Despite reviews first appearing on the web a couple of months ago, I somehow missed the imminent release of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. In a WSJ review, Charles Murray places Wade’s book on a continuum that includes E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and his own The Bell Curve (written with Richard Herrnstein). Based on the review, I expect A Troublesome Inheritance will draw an equal amount of heat, although it will play out in a world of twitter outrage.

The second half of Wade’s book looks interesting. Murray writes:

Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.”

To develop his case, Mr. Wade draws from a wide range of technical literature in political science, sociology, economics and anthropology. He contrasts the polities and social institutions of China, India, the Islamic world and Europe. He reviews circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th. He takes up the outsize Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences, most easily explained by the Jews’ conspicuously high average IQ, and recounts the competing evolutionary explanations for that elevated cognitive ability. Then, with courage that verges on the foolhardy, he adds a chapter that incorporates genetics into an explanation of the West’s rise during the past 600 years.

I understand the analysis of England draw’s on Gregory Clark’s work described in A Farewell to Alms. It will be interesting to see how Wade constructs the rest of his case.

Links this week:

1. This piece on big data is one of the best I have read.
2. No surprise here – single CEOs take bigger risks.
3. A conference on hype in science.
4. Cameron Murray on post-crash economics and the Lucas critique.

Links this week:

1. It’s from late last year, but this piece on the biological origins of morality is worth reading.
2. A new journal, Economic Anthropology, with the debut issue on greed and excess (and sorry, gated for those without academic access).
3. Diane Coyle points to some older work on wealth and inheritance. She also pointed me to this good interview with E.O Wilson.
4. Another good bash of p-values.
5. Who is buying the cigarettes? HT: Bryan Caplan
6. Baby names. HT: Eric Crampton

And Kelly Slater’s winning “Wave of the Winter”:

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 are few surprises and not a lot of fresh opinion.

The one piece new to me concerned the moderation of people’s views after they are forced to explain their understanding of an issue. The basic story is as follows:

[C]onsider an intriguing study by Philip Fernbach, a University of Colorado business school professor, and his colleagues. …

First, people were asked to state their positions on a series of political issues, including a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, a national flat tax, merit-based pay for teachers and unilateral sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program. They were asked to describe their position on a seven-point scale whose endpoints were “strongly in favor” and “strongly opposed.”

Second, people were asked to rate their degree of understanding of each issue on a seven-point scale. The third step was the crucial one; they were asked to “describe all the details you know about [for example, the impact of instituting a ‘cap and trade’ system for carbon emissions], going from the first step to the last, and providing the causal connection between the steps.” Fourth, people were asked to rerate their understanding on the seven-point scale and to restate their position on the relevant issue.

The results were stunning. On every issue, the result of requesting an explanation was to persuade people to give a lower rating of their own understanding—and to offer a more moderate view on each issue. In a follow-up experiment, Fernbach and his co-authors found that after being asked to explain their views, people were less likely to want to give a bonus payment to a relevant advocacy group.

Interestingly, Fernbach and his co-authors found no increase in moderation when they asked people not to “describe all the details you know” about the likely effects of the various proposals, but simply to say why they believe what they do. If you ask people to give reasons for their beliefs, they tend to act as their own lawyers or public relations managers, and they don’t move toward greater moderation.

I wonder how long the effect lasts.

A re-read of The Malay Archipelago reminded me of Alfred Russel Wallace’s occasional bleeding-heart libertarian leanings. From his time in remote Dobo in the Aru Islands of Eastern Indonesia:

I daresay there are now near five hundred people in Dobbo of various races, all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, “to look for their fortune;” to get money any way they can. They are most of them people who have the very worst reputation for honesty as well as every other form of morality,—Chinese, Bugis, Ceramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a sprinkling of half-wild Papuans from Timor, Babber, and other islands, yet all goes on as yet very quietly. This motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population live here without the shadow of a government, with no police, no courts, and no lawyers; yet they do not cut each other’s throats, do not plunder each other day and night, do not fall into the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed to lead to. It is very extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into one’s head about the mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe, and suggests the idea that we may be over-governed. Think of the hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the people of England, from cutting each other’s throats, or from doing to our neighbour as we would not be done by. Think of the thousands of lawyers and barristers whose whole lives are spent in telling us what the hundred Acts of Parliament mean, and one would be led to infer that if Dobbo has too little law England has too much.

Here we may behold in its simplest form the genius of Commerce at the work of Civilization. Trade is the magic that keeps all at peace, and unites these discordant elements into a well-behaved community. All are traders, and know that peace and order are essential to successful trade, and thus a public opinion is created which puts down all lawlessness.

Edge has a great set of short notes by various authors on how Daniel Kahneman has influenced them. It is worth flicking through them all, but excerpts from my two favourites are below.

