights
While the Cato Unbound discussion on Brain, Belief and Politics appears to have petered out (unfortunately, Shermer has not directly confronted most of the issues in the…
Sep 27, 2011
Jason Collins
Pinker on violence
The WSJ has published an essay by Steven Pinker on the decline of violence, which is adapted from his upcoming book
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
…
Sep 25, 2011
Jason Collins
Brooks on hunter-gatherers and egalitarianism
Fitting nicely with my recent post on human nature and libertarianism, Rob Brooks has the following to say on the mega-rich and people’s sense of fairness:
Sep 24, 2011
Jason Collins
Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays
It pays to be beautiful. Higher pay, increased chance of promotion, easier loans, more beautiful and intelligent partners, greater happiness - the benefits are significant.…
Sep 20, 2011
Jason Collins
Human nature and libertarianism
There is another interesting topic in this month’s Cato Unbound, with Michael Shermer arguing in the lead essay that human nature is best represented by the libertarian…
Sep 17, 2011
Jason Collins
What economics misses
Over at the Evolutionary Psychology Blog, Robert Kurzban has posted a fairly harsh take-down of a paper by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs.
Sep 14, 2011
Jason Collins
Happiness is not the objective
David Brooks has written an article on some of the poor trade-offs people make when they spend. In a nutshell, “as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and…
Sep 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Male incentives
In the comments to my post last month on the Cato Unbound series New Girl Order: Are men in decline?, there was some suggestion that men were being disincentivised from…
Sep 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Using evolutionary theory to shape neighbourhoods
David Sloan Wilson has just written a book,
The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time
, where he catalogues the use of evolutionary…
Sep 8, 2011
Jason Collins
The genetic and social lottery
As opportunity is equalised, more of the variation in outcomes between people will be due to genetic factors. This may have the somewhat ironic result of reducing social…
Sep 7, 2011
Jason Collins
Do economists satisfice?
In Herbert Simon’s 1978 Swedish Bank prize lecture (pdf), he stated the following:
Sep 1, 2011
Jason Collins
The end of women
The Economist has an amusing reductio ad absurdum in its regular Daily Charts section. At current fertility rates, The Economist predicts it will take 25 generations for…
Aug 29, 2011
Jason Collins
Elite envy
Robin Hanson writes:
Aug 28, 2011
Jason Collins
Sports team ownership as conspicuous consumption
Most of Malcolm Gladwell’s appearances in this blog involve me complaining about his various writings (such as my review of Outliers), but his recent piece on the NBA…
Aug 27, 2011
Jason Collins
Underestimating heritability
It’s not normally a good sign when an attempt to skewer measurement of heritability opens with a link between genetics and eugenics via Francis Galton, and Brian Palmer’s cri…
Aug 25, 2011
Jason Collins
Does epigenetics matter?
A new book has just popped out -
The Epigenetics Revolution
by Nessa Carey - and accompanying it is the usual epigenetics-related suggestions that Darwin was wrong. Take this…
Aug 23, 2011
Jason Collins
Economics is a branch of ecology
In an interview published in 1996, Garret Hardin stated:
Aug 20, 2011
Jason Collins
Economists 1, Biologists 0
Sorry for the slightly inflammatory post title - but I went to a speech tonight that reminded me of one case where an economist was well ahead of evolutionary biologists in…
Aug 18, 2011
Jason Collins
Envy has its benefits
Bryan Caplan writes:
Aug 17, 2011
Jason Collins
Low social mobility equals success
At Gene Expression, Razib Khan writes:
Aug 16, 2011
Jason Collins
More people, more ideas - in the long run
More people means more ideas. This concept underlies arguments ranging from Julian Simon’s belief that human living conditions will continue to improve through to Bryan…
Aug 15, 2011
Jason Collins
The gender gap
This month’s Cato Unbound has another interesting subject, this time on the decline of men. In the lead essay, Kay Hymowitz runs through the mass of ways men are starting to…
Aug 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Keynes and the solved economic problem
While many have dusted off Keynes during the last few years and asked “what would Keynes do”, it is fair to question whether Keynes would have done anything at all. If he…
Aug 9, 2011
Jason Collins
Health trade-offs
There are always trade-offs. From the British Medical Journal in June:
Aug 4, 2011
Jason Collins
Darwin on female preferences
I am slowly re-reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man and came across the following gem:
Aug 3, 2011
Jason Collins
The costs of polygamy
From The Economist’s Free Exchange:
Aug 1, 2011
Jason Collins
Free sterilisation
From Dan Ariely:
Jul 31, 2011
Jason Collins
Return to equilibrium
A post on Cheap Talk reminded me about an old paper of Bill Hamilton’s on the potential for extraordinary sex ratios. Apart from its importance for the particular topic…
Jul 30, 2011
Jason Collins
Only economists are rational
Andrew Gelman makes the following observation:
Jul 25, 2011
Jason Collins
Is everyone the same?
