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.

Trivers’s later work on deception and self-deception is also important. His basic argument is that self-deception is not irrationality in the way we might normally categorise it. Rather self-deception plays an important role in convincing others of the “truth”. Believing in something prevents one from giving signs of deception, while possibly reducing cognitive load.

Against that backdrop, I can only describe The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life as a mixed bag. I learnt many things from the book. His discussion of the biological basis of deception in other species is interesting, such as his description of the evolutionary battle between birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and the subjects of their deception. The immune effects of deception were new to me. His discussion of deception as one of the weapons in parent-offspring conflict links some of his most important work.

The book is also full of small insights that pop up in random places – Trivers’s writing style has a certain “flow of consciousness” feel about it. This has a cost, however, as many of those insights are sporadically placed through passages that are little more than political rants. When Trivers applied the framework developed in earlier chapters, it did not feel that there was any in-depth analysis. The chapters on Israel and United States imperialism, while possibly containing some fair points, consist of little but an assertion that the facts are obvious and that supporters of Israel or the United States are engaging in self-deception in denying them. I would not have minded that Trivers wore his heart on his sleeve if he was making a more substantive point on deception. Rather, the point was political, with little new insight in that direction.

Much of the book is reflective of a growing trend for people to accompany their work with assertions that biases and deception have led others to come to different conclusions or ignore their brilliant work. I’d prefer that they stick with arguing their point and acknowledge that bias and deception is a two-way street.

Overall, I would still recommend reading the book, and I have a hunch that many of the ideas in it will come in useful. Just be ready to wade through a mix of substance and speeches from the soapbox to find them.

(Or even better, as recommended by Razib at Gene Expression, get hold of a copy of Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) – there is some true gold in there.)

I am reading Robert Trivers’s The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I will review in the next few days, but these passages on the benefits of outbreeding are particularly interesting:

US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world. Although in its history rules of immigration have favored some groups over others, all have had some opportunity. And with illegal immigration, such opportunities are sometimes greatly enhanced. From a biological standpoint, the resulting outbreeding (insofar as it takes place, as it inevitably must) will tend to be genetically beneficial. The US population is perpetually heterogeneous, about to be infused with 10 percent more genes from around the world. …

The later history of African Americans was in some ways more dreadful than under slavery, since not counting as property they could be hanged or “lynched” by the thousands as a form of social control. Nevertheless, the subpopulation had become strong enough by the middle of the twentieth century to begin a political and social movement that led to eventual legal liberation, and with this yoke lifted, the intrinsic benefits of strong outbreeding associated with strong selection has produced a vibrant and powerful subgroup. African Americans are the melting-pot population par excellence in the United States, genetically roughly 25 percent European in origin, 70 percent African, and the remainder Amerindian and Chinese. At the same time, social policies such as the war on drugs amount to a war on lower-class African Americans, greatly increasing incarceration rates, with destructive effects on their communities. So the racist attack continues, but in the long run it can only strengthen the biological power of its target.

One of the more interesting issues in the inequality debate is how we should treat the genetic lottery that contributes to unequal outcomes.

In a recent Econtalk podcast, Mike Munger and Russ Roberts touched on this issue in their discussion of profits and entrepreneurship (the quotes below are from the Econtalk website, so are not exact):

Munger: [T]he question that John Rawls raised in the Theory of Justice and elsewhere was: Why would any of us think that we deserve any of the character or effort or intelligence that lead us to perform well? … Rawls says you got those from your parents. You won a genetic lottery. Those are morally arbitrary. We may decide to keep some of it, but only what is necessary to motivate you to do what’s good for society. The things that you know, that you do, your character–those are collectively held. They are not privately owned, according to that theory of desert. … If you start from the premise that all our talents and character are collectively owned because they are morally arbitrary, then the only reason that anyone gets to keep profits is to motivate them to do what we want them to do for the public good. …

Roberts: … [M]y first thought is, once you give the power to the state to allocate the rewards you are not going to be in the world of justice like you hope. You are going to be in the world of rent seeking and power. My second thought is, so okay, I’m willing to admit that people would still be hedge fund managers–assuming they do something valuable, which I think many of them do. Not all financial folks are doing productive things these days, but many do. And you’d say: I concede the point that a billion is too much in the sense that less than that would still motivate them to do a good job. How would you pick the number that you think was the right number, and how would you enforce it?

