There is a strong correlation – and causation – between IQ and national wealth. At times there are outliers, such as China (although it is rapidly losing its outlier status). This might be evidence that policy, despite being affected by national IQ, can be an important force in determining national wealth at a point.

In the discussion about the global financial crisis and its continuing permutations, most of the focus is on policy. Given the difficulty in changing mean national IQ, this is reasonable. But how does IQ operate as an underlying factor during the crisis? On average, can we expect the higher IQ nations to develop better policy responses? As this crisis plays out, does national wealth becomes more or less correlated with IQ?

The trigger for this question was a comment in the in the footnotes of Nigel Barber’s article on uncertainty and religious belief (which I blogged on recently):

The reviewer claimed that Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) had very clearly demonstrated that economic development is a consequence of average intelligence. Yet these are correlational data and cannot be used to establish a causal relationship. Lynn and Vanhanen are merely arguing that IQ causes economic development. Their perspective cannot accommodate the fact that Ireland was briefly one of the wealthiest countries of Europe or that African economies are currently growing faster than the United States despite relatively lower IQ scores in each case.

I presume Barber is referring to the often reported mean Irish IQ of approximately 93, the lowest in Western Europe. “Briefly” might the key word. Are we now seeing an outlier return to a level of national income closer to that predicted by national IQ? While certain Irish government policies created an economic boom, the financial crisis exposed the lack of foundation to that growth. Further, the policy decisions during the crisis now underlie much of the Irish government debt problem.

More generally, does a crisis of the type playing out push national income closer to what might be predicted from national IQ? Does higher trust between high-IQ people cushion the shock? Do high-IQ populations support better policy decisions in the crunch? Are bubbles of the type that propelled Ireland to the top of the wealth list exposed? There will be exceptions and it may not hold in the very short-term during moments of panic or gross uncertainty, but my instinct is that on average this crisis will reduce the aberrations, particularly for those countries achieving national income above what their national IQ might suggest.

Once the crisis washes through, this argument should be testable (noting that my Irish example is a single anecdotal piece of evidence). This is something to mark down as a future project.

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

We think these results have important implications. They show that overweight and obesity were already common among women who had never smoked in this population more than 35 years ago, its true extent concealed by the high smoking rates in the population as a whole. They suggest the decline in smoking rates in recent decades may have contributed to the increase in overweight and obesity. Although lifelong smoking is clearly responsible for much higher mortality rates, obesity, and especially severe obesity, is an important contributor to premature mortality.

To what extent is smoking used by low-status women to stay thin? Beyond the health question, it would be interesting to explore some other trade-offs. Does smoking or obesity have the greater effect on fertility – both in terms of likelihood of attracting a partner and the physiological effects? And what of satisfaction with or quality of life?

While the authors are clear that smoking is a larger contributor to mortality than obesity, studies like this are a sound reminder that policy decisions are full of trade-offs and unintended consequences.

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

The female, on the other hand, with the rarest exceptions, is less eager than the male. As the illustrious Hunter … long ago observed, she generally “requires to be courted;” she is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape from the male. … Or she may accept, as appearances would sometimes lead us to believe, not the male which is the most attractive to her, but the one which is the least distasteful. The exertion of some choice on the part of the female seems a law almost as general as the eagerness of the male.

From The Economist’s Free Exchange:

Economists often argue that polygamy … benefits women because it enhances their market power. That’s because it means more marriageable men for every women. …

But once a woman enters into a polygamous arrangement, it seems she’d have less power. Bargaining power in a household is often based on who contributes what to household production and utility. Each person provides certain services and resources to make the household function and this keeps the marriage balanced. But the power structure is different when you have one man and several women. The marginal value each woman can uniquely provide diminishes the more women that are added to the family. …

You might argue that a woman retains some power because she can leave marriage and find someone else. After all, she has exceptional market power in the dating market. But terminating a marriage is costly, especially if the woman has children and is dependent on the man financially (and has no legal recognition). … Under these circumstances her market value declines as she ages.

I find the argument about declining power unconvincing. It appears to be an argument based on irrationality of the woman. These potential costs are not hidden and as for other marriages in liberal democracies, the woman can enter the marriage when and on the terms she sees fit. Yes, power may relatively decline, but that is part of the consideration of whether to marry. If there are any restrictions on her bargaining power, they are often in the form of state regulation of marriage and restrictions on pre-nuptial agreements. If polygamy was legal, a term of the marriage contract could concern other or potential wives.

There is another argument against polygamy that I find more convincing. In a polygamous society, there is an increase in the number of low-status men who will be unable to find a partner. Evolutionary theory would predict that those men are going to take whatever actions necessary to gain access to mates. In a June opinion piece, evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks wrote of the similar problem of excessive men due to sex selection:

In many animal species, when males overabound, they often compete so fiercely to court, win and even coerce the few available females into mating that everybody suffers. The same is true when the supply of men on the marriage market exceeds the demand from females.

In Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer argue that violent crime, gambling, drugs and the kidnapping and trafficking of women are rampant in places where there are too many men.

In his book Sex, Genes and Rock & Roll, Brooks addresses polygamy more directly:

The first possibility is that legal polygyny is incompatible with mature democracy. More than a century ago, George Bernard Shaw observed that ‘Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality’. He had the then-recent Mormon experience in mind when he observed that ‘Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions…is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it’. Late in the twentieth century, biologists picked up on this idea. Richard Alexander argued that it becomes ever more difficult for wealthy polygynous leaders to retain the political support of lower-status men when those men cannot marry and reproduce.

Polygyny is, in the long term, incompatible with a smooth-functioning democracy because it promotes the deepest evolutionary interests of the wealthiest and most powerful men at the expense of all other men and all women. Despotic and bloody rule allowed kings and emperors of old to amass phenomenal wealth, marry prolifically and keep harems. But wherever circumstances have made it more difficult for despots to rule, the elites found it easier to gain the loyalty and support of their subjects if those subjects had the stake in society that marriage and family brings, and if the elites were themselves visibly monogamous. Most of the countries where polygyny remains legal are countries where democratic governance, if it is present at all, has only recently superseded dictatorship or monarchy. We can predict that in those countries where democracy matures, the state will cease to sanction polygyny.

In some ways, there is already some monopolisation of females by high-status men through serial marriages and mistresses. Many low-status men are unable to obtain a partner regardless of the legality of polygamy. However, policies that increase that tendency can lead to trouble. Mating is not a zero-sum game, and this is one area where, despite leaning towards the legalisation of polygamy (or more precisely, the exit of the state from regulation of marriage), I would be watching what occurs very closely.

If we ran that experiment, my gut instinct is that in developed nations, legalised polygamy would see limited occurrence of multiple wives (or husbands) and would hardly change the probability of most men finding partners. How many men do you know that could hold two wives?

From Dan Ariely:

Last year, the Danish government announced that sterilization, which had been free, would cost at least 7,000 kroner (~$1,300) for men and 13,000 kroner (~$2,500) for women as of January 1^st, 2011. Following the announcement, doctors performing sterilizations found that their patient load suddenly surged. People were scrambling to get sterilized while it was still free.

Now, it could be that the people who were already planning on getting sterilized at some point in the future just made their appointments a bit sooner, and conveniently saved some money.  But I can also imagine that (much like our research on free tattoos) there were many people who did not really think much about sterilization before the price change, but were so averse to giving up such a good deal that it pushed them to take the offer and undergo a fairly serious procedure.

Traits that lead people to voluntarily cut their fertility should reduce in prevalence in the long-term, and this is an interesting (but small) acceleration.

For those that consider that people (and their capacity to create and invent) are the ultimate resource and that each person generates, on average, positive social welfare, this policy would have benefits in more than one dimension. An important question, however, is whether the average characteristics of those that undergo the now expensive sterilisation differ from those who underwent the procedure before. Is sterilisation in Denmark now the domain of the well-off?

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 more interesting expositions that what is good for the individual (or more specifically, the gene) may not be good for the species. It also raises the implicit question of how quickly something can return to equilibrium.

First, take Fisher’s argument for the equality of sex ratios, as stated by Hamilton:

1) Suppose male births are less common than female.
2) A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female, and therefore can expect to have more offspring.
3) Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.
4) Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread, and male births become commoner.
5) As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.
6) The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males through out. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio.

All well and good. Then Hamilton frames the following situation (remembering that for humans, men have an X and a Y chromosome, while women have two X chromosomes):

Suppose the Y chromosome has mutated in a way which causes it always to win in the race to fertilize. A male with the Y mutant then produces nothing but sons. Provided these sons, who also carry the mutant, cannot be in any way discriminated against in the unrestricted competition for mates (a situation which is implied if mating is random for the whole population), the Y mutant will have a constant selective advantage. As the mutant spreads, the population sex ratio will become more and more male-biased and the population itself will become smaller and smaller; finally the population will be extinguished, after the last female has chanced to mate with a male carrying the mutant.

Starting from a population of 1,000 with one mutant male, it takes only 15 generations to drive the expected number of females below one. A similar situation can arise with an X-linked mutation, although the path to all females and species extinction is slower.

While this is a theoretical example and rests on the assumption that there is no discrimination against the mutant males or females, there are a few real-world cases of the X-linked drive to all females. At the time of Hamilton’s paper (I’m not sure if this has changed) only one case of the Y-linked drive was known. In that case, a mosquito has a sex-determining gene (not a whole chromosome) but the path to all males has been restrained by several other genes.

