Jason Collins blog

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.

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…

Using large language models as an academic

This post started as a draft email to my colleagues about how I…

Best books I read in 2022

The best books I read in 2022 - generally released in other years - were:

Why I don’t believe that signs with fatality numbers cause more crashes

In a paper in Science, Jonathan Hall and…

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 experimental evidence that I referenced, I wanted to make a few points…

Please not another bias: correcting the record

In 2015 I gave a…

Revised course notes on Consumer Financial Decision Making

Last year I posted some notes for a course on Consumer Financial Decision Making.

Megastudy scepticism

In December last year Katherine Milkman and friends published a “megastudy” testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000…

Explaining base rate neglect

In a seminar for a team from an investment manager I described how base…

A bunch of links

A past regular feature of this blog was “A…

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…

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…

The outsider to the narrow-minded profession

I have always been a sucker for…

Replicating scarcity

In Scarcity: Why having too little means so much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir tell the following (now famous) story:

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:

The academic experiment

This week I finally took the plunge and joined academia. It’s a…

A critical behavioural economics and behavioural science reading list

This reading…

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.

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…

Best books I read in 2021

The best books I read in 2021 - generally released in other years - were:

Course notes on Applied Consumer Financial Decision Making

These notes are now out-of-date. See the updated notes here.

Best books I read in 2020

The best books I read in 2020 - generally released in other years - were:

Aren’t we smart, fellow behavioural scientists

Below is the text of my presentation at Nudgsestock on 12 June 2020.

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…

Risk and loss aversion in ergodicity economics

In a previous post I posed the following bet:

Best books I read in 2019

Better late than never….

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 explain people’s choices under uncertainty. This was to be…

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…

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:

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:

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.

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, Daniel Kahneman wrote “The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral…

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:

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.

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…

Gigerenzer versus Kahneman and Tversky: The 1996 face-off

Through the late 1980s and early…

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…

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.

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.

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 interesting…

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.

Gary Klein on confirmation bias in heuristics and biases research, and explaining everything

In Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein writes:

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:

My latest in Behavioral Scientist: Simple heuristics that make algorithms smart

My latest contribution at Behavioral Scientist is up. Here’s an excerpt:

A problem in the world or a problem in the model

In reviewing Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, John Kay writes:

The Rhetoric of Irrationality

From the opening of Lola Lopes’s 1991 article The Rhetoric of Irrationality (pdf) on the heuristics and biases literature:

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…

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:

How likely is “likely”?

From Andrew Mauboussin and Michael Mauboussin:

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):

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…

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.

An evolutionary projection of global fertility and population: My new paper (with Lionel Page) in Evolution & Human Behavior

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…

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 Sunstein debated how to make people better off “as…

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 The Tyranny of Utility: Behavioral Science and the Rise of…

Do nudges diminish autonomy?

Despite the fact that nudges, by definition, do not limit liberty, many people often have a feeling of discomfort about…

A New Useless Class?

Yuval Noah Harari writes:

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 Whe…

The three faces of overconfidence

I have complained before about people being somewhat quick to label poor decisions as being due to…

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…

Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making

For many years I have been influenced by Gerd Gigerenzer’s arguments…

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…

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:

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…

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…

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):

Opposing biases

From the preface of one print of Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgement (hat tip to Robert Wiblin who quoted this passagein…

Hypotheticals versus the real world: The trolley problem

Daniel Engber writes:

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 explain simply the logic behind their argument. I haven’t…

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…

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…

Does a moral reminder decrease cheating?

In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Dan Ariely describes an experiment to determine how much people cheat:

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…

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:

Noise

Daniel Kahneman has a new book in the pipeline called Noise. It is to be co-authored…

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…

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.

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, Schumpeter and Galbraith. His supporters were…

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.

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 to make good decisions. This is not diversity in groups, but diversity…

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.

