The web magazine Evonomics is now live. The blurb: A revolution in economics and business is taking place. Orthodox economics is quickly being replaced by the latest science of human behavior and how social systems work. Few are aware of these deep and profound changes underway that have power to transform the world. Not anymore! Evonomics is the home for thinkers who are applying the ground-breaking science to their lives and who want to see their ideas influence society.

The Cooperation and Conflict in the Family conference of early last year has resulted in a follow-up event - the Economics and Biology of Contests Conference 2016: In February 2016, Brisbane will play host to an exciting gathering of economic and evolutionary thinkers who will explore the potential for a closer synthesis between evolution and economics in order to understand both the economics and biology of behaviour in contest.

Yesterday was the second edition of the Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSiX). It was a more eclectic set of speakers than last year, extending from the first year’s behavioural economics focus to include neuroscience and “big data”. In my mind, the increased variety worked well. If you saw yesterday’s post, I spoke at the event and provided a reading list which included Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, Gad Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Consuming Instinct, Amotz Zahavi’s The Handicap Principle, Robert Frank’sLuxury Fever, Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals and Douglas Kendrick and Vlad Griskevicus’s The Rational Animal.

Below is a transcript of my planned presentation at today’s Marketing Science Ideas Xchange. The important images from the slide pack are below, but the full set of slides is available here. Please, not another bias! An evolutionary take on behavioural economics Thank you for the invitation to speak today. I accepted the invite because natural selection has shaped the human mind to take actions that have, in our past, tended increase reproductive success.

Links this week: American hippopotamus. HT: Scott Alexander. A walk in the park increases poor research practices and decreases reviewer critical thinking. Encourage more students to study science and put their future employment at greater risk. Behavioural economics and savings. The economic future for men. Why twitter is terrible. I don’t spend much time there any more. The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.

A few straw men are burnt along the way, but interesting all the same. I’ve posted about some of Bowles’s work before - a review of A Cooperative Species, and some thoughts on his work on income and IQ.

I missed this when it was first posted, but John Cochrane has posted a great rant (not that I agree with it all) in response to a couple of articles on Richard Thaler’s new book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (HT: Diane Coyle). A couple of excerpts: When it gets to economics, though – market outcomes, not individual decisions – a common complaint is that “behavioral” approaches study small-potatoes effects.

Links this week: Highly rated doctors may not be that good. HT: Scott Alexander A Nobel prize for the inventor of vaping? Vaccinated people can still spread whooping cough. More complex products require elaborate networks of teamwork, and only a few places manage the trick. Intelligence and criminal behaviour by Joseph Schwartz and friends. No surprises here. Self control and political ideology.

I have been listening to a podcast of an excellent talk by David Spiegelhalter on “Thinking and Feeling About Risk”. The video of the lecture is below. The lecture covers a lot of interesting material - from the misrepresentation of cancer screening statistics to bicycle helmets - and I recommend listening to or watching the whole thing. One interesting point was about the presentation of estimates of GDP growth. The Bank of England produces quarterly forecasts of GDP growth, but when they present them graphically, they don’t include their central estimate.

Michelle Meyer and Christopher Chabris write: Companies — and other powerful actors, including lawmakers, educators and doctors — “experiment” on us without our consent every time they implement a new policy, practice or product without knowing its consequences. When Facebook started, it created a radical new way for people to share emotionally laden information, with unknown effects on their moods. And when OkCupid started, it advised users to go on dates based on an algorithm without knowing whether it worked.