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:

More interesting and important is the possibility that children born after abortion legalization may on average have lower subsequent rates of criminality for either of two reasons. First, women who have abortions are those most at risk to give birth to children who would engage in criminal activity. Teenagers, unmarried women, and the economically disadvantaged are all substantially more likely to seek abortions. Recent studies have found children born to these mothers to be at higher risk for committing crime in adolescence. Gruber, Levine, and Staiger, in the paper most similar to ours, document that the early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difficult along many dimensions: infant mortality, growing up in a single-parent family, and experiencing poverty. Second, women may use abortion to optimize the timing of child-bearing. A given woman’s ability to provide a nurturing environment to a child can fluctuate over time depending on the woman’s age, education, and income, as well as the presence of a father in the child’s life, whether the pregnancy is wanted, and any drug or alcohol abuse both in utero and after the birth. Consequently, legalized abortion provides a woman the opportunity to delay childbearing if the current conditions are suboptimal. Even if lifetime fertility remains constant for all women, children are born into better environments, and future criminality is likely to be reduced.

Second, from Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids:

Parents have little or no effect on criminal behavior. …

In 1984, Science published a study of almost 15,000 Danish adoptees age fifteen or older, their adoptive parents, and their birth parents. … As long as the adoptee’s biological parents were law abiding, their adoptive parents made little difference: 13.5 percent of adoptees with law-abiding biological and adoptive parents got convicted of something, versus 14.7 percent with law-abiding biological parents and criminal adoptive parents. If the adoptee’s biological parents were criminal, however, upbringing mattered: 20 percent of adoptees with law-breaking biological and law-abiding adoptive parents got convicted, versus 24.5 percent with law-breaking biological and adoptive parents. Criminal environments do bring out criminal tendencies. Still, as long as the biological parents were law abiding, family environment made little difference.

In 2002, a study of antisocial behavior in almost 7,000 Virginian twins born since 1918 found a small nurture effect for adult males and no nurture effect for adult females. The same year, a major review of fifty-one twin and adoption studies reported small nurture effects for antisocial attitudes and behavior. For outright criminality, however, heredity was the sole cause of family resemblance.

The lesson: Even if your standards are low, instilling character is hard. Genes are the main reason criminal behavior runs in families.

How much of the abortion-crime link (to the extent it is real) is driven by elimination of those more genetically predisposed to crime?

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 in PLoS ONE by Wilson and his colleagues. The concept behind the project is that “[K]nowledge derived from general evolutionary principles and our own evolutionary history can be used to enhance cooperation in real-world situations, such as a program for at-risk high school students.”

Among other things, the authors drew on the work of Elinor Ostrom and the design features that she identified as contributing to group success. The authors also looked at bodies of evolutionary knowledge about development, psychological function and learning.

From this knowledge, specific measures were developed. As regards cooperation, the first three days of school comprised group identity building activities. Students were consulted to set up the rules. Staff meetings were held twice weekly. Praise was plentiful but rules clear and enforced. And so on (the full list of measures is in the paper here).

Students in the modified program significantly outperformed the comparison group in a randomly controlled trial. The standard of performance was up to average for a Binghamton student, despite the sample coming from students who had failed three or more subjects in the previous year.

This is a positive result, but it reminded me of a section in Ian Ayres’s book Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Ayres describes a method of teaching known as Direct Instruction, which is the form of teaching that George W Bush was watching when he was informed of the 9/11 attacks. Ayres writes:

Direct Instruction forces teachers to follow a script. The entire lesson – the instructions (“Put your finger under the first word.”), the questions (“What does that comma mean?”), and the prompts (“Go on.’) – is written out in the teacher?s instruction manual. …

Each student is called upon to give up to ten responses each minute. How can a single teacher pull this off? The trick is to keep a quick pace and to have the students answer in unison. The script asks the students to “get ready” to give their answers and then after a signal from the teacher, the class responds simultaneously. Every student is literally on call for just about every question.

Every time I read about Direct Instruction, I struggle to understand how it could work. It seems constrained. It puts everyone at the same pace. But it works. Ayres continues:

The result was Project Follow Through, an ambitious effort that studied 79,000 children in 180 low-income communities for twenty years at a price tag of more than $600 million. … Project Follow Through looked at the impact of seventeen different teaching methods, ranging from models like DI, where lesson plans are carefully scripted, to unstructured models where students themselves direct their learning by selecting what and how they will study. …

Direct Instruction won hands down. Education writer Richard Nadler summed it up this way: “When the testing was over, students in DI classrooms had placed first in reading, first in math, first in spelling, and first in language. No other model came close.” And DI’s dominance wasn’t just in basic skill acquisition. DI students could also more easily answer questions that required higher-order thinking.