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 research…

Some podcast recommendations

What I’ve been listening to recently:

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…

Mike Walsh interviews me on algorithm aversion

Mike Walsh recently interviewed me for his Between Worlds Podcast, and here is…

Philip Tetlock on messing with the algorithm

From an 80,000 hours podcast episode:

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 numerous domains since at least the 1950s -…

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 you deeply care…

Dealing with algorithm aversion

Over at Behavioral Scientist is my latest contribution. From the intro:

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 books are designed to be slightly longer explorations of topics from TED talks, but short enough to be read in one sitting. That makes it an easy, enjoyable, but not…

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):

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:

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.…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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 useful training…

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.

The benefit of doing nothing

From Tim Harford:

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, the hours I have burnt over the last 20 years through aimless internet wandering and social media…

Rats in a casino

From Adam Alter’s Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching:

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 to use the sum of our human knowledge to make us safer and the world more stable.…

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 such…

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…

Is it irrational?

Over at Behavioral Scientist magazine my second article, Rationalizing the ‘Irrational’, is up.

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…

Humans vs algorithms

My first column over at the Behavioral Scientist is live.

The “effect is too large” heuristic

Daniel Lakens writes:

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.

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…

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.

Coursera’s Executive Data Science Specialisation: A Review

As my day job has shifted toward a statistics…

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths’s Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

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.

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…

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 -…

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.

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…

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…

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 likely surprising (or even…

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…

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 believe that Tetlock’s mission to improve forecasting of political and…

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…

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), but it contains more than enough interesting material to…

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 summary, but I took a few different lessons from the book. While experts are bad, others are worse.…

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 the interventions are…

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…

Three podcast episodes

Here are three I recently enjoyed:

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…

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…

The Behavioural Economics Guide 2016 (with an intro by Gerd Gigerenzer)

The Behavioural Economics Guide 2016 is out (including a couple…

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 read”. I…

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 applications of…

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 - essentially a random number - as a dollar price. They are then asked…

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…

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 audience. I expect the behavioural science knowledge of most attendees is drawn from…

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).

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.

The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development

Oded Galor has pointed me to his forthcoming article with Quamrul Ashraf in The Journal of Economic Literature.

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.

Notes on a few books

The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour by Adam Ferrier

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…

Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal

In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall asks why we live…

My first biology publication

For pitching in to help my PhD supervisor on a paper, I’ve scored my first biology publication:

Gigerenzer on system one and system two

If you have read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, you will be familiar with…

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 allocation of capital. He proposes…

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 with evidence to…

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 and the idea that evolutionary psychology could add a lot of value to economics - and behavioural…

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…

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:

Evonomics is live!

The web magazine Evonomics is now live. The blurb:

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:

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 year’s behavioural…

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 available…

A week of links

Links this week:

Sam Bowles on the death of ‘Homo Economicus’

A few straw men are burnt along the way, but interesting all the same.

A grumpy take on behavioural economics

I missed this when it was first posted, but John Cochrane has posted a great rant (…

A week of links

Links this week:

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.

Please experiment on us

Michelle Meyer and Christopher Chabris write:

The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics

I posted this paper on SSRN a few months ago, but neglected to blog…

A week of links

Links this week:

The human factor in accidents

The below passage is from a neat article on how mistakes can save lives.

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…

A week of links

Links this week:

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:

Family friendly backfires

Last month a NYT article by Claire Cain Miller documented some of the backfires associated with family friendly policies. For instance:

A week of links

Links this week:

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.

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…

Ration information and avoid news

I am rereading Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The first…

A week of links

Links this week:

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 the weak role of family influence…

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).

A week of links

Links this week (or more like two weeks):

A week of links

Links this week:

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…

A week of links

Links this week (or more like two weeks):

Returns to self control - unemployment edition

A new paper in Psychological Science by Michael Daly and friends:

Uncertainty and understanding behaviour

From Cameron Murray on the trolley problem:

A week of links

Links this week:

Predicting replication

The Behavioural Economics Replication Project:

A week of links

Links this week:

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 behavioural economics (and law) requires the theoretical…

The gender reading gap and love of learning

Two interesting education snippets.

A week of links

Links this week:

An evolutionary perspective on behavioural economics

I often complain that behavioural economics (behavioural science) often…

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).

