Nigel Barber of The Daily Beast (Psychology Today) has posted on a forthcoming article in which he shows that the level of atheism increases with the quality of life. Barber explains the trend as follows:

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific belief.

Barber pulls out some interesting evidence in support of his claim. For example, he argues in the article that superstition increases in the face of uncertainty:

Gmelch (1974) found that different positions in baseball evoke varying levels of superstitious behavior: When players fielded they were less superstitious than when batting or pitching, and this difference was attributed to the fact that fielding errors are rare whereas even good batters miss the ball more often than they hit it. Recently Burger and Lynn (2005) supported the uncertainty hypothesis by finding that major league baseball players engaged in more superstitious behavior the more that they believed the outcome was determined by luck. Interestingly, men and women become more religious when they view pictures of attractive same-sex mating competitors, another possible case of uncertain outcomes (Li, Cohen, Weeden, & Kenrick, 2010).

This is one of those articles where I am happy to agree with the results. However, on Barber’s longer term prediction of increasing atheism as developing countries develop, Barber did not discuss the higher fertility of those with religion and the heritability of religious belief.

Take the United States. Religiosity has undergone significant long-term decline, consistent with Barber’s findings. However, among the remaining religious people in the population, fertility rates are higher. With religiosity heritable, it is open to ask which dynamic will win in the long-term – the decline due to higher quality of life or the higher fertility of those who maintain religious beliefs despite the increase in quality of life. As the security dynamic has largely played out in most people’s lives in developed countries, my money is on the latter.

One way of putting this might be to consider the increase in quality of life as a shock. Some people respond to this shock by dropping their religious belief. As they form the majority of the population, the rate of religious belief initially drops. However, those who are immune to the shock maintain their religious belief. As those with religious belief have higher fertility, they eventually come to form the larger proportion of the population – as Rowthorn suggested in a paper I previously posted about.

From this, we would support Barber’s prediction that as the quality of life in developing countries increases, religiosity might decrease. In developed countries however, the trend will start to head the other way.

As a final thought, Barber finds higher levels of atheism where there is less income inequality and higher taxation rates. While Barber also puts this down to the security hypothesis, I wonder how much of this can be attributed to state involvement in religion. In European countries with high taxation rates, the church is often state sponsored, with limited competition between religious offerings. In such an environment, it is no surprise that there are not more takers for the moribund religious alternatives.

Another piece from the vault, this time A Farewell to Alms author Gregory Clark in an interview with Phillip Adams:

Jared Diamond in his famous text actually has has a throw away reference to this, where he speculates that New Guinea tribesmen are actually much smarter than Europeans because New Guinea tribesmen live by their wits, whereas Europeans it was their gut bacteria that determined whether they survived or not. And I actually knew that cities in Europe had very poor survival rates, that that’s where the educated people were, and I expected going into this to show that we were all, the current Europeans, were the remnants of rural idiocy.

Clark’s subsequent findings of the higher fertility of the rich and his association of this with the Industrial Revolution make this a relatively rare example in economics where someone can say that the evidence changed their mind.

Clark also makes some interesting comments on how he approached the genetic question in the book:

I must admit that when I wrote the book I was a little hesitant and so I talked about cultural or genetic link. That led to a firestorm of criticism and it led me to actually examine that proposition more carefully and I’ve actually come to realise that I was being too hesitant. There’s absolutely a genetic link. We absolutely have changed genetically over this pre-industrial period.

Finally, Clark on human ecology and the policy implications (which has some relevance to my earlier post):

There may be some groups that do face a disadvantage in operating in a capitalist economy, that their ecology is just not that of modern capitalism. But what I would argue is that might help us have some more understanding of why, these groups are not just being resistant or indolent. That really we have to understand that people have their own ecology and that these things are very hard to change suddenly.

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). The abstract is as follows:

A recent line of research demonstrates that cognitive skills—intelligence quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is yes. It presents four different channels through which intelligence may matter more for nations than for individuals: (i) intelligence is associated with patience and hence higher savings rates; (ii) intelligence causes cooperation; (iii) higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high-value production technologies; and (iv) intelligence is associated with supporting market-oriented policies. Abundant evidence from across ADB member countries demonstrates that environmental improvements can raise cognitive skills is reviewed.