That brings me to the economics. Fisher’s basic principle, which is the best starting point for discussions of sex ratios, sounds much like a neo-classical economic description of the world. If things tend away from equilibrium, there is a clear strategy that can be exploited – and we would expect it to exploited – that will return the system to equilibrium. However, when someone plays a novel, fast acting strategy, things can move quickly. The question is whether the responding strategy is played immediately or may take some time. In the above case of the mosquito, restraining mutations have occurred, preventing extinction.

Some evolutionary or neo-Schumpeterian economics seeks to deal with this, particularly in the form put forward by Nelson and Winter. Firms search for technological and organisational solutions based on habitual methods and those which succeed in finding them replicate and spread. The process is not immediate and can be lumpy and crude. Arnold Kling, with his patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade (PSST), also notes that time is an important consideration. Take the following:

It is the task of entrepreneurs to organize the economy so that people produce stuff that has value. Sometimes, entrepreneurs are not quite up to that task. Then you get unemployment. There is an incentive for entrepreneurs to try to figure out ways to create patterns of sustainable specialization and trade that utilize workers who are currently unemployed.

The system gets a bump. How long does it then take for a strategy to be developed that deals with it?

Andrew Gelman makes the following observation:

Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

….

Economists are different from everybody else, because . . . economists “assume everyone is fundamentally alike”! But if everyone is fundamentally alike, how is it that economists are different “from almost anyone else in society”?

Gelman notes that it is OK to argue one or the other, just not at the same time. The difficulty is how to distinguish the proper argument for a particular case. There is a degree of arbitrariness in the choice.

In my pop economics moments, I tend to use a mix of the two – people are boundedly rational, but no-one, be that government, economists or me are likely to be able to make them more efficient and rational than they already are. An economist or government might be able to give them more information than they already have, but we’re less likely than them to know what they should do with it.

Then there is the pop-evolutionary approach. You could consider there to be two similar arguments:

1. People are the product of evolutionary processes, act to maximise their fitness and rationally do so.

2. People are not adapted to modern environments, but rather to our ancestral environment of the Pleistocene. As a result, people irrationally take actions that reduce their fitness.

It is somewhat easier (though not always so) to decide between these two alternatives as there is a clear objective against which the person’s actions can be assessed – maximising fitness. In the rationality case for the economists, it is not always clear what the objective is.

A paper that is getting some attention at the moment is a critique of evolutionary psychology by Bolhuis and colleagues, titled Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. They critique a number of tenets of the “Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology”, including the notion that human psychological mechanisms evolved in response to stable ancestral environments or that there is a universal human nature.

As there has been some commentary on the general point of the article by some other bloggers (check out John Hawks or Razib at Gene Expression), I won’t spend much time questioning the accuracy of the critique or the lack of concrete suggestions by Bolhuis and colleagues. However, the article does have some interesting points on the speed of human evolution.

Bolhuis and colleagues argue that evolution can occur rapidly. They refer to one study which suggests that a trait can shift by one standard deviation within 25 generations (which I am going to have to read):

Evolutionary biologists have also measured the rate of response to selection in a wide variety of animals, finding that evolutionary change typically occurs much faster than hitherto thought. A recent meta-analysis of 63 studies that measured the strength of natural selection in 62 species, including more than 2,500 estimates of selection, concluded that the median selection gradient (a measure of the rate of change of fitness with trait value) was 0.16, which would cause a quantitative trait to change by one standard deviation in just 25 generations. If humans exhibit equivalent rates, then significant genetic evolution would occur over the course of a few hundred years.

Rapid evolution provides the basis for genetic variation between populations, and Bolhuis and colleagues suggest that the brain in particular has been subject to rapid change.

While variation within populations accounts for the bulk of human genetic variation, around 5%–7% of genetic differences can be attributed to variation between populations. Some of the significant genetic differences between human populations have arisen from recent selective events. Gene-culture coevolution may well turn out to be the characteristic pattern of evolutionary change in humans over recent time spans. From this perspective, cultural practices are likely to have influenced selection pressures on the human brain, raising the possibility that genetic variation could lead to biases in the human cognitive processing between, as well as within, populations. In summary, there is no uniform human genetic program.

….

[H]uman dispersal and subsequent exposure to novel climates, aggregation and exposure to new pathogens, and farming and exposure to new diets are now widely thought to be the source of selection for the spread of many human alleles. Amongst the overrepresented categories in genome-wide scans of recent selection are numerous alleles expressed in the human nervous system and brain. This raises the possibility that complex cognition on which culture is reliant (social intelligence, language, and challenges associated with constructing and adapting to new environmental conditions) have driven human brain evolution. … Gene-culture dynamics are typically faster and stronger and operate over a broader range of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics.