A week of links

Links this week:

A week of links

Links this week:

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 Behaviorhas been published in the Journal of Political…

The other gender gap

The Economist discusses a new OECD report on a growing gender gap in schools:

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Overcoming implicit bias

I have been working through The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy…

Introducing Evonomics

What is Evonomics?

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Accepting heritability

At Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow writes:

Wisdom from Tolstoy

I have just finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and along the way marked a couple of passages.

A week of links

Links this week (a slightly sparse list as I didn’t find much time to see what was out there):

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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…

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…

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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 on the question of whether obesity is a drain on the public purse, whether we consumer high sugar soda because we have no…

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…

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 “libertarian paternalism”, nudges are often framed as alternatives to coercive measures. If you can nudge most people toward the “right” decision through the way you…

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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…

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…

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Grade inflation and the Dunning-Kruger effect

The famous Dunning-Kruger effect, in the words of Dunning and Kruger, is a bias where:

The benefits of cognitive limits

Cleaning up some notes recently, I was reminded of another interesting piece from Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals:

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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:

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.

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The blogs I read

Although RSS seems to be on the way…

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 variant are on average three kilograms heavier…

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Best books I read in 2014

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 system and it should…

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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 often confused terms…

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…

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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…

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 book, although the authors are somewhat slow to get to the point and there are plenty of…

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The unrealistic assumptions of biology

Biologists are usually among the first to tell me…

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.

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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 - ecological rationality…

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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 socioeconomic causes. The strawman punchline for…

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.

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. In an interview on BBC2 (watch it at the bottom of this post), Wilson…

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Ignorance feels so much like expertise

In the Pacific Standard, David Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect writes:

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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. In that…

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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 part is below. As I have said many times before, giving a…

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 on…

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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…

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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…

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…

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Tamed by an influx of women

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 the Industrial Revolution. As children…

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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.

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Scarcity of time, money, friends and bandwidth

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Muchis full of interesting insight and experimental results. It presents a novel way of looking at scarcity that extends beyond the typical analysis in…

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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 fan and that this book is still worth reading. But there was something about this book that grated at times, especially…

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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 making in finance. By the end of the book, the idea that traders are…

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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…

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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…

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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 exception, with at least three references I can recall. The story is wonderfully simple and I have, at times, been mildly sympathetic to the idea. However, it is…

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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 outside of the academic and economics environments I am used to. There were a lot of…

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…

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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…

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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”:

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 behaviour genetics to eugenics to Nazi manoeuvre, has pointed…

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:

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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.

The benefit of uncertainty

John Coates writes:

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Doubling down

First, from Andrew Leigh, discussing Gregory Clark’s work showing that low social mobility persists across countries and policy environments:

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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:

A week of links

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A week of links

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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 science literature on political bias, although there…

The magic of commerce

A re-read of The Malay Archipelago reminded me…

Ignore the sunk costs

Edge has a great set of short notes by…

A week of links

Again, closer to a month of links:

A week of links

More like a month of links, but here goes:

A week of links

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Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference wrap

Over the past year I have posted several times about…

A week of links

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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 pd…

Doing cultural evolution right

A sojourn into the literature on cultural evolution can be confusing. Authors use the…

A week of links

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The origin of the phrase “sneaky f**cker”

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Best books I read in 2013

As is my habit, each year…

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The benefits of math skills to forager-farmers

In a new article by Eduardo Undurraga and colleagues (HT: Neuroskeptic):

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The theoretical ambition of behavioural science

From Richard Posner (HT: Ryan Murphy):

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Neoclassical theory won because it backed the right horse

An interesting idea in Herb Gintis’s review of The Origin of Wealth (pdf):

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.…

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…

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, conspicuous consumption…

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, Veblen’s argument that conspicuous consumption must…

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…

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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 work it inspired has had a limited effect through mainstream economics. I believe there…

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 Winter took the ideas expressed by Armen Alchian and Joseph Schumpeter decades earlier and presented a direct evolutionary…

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Is intelligence at the root of cooperation?

From Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (references removed):

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.

