I posted this paper on SSRN a few months ago, but neglected to blog about it - I’ve written (with my supervisors) a review of the literature incorporating evolutionary theory into economics. The abstract: The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics As human traits and preferences were shaped by natural selection, there is substantial potential for the use of evolutionary biology in economic analysis. In this paper, we review the extent to which evolutionary theory has been incorporated into economic research.

Links this week: Storytelling about famous experiments tends to go a bit askew. Noah Smith takes on Deirdre McCloskey. Chimps on the drink. A review of Richard Thaler’s ‘Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics’. The gender gap in tech. And if you missed them, my posts from the last week: MSiX 2015 is on July 30 in Sydney, and features yours truly.

The below passage is from a neat article on how mistakes can save lives. CRM [crew resource management] as born of a realisation that in the late 20th century the most frequent cause of crashes wasn’t technical failure, but human error. Its roots go back to the Second World War, when the US army assigned a psychologist called Alphonse Chapanis to investigate a curious phenomenon. B-17 bombers kept crashing on to the runway on landing, even though there were no apparent mechanical problem with the planes.

The 2015 Marketing Science Ideas Xchange - MSiX - has been announced for 30 July in Sydney. As it says in the blurb, MSiX “is dedicated to exploring how brands can benefit from the interface between behavioural science and marketing.” The headline speaker is Michael Norton, Harvard professor, author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending and developer of the first set of experiments on the IKEA effect (that last point is the reason I knew his name when I heard he would be speaking).

Links this week: Nobody is doing more to save the NHS than the “drinkers, smokers or fatties”. Some bashing of the benefits of education: Did schooling drive the industrial revolution? Against tulip (education) subsidies. Is war on the wane? The Dead Sea lives. And if you missed them, my posts from the last week: Why family friendly policies backfire.

I am using some material from John Coates’s excellent The Hour Between Dog and Wolf for a presentation I am giving next week, and decided it was worth sharing here: During moments of risk-taking, competition and triumph, of exuberance, there is one steroid in particular that makes its presence felt and guides our actions – testosterone. At Rockefeller University I came across a model of testosterone-fuelled behaviour that offered a tantalising explanation of trader behaviour during market bubbles, a model taken from animal behaviour called ‘the winner effect’.

Last month a NYT article by Claire Cain Miller documented some of the backfires associated with family friendly policies. For instance: Unlike many countries, the United States has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to get promotions than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished new study by Mallika Thomas, who will be an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University.

Links this week: Two perspectives on the chocolate study - Scott Alexander and Andrew Gelman. I would say that the chocolate study didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. Self-deluded leaders. The education myth. If only chimpanzees had ovens. HT: Tyler Cowen And if you missed them, my posts from the last week: Ration information. Avoid news.

There is a neat article by Robert Merton (from July last year) in the Harvard Business Review on the shift to defined contribution plans when saving for retirement. There are two major types of retirement savings arrangements. The first is defined benefit pension plans. Under these plans, a set income is paid to retirees based on factors such as years of service and final salary, with the income paid until death.

As a broad indication of the effects of measurement error in 23andme, ancestry analysis for two identical twins is below. It suggests the decimal point isn’t yet justified. (Their Neanderthal ancestry estimates are also off by 0.1% from each other.)