Can evolutionary theory provide an explanation? I don’t know – but it does not matter from a policy perspective if one can’t be developed. This is because policy decisions such as teaching method do not need to be made though a non-repeatable top down decision. Instead, randomised controlled trials can be used to test all the teaching ideas, crazy or not, and see which delivers the best result. Evolutionary theory can be used to develop ideas to test, but it is the results that matter.

Even better, competition between schools can provide a basis by which teaching methods compete. Student and parent choice would drive outcomes. As a result, I am more interested in seeing competition between schools in the marketplace than having them consider what evolutionary strategy they should use to teach.

So, while Wilson’s work in Binghamton is impressive and his evolutionary approach improved outcomes, I don’t know if he has produced the best possible result. Competition and randomised controlled trials are the way to find out.

(And thanks to Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll for the reminder about Wilson’s post.)

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

If war would weed out only the criminal, the vicious, the feeble-minded, the insane, the habitual paupers, and others of the defective classes, it might lay claim, with some show of justice, to the beneficent virtues sometimes ascribed to it.

But the truth is that its effects are diametrically opposite. It eliminates the young men, who should be the fathers of the next generation – men medically selected as the largest, strongest, most alert, and best endowed in every way, and at the very age when they normally would be performing the most important function which men can perform, that of fathering posterity.

Their less endowed fellows, medically rejected from military service, because of defects in stature, eyesight, hearing, mentality, &c, are left at home to reproduce the race.

The result must be a tendency toward race degeneration, and that we may look forward to as a result of this great war. …

If Fisher had of known of the events of World War II and the systematic murder of Jews, he might have been more even horrified about the dysgenic effects of war. His feeling that war was decimating Europe while leaving the United States as the last remnant of civilization might have increased if he had of seen the flow of Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States (which I consider to be one of the most important boosts that the United States has ever received).

Would Fisher have considered modern wars dysgenic? I have seen estimates (not sure how accurate) that the average IQ of the United States military is slightly above 100. However, I expect that the troops most likely to be killed (i.e. not the officers or airforce) would likely be below that mark. Most wars are now fought in developing or unstable countries, which given Fisher’s views on race, he would have seen as more benign than a war decimating Europe.

So if modern wars were eugenic, would Fisher end his pacifism and wish for world-peace?

At the end of Caplan’s post, after asking some good questions that the interviewer should have asked Fisher (I would guess that Fisher would have been comfortable answering a couple of them), Caplan summaries as follows:

We’ve learned so much from human genetic research.  But when I read Fisher, I understand why the subject terrifies so many people.  Hereditarianism combined with inane, half-baked moral philosophy does indeed logically imply Nazi-style homicidal mania.  But don’t blame the facts of human genetics.  Blame the inane, half-baked moral philosophy.

What is the appropriate boundary when discussing genetics and policy? Take this footnote from Caplan’s Cato Unbound essay from earlier this year, in which Caplan gives a slightly eugenic flavour to his policy recommendation:

There is at least one major reason to think that natalist tax credits are better than simple estimates suggest. Quebec’s program paid baby bonuses to everyone. My proposal, in contrast, only rewards parents who actually pay taxes. Since income runs in families, the extra children born are especially likely to be net taxpayers.

Similarly, I have noted the effect of incarcerating violent males in their mating prime. Obviously, the observations of Caplan and myself are at opposite ends of the spectrum to Fisher’s interventionist approach. But at what point is it fair to note a eugenic or dysgenic effect? Or use them as a pillar of an argument?

Robin Hanson writes:

Zahavi’s seminal book on animal signaling tells how certain birds look high status by forcing food down the throat of other birds, who thereby seem low status. While this “altruism” does help low status birds survive, they rightly resent it, as their status loss outweighs their food gain.

In our society, “sympathy” by high status folks for low status folks usually functions similarly — it affirms their high status while giving little net benefit to the low status.

I would frame the babbler (the type of bird) example slightly differently. The babblers are not solely trying to appear high-status by dumping on low-status birds – status is determined through these activities by providing an accurate signal of their quality to their potential mates. Some of the relevant passages from Zahavi’s The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle are illustrative:

Not only are babblers, by all accounts, at least as altruistic as other group-breeding birds; close, detailed observation shows that babblers actually compete with one another for the “right” to be altruistic. Instead of expecting their partners to return tit for tat, they attempt to prevent them from doing their share. The theory of reciprocal altruism cannot explain why individuals compete for the chance to help other members of the group, let alone why they prevent others from helping in return. …

When there is a large difference in age between the feeder and the one being fed, the latter is sometimes eager to accept the food, and may even approach the feeder, making begging sounds. But in some 15 percent of cases, babblers try to avoid being fed by another bird. When a guard sees a higher-ranking comrade approaching it with food, to feed it and replace it on sentinel duty, it may sacrifice its guard post to avoid being fed. In other cases, the sentinel may close its beak tightly and refuse to accept the food being offered, even though it is hungry; it eagerly accepts a dry crumb of bread from us immediately after refusing a juicy insect from another babbler.