A paper that is getting some attention at the moment is a critique of evolutionary psychology by Bolhuis and colleagues, titled Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for…
Jul 24, 2011
Jason Collins
Brooks on evolution and obesity
Rob Brooks has posted an article (also published in The Conversation) outlining his argument that the relatively cheap price of carbohydrates compared to the price of…
Jul 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Fukuyama’s biological approach
I have started reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and am enjoying his starting point of human prehistory. I will write a full review when I have…
Jul 18, 2011
Jason Collins
The growth of atheism
Nigel Barber of The Daily Beast (Psychology Today) has posted on a forthcoming article in which he shows that the level of atheism increases with the quality of life. Barber…
Jul 16, 2011
Jason Collins
Clark on the remnants of rural idiocy
Another piece from the vault, this time
A Farewell to Alms
author Gregory Clark in an interview with Phillip Adams:
Jul 11, 2011
Jason Collins
Jones on IQ and productivity
The June edition of the Asian Development Review has an article by Garett Jones titled National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia (pdf). The abstract…
Jul 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Darwin and Marx
Yesterday I visited Down House, Charles Darwin’s home from 1842 until his death in 1882. Darwin wrote most of his major works there. The house contained a lot of interesting…
Jul 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Wrong predictions
As I’ve sat on trains and planes over the last week, I sorted through my article archives. Among them I found one by Michael Lewis from January 2007 lamenting the doom and…
Jul 5, 2011
Jason Collins
Galbraith on evolution and the invisible hand
Paul Krugman’s oft-quoted critique of Stephen Jay Gould is one of the more brutal dismissals of his work (it is from a 1996 speech on what economists can learn from…
Jul 1, 2011
Jason Collins
Wilson and Pinker on evolutionary psychology
David Sloan Wilson has just posted a five-part series on the importance of the evolutionary toolkit in the social sciences. I’ve found the series hard work, but in the fifth…
Jun 27, 2011
Jason Collins
Defending Stephen Jay Gould
I’ve been waiting for someone to defend Stephen Jay Gould from the accusations contained in a recent paper by Lewis and Colleagues. In a nutshell, the authors found that in…
Jun 26, 2011
Jason Collins
Galton trivia
Every time a new Francis Galton piece is published, I look forward to the Galton trivia. This time it is in an article by Steve Jones (HT: John Hawks):
Jun 24, 2011
Jason Collins
Genetic thresholds
In yesterday’s post on crime, I quoted David Eagleman’s statement that “we may someday find that many types of bad behaviour have a basic biological explanation—as has…
Jun 23, 2011
Jason Collins
Crime and biology
The July/August 2011 edition of the Atlantic has a great article by David Eagleman on the implications of advances in brain science on the way we approach crime (HT: Jeffrey…
Jun 22, 2011
Jason Collins
Ferguson on Malthus again
Niall Ferguson has a slight Malthusian thread running through his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest. At one point, Ferguson touches on the mass emigration from…
Jun 21, 2011
Jason Collins
Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest
With the cover of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest stating that it is “Now a Major Channel Four Series”, I should have foreseen the pace and structure of…
Jun 20, 2011
Jason Collins
Heritability, political views and personality
Chris Mooney of The Intersection has posted on another article (with follow-up by Razib at Gene Expression) supporting the well-established finding that political views are…
Jun 17, 2011
Jason Collins
Diversity and consumerism
In Geoffrey Miller’s
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
(earlier posts on his book here, here and here - this is the last one for now), Miller discusses how there…
Jun 17, 2011
Jason Collins
The evolution of conscientiousness
For most of Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, Miller treats the genetic influences on human preferences as relatively static over human…
Jun 16, 2011
Jason Collins
Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Geoffrey Miller’s main thesis in
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
is that the conspicuous consumption we use to signal traits such as intelligence, agreeableness…
Jun 15, 2011
Jason Collins
Ferguson on Malthus
Last week I came across a 2007 article by Niall Ferguson on increasing food prices and the potential for future shortages. Leaving aside Ferguson’s predictions of the…
Jun 14, 2011
Jason Collins
Evolution and obesity
As I indicated in my recent post on Rob Brooks’s
Sex, Genes and Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World
, Brooks devotes some time to the issue of obesity.…
Jun 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Maslow’s hierarchy
I’ve just read Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, which I enjoyed. There are many interesting threads to the book, which I’ll blog about over the coming weeks.