The article deals nicely with many of the standard objections to the argument that IQ is relevant to national income, including whether IQ tests measure anything meaningful, cultural bias and the direction of causation.

In relation to the four channels suggested by Jones, I generally take the first two as given. I am unsure of the importance of the fourth as a direct causative factor, although I do not doubt there is a correlation and support for these policies through self-interest. The channel that I find most interesting at the moment is channel (iii), which is based on Michael Kremer’s paper The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development and Jones’s later paper The O-Ring Sector and the Foolproof Sector: An explanation for cross-country income differences (pdf). If production is conducted through a series of steps, with IQ associated with the rate of error at each stage, small changes in IQ can be responsible for significant differences in productivity.

I’ll post on Kremer’s and Jones’s papers in the future, but I appreciate this deeper examination of how IQ affects productivity and economic growth. While the correlation between IQ and national income is clear and the case for causation strong, an understanding of the reasons for the causation is important for policy. For example, the O-Ring theory suggests there will be significant issues with attempting to promote high-IQ country production processes in a low-IQ country.

Policy would also be enlightened by an understanding of how the distribution of IQ in a population is relevant. Do two populations with identical mean IQ but different distributions have different levels of productivity? Can a small proportion of the population with very high IQ carry a large base of low-IQ people? The O-Ring theory would suggest that this is difficult as the human resources available create problems in the production processes. Conversely, a theory based on the productivity and creativity of an elite that can effectively use the low-IQ human resources available might suggest that such a distribution could be productive.

Moving beyond IQ, this deeper analysis is relevant for traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness. What proportion of low conscientiousness people would undermine the general existence of trust is a society? What prevalence of psychopaths or violent people can undermine the trust created by a high-IQ population?

**As a side note, I am finally off the road and back in Perth. Posting will be more regular than it has been over the last few weeks on the road. However, as my return to Perth means a resumption of my day job, I’ll probably be posting around three times a week compared to the four or five posts per week I was writing in Zurich.

Yesterday I visited Down House, Charles Darwin’s home from 1842 until his death in 1882. Darwin wrote most of his major works there. The house contained a lot of interesting artefacts and bits of information, but one of the more interesting was a copy of Das Kapital sent from Karl Marx to Darwin. Inscribed inside the book was:

Mr. Charles Darwin
On the part of his sincere admirer
Karl Marx
London 16 June 1873
Modena Villas
Maitland Park

Seeing this, I did a quick search to find out the extent to which Marx was in contact with and influenced by Darwin (having not yet read Das Kapital) and it seems that there is a history of storytelling and exaggeration around it. One now debunked myth was that Marx proposed dedicating Das Kapital to Darwin but that Darwin declined. The story was later found to be based on mixed up letters. However, in the German version of Das Kapital was the dedication “In deep appreciation – for Charles Darwin”.

More broadly, Marx has indicated some interest in Darwin’s work. In one letter, Marx wrote that:

Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.

The flow of ideas, however, was slightly lop-sided. On receipt of the book from Marx, Darwin responded:

Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin

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 Davos. In criticising the pessimism, Lewis writes:

But the most striking thing about the growing derivatives markets is the stability that has come with them. More than eight years ago, after Long-Term Capital Management blew up and lost a few billion dollars, the Federal Reserve had to be wheeled in to save capitalism as we know it.

Last year Amaranth Advisors blew up, lost more than LTCM, and the financial markets hardly batted an eyelash. “The financial markets in 2007,” some member of the global economic elite might have said but didn’t, “are astonishingly robust. They seem to be working out how to absorb and distribute risk more intelligently than any member of the global economic elite could on his own.”

Apart from how wrong this statement was shown to be, what scares me about it is how willingly I would have signed my name to a similar article. I am lucky I was not a financial blogger at the time. However, how many of my blog posts will I look at in five years and wonder what I was thinking? I am relatively confident that I won’t have anything as striking as the example above, as I tend to make less dramatic predictions and they are likely to be borne out over longer periods. However, that is no certainty.

The other interesting element of the article is Lewis’s closing remarks:

And if they really believe the markets mispriced risk, or were about to adjust, they must also believe they could make vast sums of money if they quit their day jobs and opened a hedge fund to take the other side of stupid trades. But they don’t really believe that, or at least some of them would be off doing it, rather than spilling the beans to Bloomberg News.