Sympathy of high-status people towards those of lower-status has little influence on their rank relative to those to whom they show sympathy. In the same way, derision of high-status people by low-status people does not change their relative pecking order. Sympathy might be a signal to obtain status, but the competition is not between the sympathiser and the recipient of their sympathy.

Conversely, the forcing of food and rejection of it by other babblers has a direct effect on rank in the eyes of the potential mate who receives the signal – for both the feeder and the bird that is fed. It is also likely to be a reliable signal. Giving food away is costly and can only be done by a babbler with the spare resources. Similarly, most birds accept the food, as rejecting it has a significant cost.

The giving and receipt of food by babblers is more akin to charity. Charitable giving is costly and a reliable signal of wealth. Competition to buy an artwork at a charity auction is similar to the competition between babblers to give food.

Of course, the charity auction example lacks the lower status person as an unwilling recipient. Examples with that feature might include insisting on paying a restaurant bill, or that someone accept $50 in a time of need. “I insist”. I expect there are many government interventions that also have this characteristic.

As a side note and following my recent post on biologists being important players in economics, I rate The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle as one of the best economics books.

Arnold Kling writes:

The story I tell for bimodalism is mating behavior. When high earners marry high earners, class divisions will emerge. But this has implications for the IQ distribution. One would expect bimodalism to appear in the IQ distribution, with the children of high-IQ parents tending centered around one mode and the children of low-IQ parents centered around another.

Kling’s expectation depends on our assumptions about the nature of the assortive mating.

Take an extreme example, where mating is perfectly assortive and everyone mates with someone of the same income and intelligence as themselves. If intelligence is perfectly heritable, their children’s intelligence will be the same. Intelligence in the next generation will only vary to the extent that people of different levels of intelligence have different levels of fertility. If there is no difference in fertility, the distribution of intelligence will be the same one generation to the next.

So how could we generate a bimodal distribution? One way would be if there is some threshold level of intelligence that acted as a barrier to mating. If, for example, those of below average intelligence only mated with people of below-average intelligence (although not necessarily the same intelligence as themselves), while those with above-average intelligence only mate with others in their group, the two populations’ intelligence will cluster around different means.

For this threshold to exist, there must be some non-linear returns to intelligence. There might be competition to live in certain suburbs or attend certain schools. Those that scrape into the high intelligence college get access to much larger rewards and access to significantly more intelligent mates than those that narrowly miss out.

As for what is actually occurring, I do not expect that the existing mating patterns in developed countries such as the United States will result in a bimodal distribution of intelligence. The focus on assortive mating masks the huge level of mixing that currently occurs. Consider the assortive mating that occurred as humans spread themselves across the globe and mated within their small bands. Populations were separated for millennia. Even in recent centuries, people largely mated within their small communities and class. Today’s population has a level of dynamism and mixture far beyond most of human history, regardless of what class divisions there now are.

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 the availability of convenient savings accounts to the establishment of social norms.

The incentives described by Garon are not those typically discussed by economists. Garon argues that economics has failed to explain cross-national differences in savings and that the life-cycle hypothesis of savings does poorly. Why are savings rates lower in the United States where there are few safety nets, and yet there are high savings rates in European countries with substantially more publicly funded social security?

Garon makes a convincing case that the availability of savings accounts is important, as he traces hundreds of years of savings behaviour. Despite stereotypes of high-saving East Asians and spendthrift Americans, Garon demonstrates how the form savings in each country and within countries varies with the institutional structure at the time and the availability of simple options to save.

The book has plenty of interesting historical fodder. The Japanese, United Kingdom and United States were particularly effective in extracting savings from their citizens when it was required, such as during war. The history of credit and the restrictions on access faced in many European countries was eye-opening for someone from a country (Australia) with very easy access.

I cannot offer a detailed analysis of whether Garon’s argument about savings accounts is countered by people saving in other ways, such as through the accumulation of financial assets or real-estate, and to what extent there are ethnic differences in savings rates (including within countries). Regardless, Garon’s picture of the economic approach to savings struck me as incomplete. Beyond the life-cycle approach, there are many other economic analyses of savings, particularly about the flip-side of savings – consumption. How is conspicuous consumption (saving’s wasteful corollary) or competition for positional goods relevant? Do they vary between countries? How might the forces described by Veblen, Frank and Miller be affecting savings rates?

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 substitute, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, is awarded once every four years, with the winner chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Academy also participates in deciding the Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Physics and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Trivers was awarded the Crafoord prize in 2007.

Looking down the list of earlier Crafoord prize winners, I was struck by how many of them were influential to me as an economist. How many of them could be, or should be, candidates for the economics Nobel prize?

