A few months back, I posted about a Conference on Genetics and Behaviour held by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago. In that post, I linked to a series of videos from the first session on the effect of genes on socioeconomic aggregates. Over the last couple of days, I watched the videos from the session on Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). As for the first set of videos, they are technical (as you might expect for a bunch of academics) - particularly the questions - but cover some important points.

Links this week: A good Jared Diamond interview. The 10,000 hours rule - the best you can do is find the peak of your own ability. Tinder works because a picture is “worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth… almost nothing”. (HT: Razib) Dumb incentives, although economists would be the first to point out a lot of the unintended consequences.

A neat new paper has appeared on SSRN from Owen Jones - Why Behavioral Economics Isn’t Better, and How it Could Be (HT: Emanuel Derman via Dennis Dittrich). My favourite part is below. As I have said many times before, giving a bias a name is not theory. [S]aying that the endowment effect is caused by Loss Aversion, as a function of Prospect Theory, is like saying that human sexual behavior is caused by Abstinence Aversion, as a function of Lust Theory.

I have updated my economics and evolutionary biology reading list, with a few new additions including John Coates’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Gregory Clark’s new book on social mobility and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. As before, I have been selective, adding only the best books (or articles) in the area. That said, I am always open for suggestions or comment. When updating the list, I realised I have written a lot of book reviews over the last few years.

Links this week: Cooperation in humans versus apes. In praise of pilots. Are women better decision makers? Amazon is doing us a favour. Goodbye book publishers. The logic of failure. The Behavioural Insights Team has lunch with Walter Mischel. Mischel’s work is fantastic and his new book is on my reading list, but the mention of brain plasticity and epigenetics (in the same sentence!

A classic story on the play-list of many behavioural economics presentations is why you can’t find taxis on rainy days. The story is based on the idea that taxi drivers work to an income target. If driver wages are high due to high demand for taxis, such as when it rains, they will reach their income target earlier and go home for the day. The result is you can’t find a taxi when you need one most.

Links this week: Was the paper proposing that mice can pass their fears onto their offspring and grandchildren via epigenetic mechanisms too good to be true? Neuroskeptic comments (and read the comments to Neuroskeptic’s post). And my favourite epigenetics statement of the week: “Women too can succeed in business. Because epigenetics.” What are agent based models? Genetic engineering will create the smartest humans who have ever lived.

I’m note sure how I hadn’t come across this before (one need only read the Wikipedia entry “invisible hand”), but Adam Smith used the phrase “invisible hand” three times. It is used once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) - both of those I knew. The third time comes from a posthumously published (1795) essay The History of Astronomy, written before The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Over at WSJ Real Time Economics, Josh Zumbrun turns the following chart into a claim that “the SAT is just another area in American life where economic inequality results in much more than just disparate incomes.” But what does the chart actually tell us? In a perfect meritocracy, the smartest students will score the highest. But as intelligence is heritable, the smarter kids will tend to have smarter and higher income patterns, giving us the pattern we see in the chart.

Links this week: Plenty of press and interesting articles sparked by Peter Thiel’s new book. First, he has a swipe at business schools. And some great one-liners. But is he wrong about the future? Another tech-billionaire - Elon Musk wants to put people of Mars. Eric Crampton has some great posts this week on public health. First, where should the money be going? Some thoughts on soda taxes and fat taxes.