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“Behavioural economics” versus “behavioural science”

In the comments, Rory Sutherland writes:

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 what signs someone should someone look for in a decent critique. So, here are…

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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 adopters of agriculture were shorter and had worse nutrition and health than the hunter-gatherers that preceded them, the agricultural…

Life expectancy and the dawn of agriculture

Relative to their hunter-gatherer counterparts, early Neolithic farmers were short, had poor dental…

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In praise of Malcolm Gladwell

While Malcolm Gladwell bashing season is still in full swing and before the…

A week of links

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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…

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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 “how to” book, although there are plenty of principles (and suggestions to be humble) worth…

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 Irrationality is based largely on Ariely’s own work (a good thing). But where Ariely had 15 years of experiments to call on for…

A week of links

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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, Peter Turchin quizzed…

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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:

Monkeys respond to the Malthusian limit

From Smithsonian magazine (HT: John Hawks):

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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…

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 commonly referenced popular books on behavioural science, it describes Ariely’s experiments in the areas of cheating, procrastination, social norms, hot…

A week of links

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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…

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 preferring domestic to foreign industry, the invisible hand has come to represent the idea that self-interest can improve the common good.…

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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 in humans, to some of the recent rumblings about cultural…

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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 Sloan Wilson and John Gowdy…

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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 contribution to be “the love principle”. In this post, I want to pull the idea apart. I’m not going to offer a perfect…

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, Frijters and Foster seek to supplement what they call the “mainstream…

A week of links

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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 and Romain Wacziarg reviewed some literature that makes a strong case that it is population, not institutions, that underlies long-term economic growth.…

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…

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Social Darwinism is back

A couple of weeks ago I flagged the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization’s (JEBO) special issue Evolu…

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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 General…

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’…

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Observations on happiness, biases and preferences

This year’s Australian Conference of Economists had a few behavioural/experimental economists…

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…

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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…

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…

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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 undergone massive…

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…

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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…

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 interesting content. It talks about how height peaked in Europe around 800 AD, before…

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World economic history in two diagrams

Gregory Clark opens A Farewell to Alms with a strong claim:

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.

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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 not convinced that Zuk used this approach, but Hawks’s comment triggered me to…

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…

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Modelling versus theory

While looking for something completely unrelated, I came across this 2007 Econ Journal Watch paper Model…

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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…

Sexual selection and entrepreneurship

From Neil Niman’s article Sexual Selection and Economic Positioning:

A week of links

Were the Victorian’s cleverer than us? Patrick Rabbit pulls it apart.

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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…

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…

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Selection during pregnancy

Carl Zimmer writes about a new paper in Trends in Genetics …

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:

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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 about other people’s welfare in addition to their own…

Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making

Even though I consider that I am across the literature at the boundary of economics and…

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Evolution of time preference by natural selection

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?”

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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), addressing the type of argument that you can still hear today about the evolution of the…

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 float around a stable mean. Happiness is also strongly related…

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Economics from a biological viewpoint

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Using the Malthusian model to measure technology

Underlying much of Ashraf and Galor’s analysis of genetic diversity and economic development is a…

The success of the productive

In another great section from the The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher…

A week of links

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Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference

I’m excited that I can finally announce the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference.

Business adaptation

Rafe Sagarin blogs at the Harvard Business Review:

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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:

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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 those posts, I avoided examining whether genetic diversity could be considered a proxy of phenotypic diversity unrelated to that genetic diversity (such as…

Victorian naturalists

Being a naturalist in the Victorian era was a different exercise to today. From Darwin’s The Descent of Man:

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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?

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 followed that pattern. However, reading them is worthwhile as they tend to provide a…

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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 production possibility frontier through increasing the range of traits in the population for developing and implementing new…

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…

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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. When tracking mobility across generations, you cannot simply…

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’…

A week of links

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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, Human Genetic…

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…

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 the post]). In a recent post, Kanazawa asks an interesting question - Why do…

A week of links

Four links this week:

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:

Spontaneous order

Another interesting old paper off my reading pile has been Robert Sugden’s Spontaneous Order.

