Links this week: The workplace is needed to overcome our lack of self control. Resisting instant gratification - the FT explores Walter Mischel’s the Marshmallow Test. Most critiques of twin studies recycle the same discredited 40-year-old arguments. Here’s another paper pulling them apart. The college educated are still getting married, just later. The same can’t be said for everyone else. A critique of the 10,000 hour rule.

Perusing through some of my bookmarks in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I was reminded of the following passage. It’s worth sharing. The West was eventually tamed not just by flinty-eyed marshals and hanging judges but by an influx of women. The Hollywood westerns’ “prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch” captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient.

In 2007’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Gregory Clark argued that the higher fertility of the rich in pre-industrial England sowed the seeds for the Industrial Revolution. As children resemble their parents, the increased number of prudent, productive people made possible the modern economic era. Part of the controversy underlying Clark’s argument – made stark by Clark in articles and speeches following A Farewell to Alm’s publication - was that he considered there may be a genetic basis to the transmitted traits.

Links this week: Is your body mostly microbes? A nice take-down of another trail of citations dead-ends. One thing I have learnt from my PhD research is that when it comes to citations, academics are lazy. A good piece on Peter Thiel. Curing death is on the agenda. Fixing gender bias in research subjects. HT: John Durant Using data in determining punishment - some interesting implications.

In the Gerd Gigerenzer versus Daniel Kahneman wars, most of the projectiles seem to fly one way. Gigerenzer attacks directly, Kahneman expends little effort in defence. As one test of whether my impression was correct, I searched Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for how many times Kahneman directly mentions Gigerenzer. The answer is six, once in the index and five times in the notes. Gigerenzer is not alluded to in the main text.

Links this week: The Genetic Genealogist responds to Vox’s tabloid piece on genetic testing. Attempts to correct false claims often entrench them - the backfire effect. But telling politicians they will be fact checked still reduced their number of lies. [Update: There is probably no backfire effect.] Tyler Cowen suggests the gender gap will close. I’m not so sure. Violence in chimps an evolutionary adaptation.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Muchis full of interesting insight and experimental results. It presents a novel way of looking at scarcity that extends beyond the typical analysis in economics, the original “science of scarcity”, and will certainly change the way I think about it. But by the time I reached the end of the book, I was not entirely satisfied. I have new buzzwords and some interesting experiments to think about, but I’m not convinced Mullainathan and Shafir have presented a coherent new perspective on how the world works.

Links this week: An excellent Econtalk podcast with Jonathan Haidt. Just don’t buy his lines about group selection - my reasons here. Steven Pinker’s amusing article on the Ivy League. Greg Clark applies his work on social mobility to immigration. Reihan Salam comments. A great swipe at “talent deniers”. Tracking supercentenarians. The agricultural origins of time preference - I’ll blog about this once I digest.

I should start this review of Gerd Gigerenzer’s least satisfactory but still interesting book, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, by saying that I am a huge Gigerenzer fan and that this book is still worth reading. But there was something about this book that grated at times, especially against the backdrop of his other fantastic work. In part, I continue to be perplexed by Gigerenzer’s ongoing war against nudges (as I have posted about before), despite his recommendations falling into the nudge category themselves.

Links this week: Two pieces on diet. First, an excellent article on how the poisons in vegetables might be making you stronger. Second, a new study in the fat-carb wars. Andrew Gelman on the strength of statistical evidence. Two excellent podcasts. Gregory Clark on social mobility (and the genetics behind it) and Paul Sabin on the Simon-Ehrlich bet. Some of my thoughts on Julian Simon are here and here.