Well, one anthropologist anyway. I’m normally the first person to admit that economics would benefit from incorporating findings from other fields into its understanding of human behaviour, be that from anthropology, biology, evolutionary psychology or whatever other field might yield useful insight. After all, that is one of my focuses for this blog. But sometimes the caricatures of economics become too much to bear. So for this post, I want to take a moment to defend economics.

Links this week: Paul Frijters on race and IQ (also read the comments). And if you want some perspective on the epigenetic undertone to that post, Kevin Mitchell’s piece from the beginning of the year is worth a read. An article that got plenty of press - how heritable is IQ for people of low SES? The Wall Street Journal comments. There is an excellent discussion of the paper in the comments (including from one of the paper’s authors) over at Information Processing.

I’d recommend Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don’t to anyone looking for a layman’s tour of applied statistics. It is not a “how to” book, although there are plenty of principles (and suggestions to be humble) worth following. It’s also not a book that gets too deep into any subject area, so for those areas I was familiar with, there were no surprises.

I rate Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic lower than Predictably Irrational. Like Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality is based largely on Ariely’s own work (a good thing). But where Ariely had 15 years of experiments to call on for his first book, for this one he seems limited to a couple of years of newer experiments and the experiments in the reject pile from the first.

Links this week: Kids born earlier in the year do better in sport, but this doesn’t seem to apply for academic outcomes. Rational crack addicts. Why life at 40 doesn’t seem so great. Otherwise, this wasn’t the most exciting week for links.

I am called an evolutionary economist often enough that I have been tempted to write a post titled “Why I am not an evolutionary economist”. In the absence of that post, Peter Turchin quizzed Ulrich Witt on what evolutionary economics is, and provides a useful description: [T]here are two main currents in evolutionary economics, which have developed largely independently of each other. One research direction, within which Ulrich himself has been working, begins by questioning the assumption of homo economicus, a rational agent that choses those actions that yield the best balance of rewards versus costs.

Links this week: David Dobbs on the social life of genes. Full of interesting ideas, although I’d love to see someone who knows more about this area critique it. Tim Harford reviews Scarcity. A good review of some new books on neuroscience. Dave Nussbaum on why you are working too hard. Ian Rickard pulls apart David Attenborough’s suggestion that humans are no longer evolving.

In Tim Harford’s article contrasting Lin Ostrom and Garrett Hardin‘s approaches to the tragedy of the commons, he writes: She [Ostrom] persevered and secured her PhD after studying the management of fresh water in Los Angeles. In the first half of the 20th century, the city’s water supply had been blighted by competing demands to pump fresh water for drinking and farming. By the 1940s, however, the conflicting parties had begun to resolve their differences.

From Smithsonian magazine (HT: John Hawks): Though northern muriquis are critically endangered, the population in Strier’s study site, which is protected from further deforestation and hunting, has increased. There are now 335 individuals in four groups, a sixfold increase since Strier started her study. That’s a development worth celebrating, but it’s not without consequences. The monkeys appear to be outgrowing the reserve and, in response to this population pressure, altering millennia of arboreal behavior.

Links this week: David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Haidt have kicked off an evolution and business blog at Forbes. It will be worth a read, and unsurprisingly the first post reflects Wilson and Haidt’s group selection leanings. It should give plenty of fodder for interesting posts. I’ve written about Haidt’s group selection views before, plus plenty of posts on Wilson’s (here and here for starters). Also on Jonathan Haidt, he is the editor of a new business section at Evolution: This View of Life.