Jun 9, 2011
Jason Collins
Brooks’s Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll
Australian evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks’s book Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How evolution has shaped the modern world has been released. It’s a good read - accessible…
Jun 8, 2011
Jason Collins
Modelling populations
In my previous two posts, I described the model contained in Galor and Moav’s paper Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth and an extension in which we…
Jun 7, 2011
Jason Collins
Natural selection and the collapse of economic growth
In my last post, I discussed Oded Galor and Omer Moav’s paper Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth. As I noted then, my PhD supervisors, Juerg Weber and Boris…
Jun 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Natural selection and economic growth
Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth
by Oded Galor and Omer Moav is somewhat of an outlier. I’m not aware of any other paper that models the Industrial…
Jun 3, 2011
Jason Collins
Was it better for our paleolithic ancestors?
I have just started reading Geoffrey Miller’s Spent. It opens with a mildly amusing faux discussion in which a modern person seeks to convince some Cro-Magnons of the…
May 31, 2011
Jason Collins
Coyle on happiness
Over the weekend I read Diane Coyle’s The Economics of Enough. I particularly enjoyed her dismantling of the concept that to increase happiness we should forget about…
May 30, 2011
Jason Collins
Dangerous ideas
Recently, I was asked whether the idea that I was espousing - considering human evolution in economics - was dangerous. For a perspective on debating dangerous ideas, it was…
May 27, 2011
Jason Collins
The benefit to being right
In all the debates about human biases, I like to believe that there is some benefit to being right. There must be
some
evolutionary benefit to knowing the true state of the…
May 25, 2011
Jason Collins
Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, Part III
Thorstein Veblen has been ranked seventh in a poll of economists on their favourite, dead, 20th century economist. He ranked behind Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Hayek…
May 24, 2011
Jason Collins
Hungry judges
The media and blogosphere has dedicated plenty of column and blog inches to a recently published study by Danziger and colleagues on how parole rates by Israeli judges vary…
May 23, 2011
Jason Collins
The Simon-Ehrlich bet
I’m back on the population bandwagon today, and I wanted to define a point where economists and ecologists often appear to be talking across each other (and where I disagree…
May 20, 2011
Jason Collins
Evolutionary psychology and the left
Belief in evolution is often considered the domain of “the left”. Apart from being true, evolutionary theory provides a ground for opposition to creationists. It is often…
May 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Ultimate population limits
Given the recent discussion on population that the release of Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reason to Have Kids has triggered (my posts here, here and here), I have been…
May 18, 2011
Jason Collins
Happiness adjusts
Robert Frank has written a piece for the New York Times on why worrying is good. He writes of the well-known phenomena that after large life changes, people’s level of…
May 17, 2011
Jason Collins
Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, Part II
Following last week’s post on Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, I’ve progressed through some more of the book (to chapter 9). It hasn’t got any easier to…
May 16, 2011
Jason Collins
Heritability of religion and fertility
The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world with a fertility rate close to the replacement rate - that is, the rate of fertility required to…
May 13, 2011
Jason Collins
Population and the tragedy of the commons
Like all economists, I am familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons. However, possibly like most economists, I had not read Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article from…
May 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
I have started reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. The book was published in 1899 and was one of the earliest books to explore the classical economic…
May 11, 2011
Jason Collins
Trust and education
Razib Khan of Gene Expression has put together a series of charts on changes in trust in the United States over the last 40 years. The trust data comes from the General…
May 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
Bryan Caplan has a simple recommendation. Have
more
kids. If you have one, have another. If you have two, consider three or four. As Caplan spells out in his book,
Selfish…
May 9, 2011
Jason Collins
Libertarians and fertility
As I noted in yesterday’s post, Bryan Caplan has written the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on The Politics of Family Size. Caplan argues that as there are strong…
May 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Would Julian Simon worry?