First, some excellent advice via Jason Zweig:

Anyone who has ever collaborated with him tells a version of this story: You go to sleep feeling that Danny and you had done important and incontestably good work that day. You wake up at a normal human hour, grab breakfast, and open your email. To your consternation, you see a string of emails from Danny, beginning around 2:30 a.m. The subject lines commence in worry, turn darker, and end around 5 a.m. expressing complete doubt about the previous day’s work.

You send an email asking when he can talk; you assume Danny must be asleep after staying up all night trashing the chapter. Your cellphone rings a few seconds later. “I think I figured out the problem,” says Danny, sounding remarkably chipper. “What do you think of this approach instead?”

The next thing you know, he sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you’ve never heard of. If the earlier version was close to gold, this one is hewn out of something like diamond: The raw materials have all changed, but the same ideas are somehow illuminated with a sharper shift of brilliance.

The first time this happened, I was thunderstruck. How did he do that? How could anybody do that? When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft, he said the words I’ve never forgotten: “I have no sunk costs.”

Second, Eric Kandel (an 84 year-old Nobel laureate):

Daniel Kahneman has not yet influenced my work on snails and mice, but I am only in an early point in my career and I still look forward to exploring his ideas in a molecular biological context in the future.

Again, closer to a month of links:

1. A great set of essays triggered by David Dobbs’s assault on the selfish gene.
2. Tim Harford on big data. His piece on behavioural economics is also worth reading. Take the hype with a grain of salt.
3. The Greg Clark show continues – an interview on Social Science bites, a presentation at the RSA and some thoughts by Greg Cochran.
4. Charles Murray has a new book on its way – The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
5. A good long-read on de-extinction.
6. Free-range kids.

More like a month of links, but here goes:

1. We’re going to be hearing a lot about Greg Clark’s new book on social mobility – The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Clark gives a synopsis in the NYT. In short, Clark and his colleagues estimate “that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage.”
2. Kolk and colleagues present a paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B presents a model in which intergenerational fertility correlations drive a long-term fertility increase. They cite my working paper a source for genetic correlations driving fertility up. When (if) I get that paper published, do I now cite back?
3. The germs made you do it. (A good long read)
4. Are the hot hand deniers, so desperate to demonstrate cognitive biases, falling to biases of their own?
5. Don’t hire like Google.
6. Behavioural economics versus behavioural finance. On House’s question of where the behavioural economics folk are, I suggest the supply responded to the demand.

Links this week:

1. Matt Ridley on inequality.
2. Inequality and assortative mating.
3. The sloth’s algae farm.
4. The work of Suzanne Scotchmer (also here).
5. And last, the Volcom Pipe Pro is consistently the best contest each year outside the World Tour. This year’s final day highlights:

Over the past year I have posted several times about the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family Conference, which was held in Sydney this week. It turned out to be a great conference, and I am very pleased with how it panned out.

The conference has increased my optimism about the potential for more work to be carried out at the inter-disciplinary boundaries between economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology and so on. When I compare it to the Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology conference I attended almost three years ago (an excellent conference), we managed to drag in a broader range of economists and other social scientists to this event. I suspect this is evidence for increasing interest on the part of social scientists in how sciences such as biology can add to the social science toolkit.

As a result, I hope this conference is the first of a continuing series (although hopefully with a wider group of organisers). An interesting challenge for the next iteration will be to pick an appropriate theme. In this case, the Cooperation and Conflict in the Family theme was useful in pulling together people who may not have necessarily considered that there were useful insights in other disciplines. We would not have gotten such an interesting mix of people if we had pitched the topic specifically around the integration of disciplines.

It was interesting to see the different presentation styles across disciplines, and I have to say that the biologists (on average) have the edge in presenting their work in an easy to understand way – particularly in relation to the submitted presentations. Us economists are still too tied to our equations to dump them. This was best illustrated in the presentations of two plenary speakers – Michael Jennions and Hanna Kokko – who used simple cartoons and illustrations to describe their models. If you go to their papers (particularly the supplementary materials), there can be some relatively hefty math behind them. Yet they are able to present the ideas without relying on the equations. And maybe this should also be taken as an indication for how economists write their papers – more of the math in the supplementary appendix, more time in the (shorter) main paper on the important intuition. And then dump the math when we intend to communicate our ideas verbally.

The conference also reminded me of how hard it is to work across disciplinary boundaries without full immersion in both sides (or having someone from both sides engaged in the work). Again turning the Michael Jennions presentation, he talked about Bateman’s gradient and the operational sex ratio, and about what each of them actually show (the paper on this is here). I thought I knew what each were about, but am now revisiting my understanding.