A week of links

This week we have paleo for dogs, irrational consumers and the question of what is the right size:

Updating Maddison

Angus Maddison’s estimates of per capita GDP - from 1 AD through to…

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…

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, C…

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 Wrangham, Pascal Boyer and Gary Becker…

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:

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 failure in any one of…

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. Its been floating around as a working paper for a few years, so its nice to see it get a home. But…

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 on most economic issues. Based on questions to a 41…

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:

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. Published in Current Anthropology, the critique is an extension…

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…

The rationale of the family

John Kay writes:

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.

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:

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 Gould’s role in communicating evolutionary biology. Krugman argues that Gould was attractive to readers because he made no…

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:

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.

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:

Positive eugenics

In Forbes, Jon Entine discussesthe rise of “positive eugenics”:

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…

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…

Sexual selection and inequality

From Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal:

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 science media…

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 that the evolution of the propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption is a factor underlying modern economic growth, as conspicuous…

Genes, economics and happiness

From the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics (ungated prepublication version here):

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 the most recommended. Their exploration of cultural evolution has many elements that are relevant to economics, including the development of institutional…

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.

Deriving the demand for children

I’ve been working through Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family: Enlarged Edition over the last…

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 lot of research is invested in finding the…

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 in these studies is to examine the share of rare surnames in high or low status occupations and compare it to the overall prevalence of that surname…

Trivers on Romney’s sons and Obama’s daughters

In a National Review article a…

Nobel prizes and marriage markets

The committee for selecting the 2012 winners of the…

Genetic diversity and economic development: Ashraf and Galor respond

As I noted in a postscript to my last post, Quamrul Ashraf…

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…

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 they respond to someone else’s consumption choices, as it often…

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 article by Eric…

Cooperation is intuitive

From a recent letter in Nature by Rand, Greene and Nowak:

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 in poor countries may be increased…

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. The central themes of his…

Haidt’s The Righteous Mind

I am going to…

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…

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…

Kelly’s What Technology Wants

Technology wants increasing…

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 Andrew references Richard…

Henrich on markets, trust and monogamy

The Edge has put up video and transcript of a great interview with Joe Henrich (the…

Genetic diversity and economic development

Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper linking genetic diversity and economic development has been available as…

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…

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 genome, including elements…

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…

Does equality increase conspicuous consumption?

In an interesting paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Nailya Ordabayeva and Pierre Chandon propose that conspicuous…

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 that he…

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…

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 ancestors in the…

The intelligent inheriting the earth

From a working paper by Garett Jones released earlier this year:

Recent selection for height

As noted by Steve Hsu and Razib Khan, a new paper in Nature Genetics reports evidence of recent…

Ongoing selection against violent behaviour

From Mark Pagel, author of Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind, in a RSA podcast:

Models without data

A new paper in PNAS suggests that the similarity between…

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…

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. It turned out to be a good use of my $2, as The Mating Mind is one of the most important books in shaping my thinking, and it was one of the first books I put…

Cliodynamics and complexity

At the Consilience Conference earlier this year, I saw Peter Turchin’s presentation on cliodynamics - the mathematical modelling of…

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. One reason for my question was that species are typically…

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 given the complexity of the world, there are limits to how much corporations can control their fate or…

Selective sweeps in humans

From a new paper in PLOS Genetics:

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:

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 multilevel selection framework…

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.

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…

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 stitch together and reconcile the various arguments, in sum they confirm…

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:

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:

Conspicuous consumption and poverty traps

Poverty is no barrier to conspicuous consumption. As Banerjee and Duflo wrote in Poor Economics:

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.

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 sales of beauty products increase in times of recession, in contrast…

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 earliest (statistically…

The deep roots of development

Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have put out a nice review article on long-term economic…

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 wit…

Population, connectivity and innovation

Near the close of his acceptance speech for the Competitive Enterprise…

Europeans and economic growth

A new NBER paper by Bill Easterly and Ross Levine proposes…

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”:

Evolutionary policy making

Project Syndicate has published one of the last pieces by…

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.

