In my recent post reviewing Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster’s An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks, I flagged that they considered their new theoretical contribution to be “the love principle”. In this post, I want to pull the idea apart. I’m not going to offer a perfect alternative to the love principle, but I hope that by giving it a good going over I can possibly understand it better.

My assessment of An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks by Paul Frijters with Gigi Foster varies with the objective I assess it against. On the one hand, Frijters and Foster seek to supplement what they call the “mainstream economic” view to give an enhanced perspective of how society works. Although they sometimes talk this objective down, it is inherently ambitious and encompasses a significant expansion of core economic theory.

Links this week: Robert Kurzban takes on PZ Myers’s views on evolutionary psychology. The evolution of lactase persistence (HT: John Hawks). The madness of crowds (of ants). The Nature and Nurture of High IQ (HT: Tyler Cowen). Beware Star Academia.

In my last post, I noted one of the major themes of a new Journal of Economic Literature paper, How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development (ungated pdf). Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg reviewed some literature that makes a strong case that it is population, not institutions, that underlies long-term economic growth. This post turns to the focus of the second half of the article - the genetic and cultural intergenerational transmission of development.

I first flagged this article a year or so ago when it was released as a working paper, but the new Journal of Economic Literature paper How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development (ungated pdf) by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg has so much good material in it that it is worth a revisit. I am going to cover the article over two posts. This first post covers the major theme of the first half of the paper - that it is populations, not institutions, that underlie persistent differences in economic development.

Links this week: Brandon Keim discusses a new Science paper by Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg questioning how warlike human nature is. My two cents: a war to personal violence ratio is a poor way to look at this. If we interpret the ratio in the other direction, we could say that human nature inclines us to high rates of interpersonal violence. I’d prefer examination of baseline rates.

A couple of weeks ago I flagged the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization’s (JEBO) special issue Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy. I thought I would open my commentary on the special issue by examining one of the popular press articles that accompanied its launch, a piece by David Sloan Wilson called A good social Darwinism. A couple of years ago Wilson wrote a series of posts at his blog Evolution for Everyone called Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms.

Links this week: A few articles on the recent JEBO special issue on economics and evolution - Jag Bhalla in Scientific American, commented on by Mark Thoma, commented on by Mark Buchanan. Larry Arnhart has posted about the recent Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the Galapagos - Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty. Here are posts on presentations by Robert Boyd and Robin Dunbar. I expect more posts will follow.

Over the last couple of months I have been a silent participant in Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen’s reading group for their book Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. After finishing the book and following the reading group discussions, I’m not sure I am in a position yet to offer a strong review or critique. But in the meantime, here are some notes about the book.

It has been a few months since I wrote most of my series of posts on Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor’s paper The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development. This last post in the series is on the implication of their argument for policy. As a recap, Ashraf and Galor showed a hump-shaped relationship between genetic diversity and economic development across countries and populations. They proposed that two opposing effects of genetic diversity cause this hump-shaped pattern: diversity promoting innovation and productivity through the greater range of traits available in the population, and negative effects through conflict between more dissimilar individuals.