This month’s Cato Unbound is on The Politics of Family Size. The lead essay is by Bryan Caplan, who is on a mission to get people to have more kids.
May 5, 2011
Jason Collins
Fogel and supersized humans
Last week, the New York Times ran a profile of economist Robert Fogel in anticipation of the release of the book
The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development…
May 3, 2011
Jason Collins
Rotten kids and altruism
Gary Becker’s 1976 article Altruism, Egoism and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology is an article that I cite often. Becker’s closing paragraph has one of the…
Apr 29, 2011
Jason Collins
Morris’s Why the West Rules For Now - Part II
Following yesterday’s post on Ian Morris’s approach to biology in
Why the West Rules - for Now
, below are my thoughts on the some other elements of the book.
Apr 28, 2011
Jason Collins
Morris’s Why the West Rules For Now
Over the Easter break, I read Ian Morris’s
Why the West Rules- for Now
. Morris seeks to develop what might be called a “unified theory of history” that can shed light on why…
Apr 27, 2011
Jason Collins
Genetically testing similarity
In my last post, I questioned whether a stranger sitting next to you on a train would be more similar to you than an ancestor from 10,000 years ago and suggested that this…
Apr 23, 2011
Jason Collins
In the company of a stranger
I have just left the Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology conference, with one of the last speakers being Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers…
Apr 22, 2011
Jason Collins
Consumption and fitness
After posting Friday’s piece on Hansson and Stuart’s paper on natural selection and savings, I realised I had not commented on one of the most important assumptions made by…
Apr 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology
I am at the
Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology
conference (the abstracts of which can be downloaded here). As the name suggests, the basic idea behind…
Apr 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Jones on IQ and immigration
David Henderson has posted on a recent presentation by Garett Jones of George Mason University in which Jones discussed IQ and cooperation.
Apr 14, 2011
Jason Collins
What can evolutionary biology offer economics?
This is my last post on David Sloan Wilson’s series Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms (my earlier three posts are here, here and here). While much of Wilson’s…
Apr 13, 2011
Jason Collins
Lehrer on measurement
Jonah Lehrer has expanded his recent focus on measurement and grit (on which I recently posted) in an article on the usefulness of the Wonderlic test, a quasi-IQ test, in…
Apr 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Evolution and the invisible hand
In David Sloan Wilson’s blog series Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms (which I have recently posted about here and here), Wilson discusses the invisible hand…
Apr 11, 2011
Jason Collins
Wilson on economics and evolution
As indicated in my last post, between December 2009 and October 2010, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote a series of posts titled Economics and Evolution as…
Apr 8, 2011
Jason Collins
The Evolution Institute
In the first of a series of blog posts by David Sloan Wilson on economics and evolution (which I will blog about in the coming weeks as the posts contain some interesting…
Apr 6, 2011
Jason Collins
Measurement nihilism
Following from my recent post on Scott Barry Kaufman’s heritability measurement nihilism, Jonah Lehrer has gone a step further and taken a swipe at measurement in general…
Apr 4, 2011
Jason Collins
The heritability debate, again
Like the level of selection debate, the debate about what heritability means has a life of its own. The latest shot comes from Scott Barry Kaufman who argues (among other…
Apr 1, 2011
Jason Collins
Micromotives and macrobehavior
In a post a couple of months or ago as part of a debate on complexity in aid, I recommended Thomas Schelling’s
Micromotives and Macrobehavior
as a good starting point for…
Mar 30, 2011
Jason Collins
Income and IQ
As I noted in my recent post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gladwell ignored the possibility that traits with a genetic component, other than IQ, might play a role in…
Mar 28, 2011
Jason Collins
Evolution and irrationality
In a classic behavioural economics story, research participants are offered the choice between one bottle of wine a month from now and two bottles of wine one month and one…
Mar 25, 2011
Jason Collins
Economists and biology
Mike the Mad Biologist has posted this piece on economists’ understanding of biology. He pulls apart some statements by Russ Roberts and suggests that if economists are…
Mar 22, 2011
Jason Collins
Gladwell’s Outliers
After flipping through Malcolm Gladwell’s
Outliers: The Story of Success
late last year, I have finally read the book (nothing like over 30 hours of travel to get through a…
Mar 21, 2011
Jason Collins
Diamond on biological differences
On Friday afternoon, as has happened a few times, I was asked if I had read Jared Diamond’s
Guns, Germs and Steel
. How could an evolutionary analysis of development…
Mar 13, 2011
Jason Collins
Unskilled and unaware
Robin Hanson has had another stab at the oft-quoted paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It. The first couple of sentences of the paper’s abstract gives…
Mar 8, 2011
Jason Collins
Crisis in human genetics?