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 Passion…

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:

Economists are different?

In Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (this is another snippet pending my…

Hayek, planning and eugenics

In Friedrich Hayek’s magnificent essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek writes:

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…

Shrinking brains and intelligence

Average human brain size has…

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:

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)…

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…

Markets and morals

I enjoyed the responses to Michael Sandel’s critique of markets in the How Markets Crowd Out Morals forum on the…

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…

Institutions are endogenous

From Jared Diamond’s review of Why Nations Fail:

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.

Could this critique apply to economics?

From an excellent article in Nature News by Ed Yong on problems with replication in psychology:

Chimps 1, Humans 0

At the recent The Biological Basis of Preferences and Behaviour conference…

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:

Maladaptive ideas

Following the Consilience Conference and some suggestions for additions to my reading list, I have been…

The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences

Evidence from…

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:

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 Michael…

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 with some high quality presentations. I will post…

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):

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 Economics as an Evolutionary Science: From Utility to…

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 strength was that most of the…

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 as Edward O. Wilson and Herb Gintis is no surprise, the degree of…

The recent evolution of musical talent

From a debate between Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller on the biological basis for musical talent:

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 that we should…

Selfish herding

Nicholas Gruen writes:

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 designed, in part, to…

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 made up of adaptive agents. The economy emerges from the interactions of those…

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.

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…

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 …

Economics and evolutionary biology reading list

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…

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:

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 and Gintis some competition as the most prominent advocates of a group selectionist approach (or multi-level selection as Nowak and colleagues would term…

Education, income and children

In my recent post on whether children are normal goods (demand for children increasing with…

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…

Subsidise the rich for the good of our species

From Michael Shermer’s review of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy:

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…

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 Richard Sennett. Each was reviewed by…

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 and Thomas Pollet look at data from a variety of societies, ranging from subsistence groups to industrialised societies, and show that the link between male…

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 have merit. Two of…

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:

Kahneman on the price of freedom

From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Foresight by H. G. Wells

From When the Sleeper Wakes (1910):

Parental income and SAT scores

To make his point that socioeconomic status is a major driver of educational outcomes, Dan Pink made the following…

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 species evolves, what appears to be…

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.…

Quantifying children

In the New York Times profile of Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, Motoko Rich writes:

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 population genetics. The model described by…

Risk aversion is not irrational

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:

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.

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…

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.

Absolute improvement

Fernando Teson writes:

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 was first…

Excess males

Robin Hansen writes on the sex selective abortion of females:

Consilience Conference

Have just discovered the upcoming Consilience Conference. From the blurb:

Economic mobility and reproductive success

Tyler Cowen writes:

The mating reservation wage

Bryan Caplan makes an excellent point:

Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow

[See my 2016 update]

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:

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…

Dysgenics and war

Bryan Caplan has picked up on an interesting interview of Irving Fisher in the New York Times archives. Fisher states:

Status, signalling and the handicap principle

Robin Hanson writes:

Intelligence and assortive mating

Arnold Kling writes:

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, to the institutional structure and norms created by government. These incentives range from…

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, Helena Cronin notes the absence of a Nobel prize in biology. The closest…

Not so irrational

In Freeman Dyson’s interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dyson…

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…

IQ externalities

Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil focuses on a message that the situation is more…

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, and while I disagree with some of the implications that he draws from this message, Zimbardo’s case is…

The perfection of man

From 100 years ago, Scientific American calls for more research into human evolution:

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 to…

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…

A passion for equality?

In Benoit Debreuil’s Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies, the opening chapter contains the…

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 fertility. As natural selection acts strongly on fertility and the traits that affect it, you might expect that the heritability of fertility would…

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 first is the transition from dominance hierarchies, such as those…

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…

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.

Two articles on genetics and economics

From Charles Manski in the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives (pdf):

Intelligence changes

Scott Haufman has written a post on the variation in IQ over a person’s life. He writes:

Monkey inequality

Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer has written a post in which he looks at a couple of…

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 expanded and revised from the first, while later editions through to the sixth in 1826 are…

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…

Is loss aversion a bias?