Munger: It is really interesting that most of us think, if we are defenders of capitalism–no one that I know would defend the greed claim. What we defend instead is that what the price system does is provide information about the scarcity of resources so that it’s easier for us to correct mistakes.

I appreciated that Roberts and Munger do not argue that people receive exactly what they deserve, which is equal to their value to society. Instead, Roberts and Munger hit on the two of the points that I usually make about how we should respond to the genetic lottery. First, government does not equalise outcomes. More often than not, it entrenches the status quo, with redistribution to powerful interest groups (for example, home owners or agribusiness) and not the economically weak.

The second point is the more interesting. How do you decide how much a person should receive to motivate them to use their genetic talents wisely and allocate them to their most valuable use? As Roberts and Munger ask, how much should Steve Jobs have received for all that he did? At what point would you say, “Steve, you’ve received a lot of money, and as you received your talent in a lottery, you can’t keep any more”? How would this have affected his effort in delivering the raft of Apple consumer goods that so many of us use? I don’t know, but neither does the person determining what is someone else’s just deserts.

(And as for most Econtalk podcasts, the rest of the discussion is worth a listen.)

Fernando Teson writes:

Yet, outside the rarified circles of political philosophy journals, I haven’t heard many folks ask two other important questions about the President’s approach.  Yet these questions are, to me, obvious.

First, why should reducing income equality be a worthy goal? If we are concerned with the poor, then we should focus (as Rawls famously does) in improving their lot in absolute terms, regardless of the effect of such improvement on the gap between them and the rich. Again, this is common currency in academic circles, but I don’t hear anyone in our public debate making the point.

One reason why the focus is not on improving the absolute income of the poor is that income is not the sole objective of those at the bottom.

To make a point I have often made before, if someone’s aim is to attract a mate, a slight increase in absolute income will not assist low-status males in achieving this objective if massive increases at the top allow high-status males to dominate the mating market (or to cause high-status women to price themselves too high).

If we accept that people have objectives beyond absolute income, the range of policy considerations becomes more interesting. Take prohibitions against polygamy, whose primary beneficiary (particularly before the emergence of the welfare state) was low-status males. Compulsory child-support payments reduce the benefits for a woman of partnering with a low-status male. The terms of the policy debate about inequality do not have to be primarily about income.

That is not to say that increasing absolute income does not matter. It does. It is just that income inequality plays out in other spheres that people care about – and increasing absolute income provides no guarantee of addressing those.

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 released in 1999.

I quickly realised that The Darwin Economy is not so much a new book, but rather a refinement of Luxury Fever, updated for the events of the last 10 years and with a few of the weaker arguments replaced or improved.

Take the central theme of both books – that people over-consume goods where there is competition for relative rank. In Luxury Fever, Frank contrasts conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption, and argues that conspicuous consumption triggers an arms race in that sphere. In The Darwin Economy, the focus is more on positional and non-positional goods. This is a sensible change, as many positional goods, such as housing in a good school district, may not be chosen purely for conspicuous consumption purposes.

Luxury Fever also has many of the same patterns of The Darwin Economy, such as the tendency to include chapters that do not quite fit the theme but reflect Frank’s broader philosophy. The chapter suggesting a program of public employment instead of unemployment benefits is one of them. I noted before that Frank could have made his core point in The Darwin Economy in an essay, and after reading Luxury Fever, my view on this has been confirmed.

Luxury Fever even contains the insight that underpins the theme of The Darwin Economy – that the description of competition by Charles Darwin may be more accurate in many instances than that of Adam Smith (or more precisely, many modern interpretations of Smith).