While this argument for strong recent selection places the claim that humans have a universal nature in some context, it does not appear fatal to the general concept that many of our characteristics are likely to be common through our common ancestors. However, I do like the consideration of variation, and there is another dimension where it is important and often overlooked. That dimensions is whether, within a single population, did diverse traits co-evolve and now co-exist? The example that always comes to my mind is that of the sneaky dung beetles. While some are following an alpha male strategy of growing large and guarding their females, others are sneaking in from the back with their large testicles and long sperm. Similar strategies are found in some species of deer, crickets, cuttlefish and so on. To understand the adaptive benefit of one particular strategy, there should be recognition of the suite of strategies in which it sits. Sometimes those strategies are part of the variation that selection will erase. At other times, that variation might be the equilibrium point, with the success of any individual tied to the presence of others with different traits.

Rob Brooks has posted an article (also published in The Conversation) outlining his argument that the relatively cheap price of carbohydrates compared to the price of protein is driving the obesity crisis. Drawing on material from his book Sex, Genes and Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World, Rob argues that as our recent evolutionary history involved a diet of lean meat and high fibre plant foods, modern humans are poorly evolved for the cheap simple carbohydrates that dominate many modern diets.

I have considered Rob’s arguments and policy suggestions in an earlier post, but there is one element in Rob’s post that I would like to discuss. At the end of his post, he writes:

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, infuriated civil liberties groups and the sugar and soda lobbies last October when he asked the US Department of Agriculture to allow New York City to ban the 1.7 million citizens who receive food stamps from using them to buy soda.

Those Americans poor enough to receive food stamps are precisely the people most at risk of obesity: people with enough access to food that they do not starve, but not enough money to eat a healthy diet with plenty of protein.

So did Mayor Bloomberg have the right idea? Should we tell people what they can and can’t eat or drink? Libertarians love to tell us that we have a choice, and that nobody is forced to overeat.

Despite describing myself as having libertarian leanings, I don’t think this is a bad idea. Bloomberg is not telling people what to eat or drink. If the food stamp users wish to consume sugary products using their own resources, they are free to do so. Similarly, they cannot buy cigarettes with food stamps, but they are still free to smoke.

I usually extend this idea across any provision of government services. While I would often prefer that they were not provided to begin with, placing conditions on access is not restricting liberty as long as the option to take action as a private citizen remains. If the conditions become tight enough, the government service disappears altogether (not that I am arguing that is what should be done with food stamps).

So, controlling use of food stamps among a group most vulnerable to obesity might be a good place to start. However, what I would like to see are some random trials of controlling food stamp expenditure. While state by state comparisons will produce some useful evidence, a random trial would give some evidential meat to the argument that restricting access to sugar will work in practice.

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 worth noting. In particular, he takes biology to be the foundation of our understanding of political development.

To understand this, then, we need to go back to the state of nature and to human biology, which in some sense sets the framework for the whole of human politics. Biology presents a certain degree of solid ground resting below the turtles at the bottom of the stack, though even biology, as we will see in the next chapter, is not an entirely fixed point.

…

This knowledge exists in several distinct domains, including primatology, population genetics, archaeology, social anthropology, and, of course, the overarching framework of evolutionary biology. … The recovery of human nature by modern biology, in any case, is extremely important as a foundation for any theory of political development, because it provides us with the basic building blocks by which we can understand the later evolution of human institutions.

While Fukuyama starts with the biological basis, he adopts a Jared Diamond-esque approach to differences in political development:

Biology gives us the building blocks of political development. Human nature is largely constant across different societies. The huge variance in political forms that we see both at the present time and over the course of history is in the first instance the product of variance in the physical environments that human beings came to inhabit. As societies ramify and fill different environmental niches across the globe, they develop distinctive norms and ideas in a process known as specific evolution. Groups of humans also interact with each other, and this interaction is as much a driver of change as is the physical environment.

As I have posted about before, I am not averse to a Jared Diamond style argument for developmental differences being triggered by environmental variation. However, this is not to say that human nature is from that point static.

Fukuyama’s analysis of the basis of the philosophies of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke is also interesting. By acknowledging that humans are social and competitive animals, their philosophical positions can be argued to have a very weak foundation. Fukuyama writes:

Human beings and chimpanzees were both descended from an ancestral ape, and both modern chimpanzees and human beings, especially those living in hunter-gatherer or other relatively primitive societies, display similar forms of social behavior. For the account of the state of nature given by Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau to be correct, we would have to postulate that in the course of evolving into modern humans, our ape ancestors somehow momentarily lost their social behaviors and emotions, and then evolved them a second time at a somewhat later stage in development. It is much more plausible to assume that human beings never existed as isolated individuals, and that social bonding into kin-based groups was part of their behavior from before the time that modern humans existed. Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.