From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Take the evolutionary economics pill

Frances Wooley writes:

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:

Two perspectives on sex differences

First, from Rob Brooks:

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…

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 intellectual founder of economics, displacing Adam Smith from that role. Frank’s…

Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy

Hunting, gathering and comparative advantage

From an article by Gijsbert Stoet in the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behaviour:

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:

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).

Markets and family values

Larry Arnhart’s recent post at Darwinian Conservatism makes a couple of interesting points on family…

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:

Human nature and property rights

While the Cato Unbound discussion on Brain, Belief and…

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. Pinker points out six major declines in violence in human history, starting with the shift from the hunter-gatherer…

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:

Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays

It pays to be beautiful. Higher pay, increased chance of promotion, easier…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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 re…

Do economists satisfice?

In Herbert Simon’s 1978 Swedish Bank prize lecture (pdf), he stated the following:

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 Hong Kong’s population to drop from its current 3.25…

Elite envy

Robin Hanson writes:

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…

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 critique of twin…

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 from Peter Forbes in the…

Economics is a branch of ecology

In an interview published in 1996, Garret Hardin stated:

Economists 1, Biologists 0

Sorry for the…

Envy has its benefits

Bryan Caplan writes:

Low social mobility equals success

At Gene Expression, Razib Khan writes:

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…

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 fall behind…

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…

Health trade-offs

There are always trade-offs. From the British Medical Journal in June:

Darwin on female preferences

I am slowly re-reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man and came across the following gem:

The costs of polygamy

From The Economist’s Free Exchange:

Free sterilisation

From Dan Ariely:

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 (Hamilton considered it to be one of his best papers), it is one of the…

Only economists are rational

Andrew Gelman makes the following observation:

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…

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…

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 finished, but in the meantime, some of Fukuyama’s initial observations are…

The growth of atheism

Nigel Barber of The Daily Beast (Psychology Today) has posted on a forthcoming article in which he shows that the…

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:

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).…

Darwin and Marx

Yesterday I visited Down House, Charles Darwin’s home from 1842 until his…

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 gloom in…

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…

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 th…

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 Gould’s analysis of skull measurements by Samuel…

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):

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 happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania.” What we…

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: Je…

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…

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…

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…

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 might be a move away from a consumerist culture. To do this, there is a need to develop and maintain social…

The evolution of conscientiousness

For most of Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, Miller treats the genetic…

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 or conscientiousness is unnecessarily indirect. Instead, we should use our…

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…

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…

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.

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 and amusing. The books ranges between more serious issues such as obesity, population control and infanticide to the more…

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 introduced genotypes with a low preference for…

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…

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…

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 benefits of the modern way of life. The modern person is…

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 growth. My reading list on…

Dangerous ideas

Recently, I was asked whether the idea…

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 world (on average). That is not to say that the benefits will always outweigh the costs, as the aim is to reproduce.…

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, Schumpeter and Galbraith. His supporters were…

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…

The Simon-Ehrlich bet

I’m back on the population bandwagon today, and I wanted to…

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…

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 contemplating some physical limits of what the ultimate human population could be. The current global population is around 6.8 billion and is growing at…

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 happiness tends to drift back to…

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 read, but…

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…

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 where we derive the phrase - that is, until yesterday. As a result, I did not understand the extent to which overpopulation concerns underpinned Hardin’s writing (HT…

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…

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 Genera…

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 Reasons to…

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 benefits to increasing population, libertarians should support “libertarian policies” to increase population, educate and persuade…

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.

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…

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…

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.

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…

Genetically testing similarity

In my last post, I questioned whether…

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. I will post some thoughts on Seabright’s presentation (and some of the other presentations at the conference) after Easter and once I have read the related…

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 the authors. To get their…

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 the conference is to pull together economists and evolutionary biologists to develop new collaborations and examine how their…

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.