While Edward O. Wilson won the prize for his work on island biogeography and species developing in isolation, his work in sociobiology and later application to humans should be a lynchpin of economic thinking. Bill Hamilton, were he still alive, could be considered for his work on altruism and kin selection. Robert Trivers might also be a worthy winner for his contributions in the area of cooperation. Robert May’s paper on the complex behaviour of simple systems is at the foundation of my understanding of complexity. The work of John Maynard Smith is peppered through any book on game theory (although he is also deceased).

Biology has not yet been adopted in economics to an extent that would make it likely that any of these candidates will receive the economics Nobel prize. However, as the award to Daniel Kahneman showed, the Nobel Committee is not averse to looking outside the narrow group labeled as economists.

In Freeman Dyson’s interesting review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dyson describes a couple of examples of the biases identified by Kahneman. One of them is as follows:

The endowment effect is our tendency to value an object more highly when we own it than when someone else owns it. …

In poor agrarian societies, such as Ireland in the nineteenth century or much of Africa today, the endowment effect works for evil because it perpetuates poverty. For the Irish landowner and the African village chief, possessions bring status and political power. They do not think like traders, because status and political power are more valuable than money. They will not trade their superior status for money, even when they are heavily in debt. The endowment effect keeps the peasants poor, and drives those of them who think like traders to emigrate.

Why would a landowner or chief give up their political power and status? There may be an endowment effect in that they value the power and status more when they have it, but if we think in evolutionary terms such as the desire for status and power, and the ability to attract mates, it would not be in the interest of any landowner or chief to step down.

This is typical of many uses of behavioural economics where the rationality underlying actions is skipped over in search of potential biases. The bigger picture is missed. People may use less electricity if they are provided real-time data on the use and price, but they will use far less if the price goes up. People eat burgers not because they don’t know they are full of calories, but because they taste good and are cheap. While there is potential for a small behavioural error or bias, the focus on the error masks the fundamentally rational action. And many times a bias is identified when the problem is that we don’t understand what the person’s objective is.

As an aside, earlier in the article, Dyson does hit on one of my favourite factoids:

A striking example of availability bias is the fact that sharks save the lives of swimmers. Careful analysis of deaths in the ocean near San Diego shows that on average, the death of each swimmer killed by a shark saves the lives of ten others. Every time a swimmer is killed, the number of deaths by drowning goes down for a few years and then returns to the normal level. The effect occurs because reports of death by shark attack are remembered more vividly than reports of drownings.

As for last year, this year’s top book list comprises the best books I have read this year. I haven’t read enough books published in 2011 to be able to apply a decent filter, plus there are many books out there that we should not forget. In no particular order:

Flatland: a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott – Clever, fun satire

Sex, Genes & Rock ‘N’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World by Rob Brooks – While the book is generally a fun read, it makes this list for two specific parts: the discussions of sexual conflict in the context of population and on obesity (my discussion of the obesity chapter).

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – One of the classics that lives up to its reputation.

Spent: Sex, Evolution and Behavior by Geoffrey Miller – Miller’s analysis of consumer culture under the lens of evolution is the sharpest I have read – and the most fun.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert Frank – While the main point in this book could have been presented as an essay and I disagree with many of the applications, the central concept that competition is not always for the common good, as we can see in evolution, is important.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama – Fukuyama’s use of kin selection as the foundation to his analysis gives this book a solid foundation lacking from most grand histories (some earlier comments).

Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen – This book was hard to read and at times inconsistent, but it is clear why it is one of those important books for economists to read.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo – Although these books are in no particular order, I am going to suggest that this is probably the best. It had me thinking like few others (my review and a later musing).

There are a few books not on this list that were released this year and I have have high hopes for – Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Triver’s The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. They are not in the list as I have not read them yet, but as they are in my summer reading pile, reviews will be coming soon.

Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil focuses on a message that the situation is more important than the person’s disposition. Good people can do evil things if placed in the wrong situation.

One of my main responses to this message was that the disposition of other people forms part of my situation. Disposition and situation cannot be neatly disentangled.

This is similar to the case of IQ and income. As noted by Garett Jones, boost the IQ of a person by two standard deviations and you get an average 30 per cent increase in their wage. Boosting the average IQ of a country’s population by two standard deviations leads to a prediction of a 700 per cent increase in average wages. By this measure, the situation, which is the IQ of the people of the country in which you live, is more important than your own IQ.

Taking this further, the pay-off to being patient, saving and investing is contingent on the propensity towards violence of those around you. It is contingent on the foresight of those who borrow and invest your savings. It is contingent on the intelligence of the voters and politicians who create the institutional framework that affects the rewards from your work and savings.

There are some massive externalities to the behaviour of other people.