I expect that if I had read Luxury Fever 10 years ago, it would have been a revelation to me. Today, I suggest that you go for the new and improved.

Robin Hansen writes on the sex selective abortion of females:

A simple supply and demand analysis says that selective abortion both expresses a preference for boys and causes a reduction in that preference as wives become scarce. In South Korea this process is mostly complete, with excess girls down from 15% in the 1990s to 7% today (with ~5% as the biologically natural excess). …

Over an evolutionary time scale, the pay-offs to male and female children is, on average, equal, which would tend to balance numbers. Over shorter time scales, parents adjust socially, whether that be due to a demand response or changing preferences with income. However, females born today will not affect the ratio of males to females in their reproductive prime for another 15 to 20 years.  The ratio of males to females in China in the 0-4 years age brackets was 110 in 1990, 120 in 1999 and 123 in 2005. We have 20 to 30 years of excess males in the pipeline before any demand response can be realised. The long-term self-correction does not change the short-term issue. (It should also be noted that these ratios are higher than the sex ratio at birth, suggesting there is post-birth mistreatment and infanticide – the preference is not only “benignly” expressed by selective abortion.)

A more interesting point is what we mean when we say there are excess males. Mating is not simply a case of equal numbers matching equal numbers. Females have a stronger preference for quality. Men seek quantity, but quality is not irrelevant.

Take the following chart of Australian marriage rates (data from Heard (2011)):

There is no shortage of unmarried males in low-income groups even where there is no (or minimal) sex selective abortion. Women care about quality. It could be argued that in Australia, without sex selective abortion, there is a shortage of high-quality males.

So, what is the status of the excess males in China? In the article that triggered Hansen’s post, Nicholas Eberstadt writes:

For one thing, abnormal sex ratios appear to be almost entirely a Han phenomenon within China — and China’s Han are, generally speaking, better educated and more affluent than the country’s non-Han minorities.

From a female perspective, this may be good news as more of the product they desire is being produced – although quality is relative. For low-status males, the equation is worse.

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

Speakers at this conference are all top researchers in biology, the social sciences, or the humanities. All the speakers know the level of consensus in their fields and can recognize major changes taking place, identify the major unsolved problems, and point toward future directions of research. They can all also discuss relations among at least two of the three areas (biology, the social sciences, and the humanities).

Momentum to incorporate biology into the social sciences is growing.

The speakers list has me tempted to jump on a plane: Edward O Wilson, Henry Harpending, John Hawks, Christopher Boehm, Herb Gintis and Robert Frank among others. (Although a quick look at flight schedules – 24 hours there, 32 hours back…..)

Update: Well, I attended, and posted about the conference here and here.

Tyler Cowen writes:

How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”?  Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.?  What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy?

I have  written before about how decreased social mobility may be a sign of equalised opportunity. In a perfect meritocracy, assortment will largely be through genes.

However, there can still be social mobility even though assortment is through genetic factors. This is through differential reproductive success. If an economic class has  more children, many of those children move up or down the social scale as there is no longer room for them in their cohort.

This social mobility can have some interesting effects. If, for example, the bottom 80 per cent of the economic distribution has much higher fertility than the top 20 per cent, some of those born in the bottom 80 per cent will move into the top  quintile. If those who move up the scale do not experience any increase in income (as their productivity has not increased, only their prevalence has changed), the relative wealth of those born to someone from the initial top 20 per cent may increase. Social mobility appears to increase inequality through concentrating wealth in the less fertile top.

Greg Clark describes the converse situation in A Farewell to Alms. In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the rich had higher reproductive success. There was necessarily downward social mobility. Over time, the population became largely composed of those from the top. Productivity increased among the lower classes, but many of them weren’t from the lower classes at all.

Bryan Caplan makes an excellent point:

Female income has greatly increased, and men with low status jobs are “inferior goods” in the mating market.  As a result, the demand to date and marry such men has sharply declined.  The average guy with a low-status job is only modestly more dateable in women’s eyes than the average guy with no job at all.  Men respond by either working much harder to become “superior goods,” or saying “Why bother?” and giving up.  On this account, working class men are acting less industriously even though their preferences are no less industrious than they used to be.

People often forget that money is not the primary purpose of working. If men work and earn to attract a mate, they are interested in how much they should earn to succeed in that goal. If they have no chance of reaching that objective, they will not work. Their mating reservation wage is not reached.

I agree with Caplan. Preferences have not changed. The mating reservation wage is going up.

This has some consequences for minimum wage policy. If the mating reservation wage is going up, the minimum wage will have less effect on working decisions by men.

However, one thing about this situation perplexes me. Why are low-skilled men accepting this so quietly? Crime is still going down. There is no evidence of the social disruption that is often predicted to go with the presence of many unpaired males. Does modern society provide enough opiates for men to quietly check out?

On glancing down the chapter list of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I saw a list of heuristics and biases that behavioural scientists have discovered over the last few decades. I am often critical of behavioural science in that it is often presented as a list of biases with no linking framework, so the chapter list played to my fears. I was not confident that the book would present me with many new ideas.

Thankfully, the chapter list was deceiving.  Thinking, Fast and Slow is a magnificent book. Kahneman has such a clear writing style and ability to draw simple examples that my grasp of many of the heuristics and biases has increased. I am sure that I will be using many of Kahneman’s examples when trying to explain these biases to others in the future. Thinking, Fast and Slow is my first recommendation to anyone wanting to come to grips with behavioural economics, regardless of their background or level of technical skill.

More importantly (for me), was Kahneman’s ability to link many of these heuristics and biases. Kahneman’s use of the dual process model of the brain allows him to thread a coherent story through each bias and to give them something resembling a framework. The basic concept is that the brain has two modules: System 1 which is fast and applies quick, efficient but occasionally wrong intuitive decisions; and System 2, which is more analytical, but lazy and prone to its own biases.

When placed into an evolutionary context, the dual model framing makes intuitive sense. System 1 take over in emergencies. That quick, intuitive reaction allowed our ancestors to survive. System 2 is only called upon when there is time to decide and the energy used in deploying System 2 is worthwhile. This model allows Kahneman’s story to be less about “irrationality” and more about the costs and benefits of different forms of decision-making, particularly when the human brain, which evolution has shaped over many generations in an environment vastly different from today’s, is placed in the modern world.

Kahneman’s discussion of prospect theory adds to his story’s coherence. Under prospect theory, people evaluate losses and gains from their current reference point, and not as a calculation of their total wealth. People weight losses more than gains, and as such, are risk seeking in the domain of losses and risk averse when it comes to gains. This leads to the fourfold pattern of risk preferences: risk-averse behavior towards a high probability of gains (fear of disappointment) and towards a small probability of losses (hope to avoid loss – insurance); and risk-seeking behavior towards a high probability of losses (hope to avoid loss) and towards a small probability of gains (lotteries). Many of the biases discussed sit within this framework.

There is not much to dislike about the book, but Kahneman’s endorsement of libertarian paternalism to nudge people away from their behavioural biases was one area in which I would tread more carefully. As other chapters in the book show, groups of experts are also prone to biases. As Kahneman described his experience on a curriculum committee, which saw vast underestimates of the time involved and the probability of a negative result, I kept picturing government committees committing the same planning fallacy.

Similarly, Kahneman describes a debate between himself and Gary Klein over the usefulness of expert prediction. Part of their disagreement stemmed from the types of experts they were considering. Kahneman saw little usefulness for experts in fields where the outcome is inherently predictable. Klein saw more utility in fields where consistent feedback and practice allow a real degree of expertise to be achieved. Government largely sits in the former category. However, that small complaint should not detract from one of the best books I have read.