Over four years since release of the working paper (and two and half years since I posted about it), Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel’s paper The Origin of Savings Behaviorhas been published in the Journal of Political Economy (follow the working paper link for an ungated copy). The abstract is as follows:  Analyzing the savings behavior of a large sample of identical and fraternal twins, we find that genetic differences explain about 33 percent of the variation in savings propensities across individuals.

The Economist discusses a new OECD report on a growing gender gap in schools: It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. ... The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank.

Links this week: I have an article at ABC’s The Drum on the Australian Government’s Intergenerational Report - “It’s time to end the demographic pessimism”. “The myriad processes that bring in food, convert it to metabolic fuel, and burn this fuel in our cells act in concert to keep our energy budget – the daily paper – essentially fixed in size.” HT: Melissa McEwen An education intervention that might have worked.

I have been working through The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, edited by Eldar Shafir, and have mixed views so far. As I go through, I will note some interesting points. The opening substantive chapter by Curtis Hardin and Mahzarin Banaji is on bias - and particularly implicit bias. Implicit biases are unconscious negative (or positive) attitudes towards a person or group. Most people who claim (and believe) they are not biased because they don’t show explicit bias will nevertheless have implicit bias that affects their actions.

What is Evonomics? _Evonomics_ is an online magazine and intellectual movement built on the pillars of complexity science and evolutionary principles, and includes key insights from the synthesis that has slowly been growing across disciplines in areas like behavioral, experimental, institutional, and ecological economics. The magazine showcases the new scientific foundations for human nature and society and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary economic and political issues. Sign up on the Evonomics site for updates as it gears up for launch.

Links this week: The Lancet’s obesity predictions. Design things to be difficult. HT: Rory Sutherland Is there any known safe level of government funding? Increasing diversity by hiring groups, not individuals. Plenty of critiques of nudge-style interventions popping up, although they are rarely done well. Here’s another. And what is a nudge? A perspective on consumer genomics. Wealth heritability.

At Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow writes: [M]aybe some lefties do reject the heritability of IQ on ideological grounds. I want to make another point - that there's no need for them to do so. You can accept that IQ (or ability generally) is heritable and still be a strong egalitarian. I say this because of a simple principle: luck egalitarianism. This says that inequalities are unjust if they are due to circumstances beyond one’s control.

I have just finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and along the way marked a couple of passages. The first two fit with the story that much behavioural science is formalisation of common sense. First, hindsight bias: In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he sought a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolensk, and of making similar statements to show that the danger of the campaign was even then understood.

Links this week (a slightly sparse list as I didn’t find much time to see what was out there): The number of never married in the US continues to grow. HT: Arnold Kling Moderate drinking is still good for you. Christopher Snowdon delves into the details. It’s no surprise that Uber and friends want to be regulated. There is plenty of signalling in years K-12.

Links this week: A few years old, but good - a story from a Blue Zone “where people forget to die”. HT: Razib Khan Another critique of modern dietary guidelines. Weight gain after a fecal transplant. And the US Government is about to drop warnings about cholesterol. Improving ‘Neoclassical man’ with a gaze heuristic. Bigger data sets are uncovering the genetic underpinnings of intelligence.