Links this week:

  1. A week ago I posted about a piece in the Economist on Greg Clark’s work using surnames to estimate social mobility. A debate followed the Economist article, with contributions by Miles Corak, Fransicso Ferreira, Greg Clark (and again), and Jason Long. All are worth reading.

  2. Jonathan Last notes three issues that he would include in a second edition of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster. The third relates to my recent working paper with Oliver Richards on natural selection driving an increase in fertility.

  3. The anthropology wars are in full swing at the moment, moving from Diamond to Chagnon. The two most interesting articles I read this week were by Alice Dreger in the Atlantic and John Horgan in Scientific American. I’d be interested in hearing a response from the gang of five to Horgan’s claims.

  4. Half a year late, I have finally read this article by Dierdre McCloskey on the measurement of happiness. Its full of straw men, but many passages are fantastic.