Despite being wrong, I still believe that Lewis was fair to call the doom-sayers’ bluff. Most of the doom-sayers did not make their billions (despite some notable examples such as those catalogued by Lewis in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine). How many of them believed they were right to the extent that they were willing to put their money on the line rather than taking the relatively safe bet that the media will forget about them if they are wrong? It is another advantage to betting on opinions. After the fact, you can separate those who believed what they were saying from those who may have been seeking to get in front of the cameras and happened to luck into the correct side of the debate.

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 economists can learn from evolutionary theorists):

Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about – not just the answers, but even the questions – are consistently misleading.

While this statement is usually quoted in reference to Gould, it is also a blunt assessment of John Kenneth Galbraith’s work. I have not read much Galbraith, despite having The Affluent Society on my reading list for a while, so I am not in a position to judge Krugman’s comparison. However, I recently came across an article written by Galbraith in which he considered the invisible hand metaphor from the perspective of Darwinism. He stated that belief in the invisible hand was like belief in intelligent design, under which evolution is guided by an intelligent designer and is not the result of unguided natural selection. Galbraith writes:

Smith’s Creator did not interfere. He simply wrote the laws and left them for events to demonstrate and man to discover. The greatest American economist, Thorstein Veblen, observed that “the guidance of…the invisible hand takes place…through a comprehensive scheme of contrivances established from the beginning.” What is this if not Intelligent Design?

But to Veblen this was, precisely, unscientific. And so he made a mighty effort back in 1898 to move economics into the Darwinian age. In a magnificent essay entitled “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Veblen pointed out the problems of classical economics: too much preoccupied with classification schemes and higher purposes, too little with material process and “cumulative or unfolding sequence.” Economics could become a science, but only if it detached itself from the idea that change intrinsically led to improvement.

It is an interesting comparison but  Galbraith has lined up the wrong target. He is right that evolution provides a critique of the interpretation of the invisible hand that voluntary interactions between people always result in the optimal social outcome. While voluntary exchange is beneficial for the individual participants, evolution shows us that there is no mechanism to make sure societal benefit is maximised – there is no intelligent designer. With wasteful signalling, winner takes all contests and the potential for sub-optimal equilibria, an emergent economy might be full of waste and inefficient competition.

However, Smith did not state that emergent outcomes were always positive and he recognised a score of ways in which market interactions could lead to sub-optimal outcomes. The invisible hand is an excellent metaphor for the emergent phenomena whereby “selfish” actions by individuals lead to outcomes that they do not intend. They are generally welfare enhancing (which is one reason I lean libertarian) but not necessarily so. Instead of criticizing the invisible hand metaphor, Galbraith should have used the intelligent design comparison to argue that there is no mechanism to make sure that emergent economic outcomes are positive. (Of course, this does not mean government should step in – you still need to show that government can fix the problem without creating other worse problems.)

In attacking neo-classical economics, Galbraith also raises the important issue of variation:

Economists still don’t understand variation; instead they write maddeningly about “representative agents” and “rational economic man.” They still teach the “marginal product theory of wages,” which excuses every gross inequality faced by the laboring poor. Alan Greenspan even recently resurrected the idea of a “natural rate of interest” to justify raising rates, though that doctrine had been extinct for 70 years. Economists still ignore the diversity of actual economic and social life.

Ignoring the specific examples that Galbraith has used (I don’t understand how they line up with his points), natural selection operates on variation. If every firm or agent is the same, you cannot have firm failure or creative destruction. There cannot be comparative advantage and the benefits of specialisation are diminished. Outside of evolutionary economics, few economic models try to capture this. Despite having some trouble getting to grips with Arnold Kling’s “patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade” (I’m still short on details, and am not convinced by many of his examples), I appreciate how it introduces the ideas of variation, exploration and failure. Entrepreneurs vary in their ideas and how they search for them.

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 the fifth post Wilson has pointed to an interesting exchange in Edge between his cousin Timothy Wilson and Steven Pinker. Timothy Wilson starts with an examination of the state of social psychology, and then turns to the role that evolutionary psychology can play:

There are some striking parallels between psychoanalytic theory and evolutionary theory. Both theories, at some general level are true. Evolutionary theory, of course, shows how the forces of natural selection operated on human beings. Psychoanalytic theory argues that our childhood experiences mold us in certain ways and give us outlooks on the world. … But both theories led to a lot of absurd conclusions, and both are very hard to test rigorously. …  Evolutionary theory … can explain virtually anything. It can be a useful heuristic, as I mentioned. But at the same time, I think it is way too broad.

