Links this week: Eric Falkenstein on Stevenson and Wolfers’s happiness research. “When an economist tells you a symmetric ovoid contains a highly significant trend via the power of statistics, don’t believe them”. Australia’s Productivity Commission has fingered genetics as a cause of differences in educational attainment. It’s healthy that ideas such as this are starting to be mentioned in serious discussion (although the Commission still treats the issue as though it is walking on eggshells).

This year’s Australian Conference of Economists had a few behavioural/experimental economists among the invited speaker list. This post is a short record of some of the main things I took away from their presentations (which is not necessarily the focus of the presentation). From Andrew Clarke: Ignore cross-country comparisons of happiness. The word happiness (or whatever term is intended to capture it) is ambiguous enough in survey questions without the added complications of language translations and cross-cultural interpretation.

In his research on social mobility using surnames, Gregory Clark has found lower levels of social mobility than many other studies. Clark has defended this finding on the basis that analysis of social mobility across a single generation or using a single variable will overestimate it. Clark writes: Conventional estimates of social mobility, which look at just single aspects of social status such as income, are contaminated by noise. If we measure mobility on one aspect of status such as income, it will seem rapid.

Links this week: The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization has a special issue out “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy”. You can also access the papers through the Evolution Institute website and there is a series of summary articles in Evolution: This View of Life. Many look worth a read, and I’ll post about them over coming weeks/months. David Sloan Wilson (one of the editors and authors in the JEBO special issue above) has an article in aeon magazine critiquing economics from an evolutionary angle.

My first publication, Economic Growth and Evolution: Parental Preference for Quality and Quantity of Offspring, has just been released electronically in Macroeconomic Dynamics (ungated pdf here). With my co-authors Boris Baer and Juerg Weber, we simulate and extend Oded Galor and Omer Moav’s seminal paper Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth (ungated working paper version here)_, _the first paper that models an evolutionary trigger to the Industrial Revolution.

In his seminal paper Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990, Michael Kremer combined two basic concepts to explain the greater than exponential population growth in human populations over the last million years. The first concept is that more people means more ideas. A larger population will generate more ideas to feed technological progress. The second concept is that, in a Malthusian world, population is constrained by income, with income a function of technology.

Links this week: If you read one thing this week, read this article by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg: How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development? (ungated version here). I’ll post in more detail on the article in a couple of weeks. Noah Smith provides a list of essential papers in behavioural finance. Cannabis and IQ. My newest working paper has just gone online: Population, Technological Progress and the Evolution of Innovative Potential.

In my last post, I noted R.A. Fisher’s argument that a larger population leads to more mutations and greater potential for adaptive evolution. As human populations have undergone massive growth over recent tens of thousands of years, we would expect the evidence of this population growth to show in our genomes. In this post, I point to a couple of papers that look at this evidence. In the first, Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, John Hawks and colleagues examined the age distribution of positively selected gene variants in a 3.

A core ideas in economics is that more people means more ideas. To take an extreme case, you would expect a population of one person to generate fewer ideas that a population of one million people. The precise relationship between population and ideas depends on factors such as the fishing-out of ideas, network effects, the composition of the population and the like, but it would seem to be strongly positive.

Links this week: Malcolm Gladwell on Albert O. Hirschman. One good paragraph: People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed _absence_ of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky.