In 1798, Thomas Malthus described a world where technological progress did not increase per person income. Any additional income was consumed by population growth. It appeared a solid explanation of the world to that point, but Malthus had the misfortune of describing the “Malthusian world” just when some parts of that world were breaking their Malthusian shackles. This left Malthus with a somewhat tarnished reputation (I consider undeservedly), with the Malthusian model failing to offer an explanation for why it no longer seemed to apply.

After sitting in my reading pile for the best part of three years, I have finally read (or more accurately, listened to) Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. One of the most commonly referenced popular books on behavioural science, it describes Ariely’s experiments in the areas of cheating, procrastination, social norms, hot decision-making and so on. One nice element of the book is that Ariely describes his own experiments. In the behavioural science literature, you often come across the same experiments over and over.

Links this week: Peter Turchin on Ibn Khaldun and the rise and decline of corporate empires. Another critique of p-values. John McNamara proposes that we need to move to a richer evolutionary game theory. The article focuses on biology, but many of the same comments could be made of economics. I’ll post on the article in coming weeks. Tyler Cowen on scarcity of mental bandwidth.

Although most of my interest in integrating evolutionary biology into economics concerns treating people as evolved (or evolving) animals, economists can also learn a lot from the dynamic analysis of biological systems. This thought is shared by John Gowdy and colleagues and is the subject of their third economic cosmology, equilibrium, in their article Economic cosmology and the evolutionary challenge from the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization special issue, _Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.

Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand is one of the more abused ideas in economics. Mentioned only once in The Wealth of Nations, and only then in the context of preferring domestic to foreign industry, the invisible hand has come to represent the idea that self-interest can improve the common good. The following phrase from The Wealth of Nations nicely captures the idea of the invisible hand (although it is not located with Smith’s use of the term):

Links this week: Noah Smith on maths in economics. Responses from Paul Krugman, Arnold Kling, Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan. Malcolm Gladwell defends the 10,000 hour rule. Gary Becker and Richard Posner discuss population. And finally, an interview with Martin Daly as part of the “On the Origin of HBES: An Oral History Project”, from Evolution, This View of Life. http://youtu.

The social sciences have recently become a common battleground for debates about group selection. From Jonathan Haidt’s use of group selection to explain “groupish” traits in humans, to some of the recent rumblings about cultural group selection (as expressed in a debate triggered by Steven Pinker), and even at last years Consilience Conference, group selection has undergone a revival in the social sciences. One social science in which group selection has re-emerged is economics, with the most recent occurrence in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization special issue, Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.

Links this week: Sean Roberts on spurious correlations over at Replicated Typo. Some babble on the neuroscience bubble. Why do Jews succeed? Noah Smith throws some reasons out there, but I expect Smith’s explanations would do a poor job of explaining ultra-success in the form of, say, Nobel prizes. And here’s Noah Millman’s take. And finally, below, an interview with Leda Cosmides (HT: Douglas Kenrick).

In the lead article to a recent Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization special issue, Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy, David Sloan Wilson and John Gowdy examined four reasons why someone may not need to consult an evolutionary framework in examining economic and policy questions. The four arguments are riffs on the same theme, but the distinctions between them are worth making. The first reason is that smart people will come to similar conclusions even if they use different approaches.

Links this week: Aaron Sell rants about some recent papers on whether there are sex differences in the willingness to have casual sex. Robert Kurzban (who I seem to be linking to a lot recently) posts on one of my favourite Gerd Gigerenzer papers. Alex Tabarrok comments on fat animals. “Derek” fathers over 500 children filling in for shellshocked husbands. Do we need more pharmaceutical advertising to enhance the placebo effect?