To make his point, Wilson creates an adaptive explanation of why blood is red. Pinker swats it away like the fly it is – drawing on the chemistry and physics, the non-adaptive explanations for red blood are known. Pinker also suggests a range of empirical tests of Wilson’s faux claim.

In further defence of evolutionary psychology, Pinker argues that evolutionary psychology has been successful and, in particular, uses empirical evidence:

In a 2003 Psychological Bulletin article, David Buss listed fifty novel predictions about social behavior derived from evolutionary theory, most of which had been supported at the time by empirical tests. Entire fields of social-psychological research—on violence, love, beauty, motherhood, religion, sexual desire, parent-offspring conflict, dominance, status, self-conscious emotions, and yes, sex differences (which everyone in the world but Wilson thinks is an important phenomenon)—have been driven by tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Many other evolutionary hypotheses—the nepotism theory of homosexuality, for example, and the Trivers-Willard hypothesis applied to female infanticide—have been empirically falsified as well, leaving the phenomena in question unexplained. It’s simply not true that evolutionary hypotheses that make correct empirical predictions can “explain anything.”

Having defended his turf, Pinker then lines up social psychology:

Why doesn’t social psychology get more respect? I readily agree that social psychology, not least Wilson’s own research, has made profound discoveries, which deserve a greater place in policy and personal recommendations. But the field has been self-handicapped with a relentless insistence on theoretical shallowness: on endless demonstrations that People are Really Bad at X, which are then “explained” by an ever-lengthening list of Biases, Fallacies, Illusions, Neglects, Blindnesses, and Fundamental Errors, each of which restates the finding that people are really bad at X.

When you make broad statements such as this to experts in the field, you are almost assured of getting counter-examples – and Wilson and some other participants in the discussion give just that. However, Pinker keeps asking why, why, why. There is a limit to the generality of an explanation if it ignores, in the case of social psychology, the biological underpinnings. Pinker describes this issue nicely:

A satisfying explanation invokes principles that are fewer in number, more general, earlier in the causal chain, and closer to irreducible physical and mathematical laws than the ones that immediately fit the data in question. And that will almost always take one outside the boundaries of one’s academic specialty. In the case of social psychology, any explanation must ultimately invoke a conception of what our social emotions and reasoning processes are for.

Reading this, I kept thinking how similar Pinker’s description of social psychology is to my perception of behavioural and experimental economics. Behavioural economists have generated a mass of biases, illusions and heuristics but lack a framework to put them together. It is reflected in wikipedia pages like this. Claiming that there is no framework at all is overreach, in the same way that Pinker’s generalisation may have missed some specific examples, but as a general critique it holds. Each time a new paper comes out that finds a bias or heuristic, I generally don’t read beyond the abstract. There are so many of them that it is hard to know if it matters. Further, if there was a framework, we would probably discover that many of the biases are versions of the same feature. We’d end up with a much smaller list.

Pinker closes by making an obvious point:

Tim asks who would be best equipped to solving a social problem, a social psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist, or an economist, but this strikes me as the wrong question. The right question is, who is better equipped, a social psychologist who uses relevant ideas from evolutionary biology and economics (and other fields), or a social psychologist who doesn’t?

To me, the point is so obvious that it is trite, but it seems to need plenty of repeating. In his commentary, David Sloan Wilson noted the lack of cross-referencing between evolutionary and social psychology – and that lack applies both ways. In his words, they inhabit “parallel universes”.

And again, this point applies equally to economics. Who is better equipped: an economist who uses relevant ideas from evolutionary biology, or an economist who doesn’t? Over the next decade, the evidence is going to strongly favour the economist trained in evolutionary biology.

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 Morton, “most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified.”

I haven’t yet found that specific defence, but John Horgan in Scientific American has stepped in to defend Gould’s broader crusade against “biological determinism”. Horgan writes:

Maybe Gould was wrong that Morton misrepresented his data, but he was absolutely right that biological determinism was and continues to be a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology. Biological determinism is thriving today: I see it in the assertion of researchers such as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University that the roots of human warfare reach back all the way to our common ancestry with chimpanzees. In the claim of scientists such as Rose McDermott of Brown University that certain people are especially susceptible to violent aggression because they carry a “warrior gene.” In the enthusiasm of some science journalists for the warrior gene and other flimsy linkages of genes to human traits. In the insistence of the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and neuroscientist Sam Harris that free will is an illusion because our “choices” are actually all predetermined by neural processes taking place below the level of our awareness. In the contention of James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, that the problems of sub-Saharan Africa reflect blacks’ innate inferiority. In the excoriation of many modern researchers of courageous anti-determinists such as Gould and Margaret Mead.

Horgan’s examples of “biological determinism are interesting. Coyne is one of the more vocal critics of the “just so” stories coming out of evolutionary psychology, and Coyne’s arguments against the existence of free will are based on the effects of both biology and environment. While the “warrior gene” findings may not stand the test of time, the evidence for the heritability of violent tendencies is strong (I recently posted on the “missing heritability” problem). What makes findings of the type that Horgan describes generally scientifically unfounded? Neither Horgan’s post, nor my perusal of his blog back catalogue, makes this clear.

Horgan’s attack on “biological determinism” is an attack on a straw man – that biology determines all. Every person I have met who argues the case for biological influence acknowledges the role of environment. Genes express in an environment. The question is the degree of that role – and in that area, there is still plenty of room to debate (as Coyne’s debates with the evolutionary psychology proponents show). Conversely, Gould attempted to erase the role of evolution in shaping human behaviour. Horgan wants to contain it. But as Coyne states in his response to Horgan:

[T]o dismiss any claims about the genetic basis of modern human behavior as “biological determinism, therefore pseudoscientific ideology” is simply silly: it’s the same kind of knee-jerk rejection of all research on the evolution of human behavior that Gould sometimes engaged in.  Horgan wants to dismiss these studies simply because he doesn’t like what he sees as their implications:  “the way things are is the way they must be” and that “we have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do.”  Well, tough.  Biological determinism, of both the anti-free-will and genes-determining-human-behavior variety, may be more pervasive than many people think, and is certainly more pervasive than Horgan thinks.

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):

He made statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer – he got into trouble for that for he found that those people frequently prayed for, like monarchs, lived no longer than anyone else.

He even made a beauty map of Britain, based on a secret grading of the local women on a scale from attractive to repulsive (the low point was in Aberdeen).

Jones uses Galton’s findings on height to lead into his argument that genetics has run into a problem. Geneticists are not finding specific genes for traits that we know are highly heritable.

Take adult diabetes, now a major health problem, and one that certainly runs strongly in families. Genome scans reveal scores of different bits of chromosome as possible culprits but together they explain just one part in 20 of the overall inherited liability to the disease.

The chance of being born with a predisposition to a common illness such as diabetes or depression is a gamble with huge numbers of cards.

So many small cards can be shuffled that everyone who falls ill fails in their own fashion and no gene says very much about whether or not you will get the illness (although the number of cheeseburgers you eat certainly does).

While no gene by itself is likely to say much about your chance of getting adult diabetes, Jones’s comparison between a single gene and cheeseburgers is not meaningful. We are not composed of a single gene – we have a genome. Despite genetic studies not finding the “missing heritability”, that heritability still exists. A more useful comparison might be whether family history is a better predictor than the number of cheeseburgers eaten. Or whether your twin has adult onset diabetes.

The other interesting thing about examples like this is that the environmental factor would have a genetic component. A host of heritable traits are likely to affect whether one eats a lot of cheeseburgers. This is one of the reasons why it is not easy to link gene X to a specific outcome.

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 now consider culpable behaviour may fall into the class of mental illness, with the criminal justice system adjusting its threshold so.

This threshold issue extends beyond crime. Take IQ, which is highly heritable and correlates with income and most other life outcomes. Where one sits on the IQ bell curve is largely determined by genes. If one’s IQ falls below a certain level, they may receive special schooling, social security and other forms of special care. As is the case for criminal culpability, a threshold is set which considers biological factors.

In each case, is may be worse for someone to be just above the threshold than just below it. It is the person that has a strong genetic disposition to commit crimes, but not strong enough for the justice system to consider it a mental illness, that is the most likely to end up behind bars. Similarly, it is the person with the very low IQ, but not low enough IQ to be considered disabled, that may have the worst life outcomes. The pay-out from the genetic lottery is not monotonic.