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 attack on economics is against a caricature of the discipline, he ties up his series with a few…

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…

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…

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…

The Evolution Institute

In the first of a series of blog…

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, and in particular, at short-term tests.…

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…

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 understanding complexity science. The book predates a lot of the language associated with complexity science (in fact, I don’t think it uses…

Income and IQ

As I noted in my recent post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers…

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…

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 going to use biology as a model for the…

Gladwell’s Outliers

After flipping through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success l…

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…

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…

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 crisis had two parts: that new findings in genetics would reveal…

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 genetic data are being…

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. A person is better off even if they are trading with someone who is better than them at all activities. This is because the less productive person will still have a…

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 Charle…

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 not convinced about the idea. If anything, the paradigm appears to…

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…

Banking as an ecosystem

Most of my interest in the use of biology in economics concerns humans being subject to the forces of…

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 economics inspired by biological processes, with interactions between firms, industries and institutions examined using evolutionary methods. The economics is…

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…

Why do rich parents bother?

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…

DeLong on the pace of evolution

Any theory that seeks…

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.

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…

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 faster in larger cities, with this relationship surprisingly consistent. Where…

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 capita income…

More on violence

Following yesterday’s post on female preference for masculine men, a couple of old articles came to mind.

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.…

My top 10 books in 2010

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 tradeable quotas or ITQs), each fisher owns a…

A wasteful Christmas

As noted by Chris Berg, the Australia Institute has rolled out its annual reminder of Joel Waldfogel’s almost 20-year old observation about the wastefulness of Christmas giving. As the gift giver has less than complete knowledge of the preferences of the recipient, the recipient tends to value the gift at…

Fitness spreading

One of the issues at the core of my research is the speed of human evolution, particularly over the last 10,000 years. There are several potential arguments to suggest that…

The evolution of technology

In Kevin Kelly’s recent appearance on Econtalk, he talked about his new book What Technology Wants. I have not read…

Post-crisis economics

Over the weekend I listened to the three-part Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures 2010, this year given by Lord Adair Turner.

Coal and the industrial revolution

In a recent discussion as part of the Cato Unbound series, Matt Ridley suggested that we shouldn’t forget the Materialist explanation for the industrial revolution. The difference between the British and other bursts of economic activity, such…

Better school performance leads to more children

An article by Anna Goodman and Ilona Koupil in last month’s Evolution and Human Behavior found a link between school performance and number of children and grandchildren (in Sweden 1915-1929). This effect, as might be expected, held in males only. The number of…

Procrastination

Procrastination bothers me. Not in the sense that I want to procrastinate, but biologically. Why would a tendency to procrastinate evolve?

The value of a species

Today I listened to an old (2006) interview with E.O Wilson by Michael Novacek (thanks NYAS). Wilson had a few criticisms of economics - the heavy basis in mathematics for one - and he stated that this had…

There is but one social science

“There is only one social science and we are its practitioners” - George Stigler, economist

The short wingman - do humans use visual illusions to attract a mate?

An ABC news article last week reported a study by Professor John Endler on the use of visual tricks by male bower birds to make themselves look larger to females. By placing small objects at the front and larger objects…

Economics versus history - is this the right debate?

Over the past few days, Tim Harford has been engaging in a debate with Gideon Rachman (along with a few other bloggers)…

Education in the developing world

Following from my recent blog on over-education, Tyler Cowen’s words on under-education for most of the world should be noted.

Sports stars born early in the year

One of the more interesting pieces of evidence in the nature or nurture debate is the that athletes…

Should we tax education?

Over the last few weeks, Bryan Caplan of Econlog has engaged in a debate with his former teacher Bill Dickens over the social value of education. Brian’s position is that education is largely used for signalling rather…

Patience and IQ

Following from my recent post on marshmallows and impatience, I have come across the following article by Dohmen et al. It was found…

The predictive power of marshmallows

I have gone through the back catalogue of podcasts for WNYC’s Radiolab for a couple of months now. I got into it after ABC radio substituted it for the Science Show for two weeks in late June. It is sensational – great content and…

It’s a risky business attracting a mate

Last week, ABC’s Catalyst had a story on skateboarders taking extra risks based on the presence of an attractive researcher. This was based on article published earlier in the year (Ronay, R.…