It is a bit over a year since Geoffrey Miller wrote this piece foreshadowing a crisis in conscience by human geneticists that would become public knowledge in 2010. The…
Mar 4, 2011
Jason Collins
Genetic distance and economic development
The History and Geography of Human Genes
has heavily influenced the way I think about human evolution. Even though it is getting old at a time when masses of population…
Mar 2, 2011
Jason Collins
Trade and natural selection
Economic theory tells us that trade makes the parties involved better off. Through trade, a person can specialise in the activity in which they have a comparative advantage.…
Feb 23, 2011
Jason Collins
Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging
Having put it in the top ten books I had read in 2010 despite being only halfway through it then, I feel somewhat obliged to offer a review of Janet Browne’s
Charles Darwin…
Feb 19, 2011
Jason Collins
Kling on patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade
I have just listened to the recent Econtalk podcast with Arnold Kling on his new “paradigm”, Patterns of Sustainable Specialisation and Trade (PSST). On first thoughts, I am…
Feb 15, 2011
Jason Collins
Crime and selection of aggressive males
As I posted a couple of months ago, a higher level of violence in a society may lead women to prefer more masculine appearing men. In such an environment, picking the…
Feb 12, 2011
Jason Collins
Banking as an ecosystem
Most of my interest in the use of biology in economics concerns humans being subject to the forces of selection like any other biological organism. With this starting point…
Feb 8, 2011
Jason Collins
Evolutionary economics and group selection
As my research intersects economics and evolution, I have found it inconvenient that the term “evolutionary economics” is already taken. Evolutionary economics is an area of…
Feb 7, 2011
Jason Collins
What is the objective?
An economist typically bases their economic models on an assumption that the economy is composed of agents who gain utility from consumption. From the beginning of the…
Jan 29, 2011
Jason Collins
Why do rich parents bother?
For several years, I have been relatively convinced that beyond a certain threshold, parenting does not matter. This belief came from two sources. The first was Judith Rich…
Jan 26, 2011
Jason Collins
Is aid really so complex?
Since Bill Easterly stuck his head above the parapet last week and referred to complex systems in response to Paul Collier, the “complexity” community has been up in arms.…
Jan 21, 2011
Jason Collins
DeLong on the pace of evolution
Any theory that seeks to invoke human evolution as a factor in the Industrial Revolution needs to deal with how quickly humans can evolve and whether this rate of change is…
Jan 19, 2011
Jason Collins
The speed of cities - afterthoughts
Having recently discussed cross-country variation in time preference and the pace of life, I have found it interesting reconciling the conclusions.
Jan 14, 2011
Jason Collins
The speed of cities, part II
As I described in my last post, there is a strong relationship between the size of cities and the residents’ speed of walking. The larger the city, the quicker its residents…
Jan 12, 2011
Jason Collins
The speed of cities
Over the weekend, I listened to a great Radiolab podcast in which Bob Levine was interviewed about the pace of walking in cities. Bob spoke about how people tend to walk…
Jan 10, 2011
Jason Collins
Clark on violence
In Greg Clark’s excellent book A Farewell to Alms, Clark posited that there was only one important event in human history - the Industrial Revolution. Before that time, per…
Jan 6, 2011
Jason Collins
More on violence
Following yesterday’s post on female preference for masculine men, a couple of old articles came to mind.
Jan 5, 2011
Jason Collins
Selection for aggression
Masculine appearance in a man is an indicator of their health, which in turn leads to more viable offspring. On this basis, one might assume that women prefer masculine men.…
Jan 5, 2011
Jason Collins
My top 10 books in 2010
As is the fashion for this time of year, here are my top ten books of 2010. As I tend to read books that are both old and new, these are the top 10 books I_ have read_ this…
Dec 31, 2010
Jason Collins
Trading fish
Alex Tabarrok has posted on Marginal Revolution a piece on the expansion of “catch shares” as a fisheries management tool. Under catch shares (also called individual…
Dec 28, 2010
Jason Collins
A wasteful Christmas
As noted by Ch