Working through my reading pile, I finally read this great 1966 article by James Crow - The Quality of People: Human Evolutionary Changes. For those unfamiliar with Crow’s work, it’s worth watching this piece from Wisconsin Public Television (HT: Steve Hsu). The introduction captures some of his achievements. In the paper, Crow opens by discussing the prediction of future evolutionary trends for humans: Prediction of future evolutionary trends is difficult because man himself plays such a decisive role.

Edge’s annual question for 2013 - What should we worry about? - has generated a bunch of interesting responses. First in the list is Geoffrey Miller’s response, Chinese eugenics. Miller writes: When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies. ... The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles.

I had the following Mont Pelerin Society Special Meeting pointed out to me. It has a great bunch of speakers - Robert Boyd, Robin Dunbar, Leda Cosmides, Matt Ridley, Richard Wrangham, Pascal Boyer and Gary Becker among them. Not a bad location either, if you ignore the expense. Unfortunately, its for MPS members and their guests only. **Evolution, the Human Sciences and Liberty** What? This Mont Pelerin Society Special Meeting has the objective to link the concept of evolution to freedom, reinforce the debate that opposes classical liberal society and statism using biology and anthropology as theoretical foundations, and to understand cultural evolution of open societies as a mean to escape from the tribal order.

In response to the critique in Current Anthropology on Ashraf and Galor’s paper on genetic diversity and economic growth, C.W. writes: 1. The critique of the use of the McEvedy and Jones population density data is (as already noticed by the first comment) not reasonable. McEvedy and Jones (1978) is the standard source for cross-country historical population estimates used in dozen of papers by economists, historians and economic historians. No Referee – as I now - did refuse this data source or demand authors to use another.

In my last post, I described Kremer’s O-ring theory of economic development. Kremer’s insight was that if production in an economy consists of many discrete tasks and failure in any one of those tasks can ruin the final output, small differences in skills can drive large differences in output between firms. This can lead to high levels of inequality as the high-skilled work together and are disproportionately more productive. In a new paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (although kicking around as a working paper for a few years), Garett Jones tweaks Kremer’s model to capture the observation that measures of worker skill are a stronger predictor of cross-country economic performance than of within-country differences in income.

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization has a new paper by Garett Jones (ungated version here) on the O-ring theory of economic development. Its been floating around as a working paper for a few years, so its nice to see it get a home. But before I post about that paper, I thought I’d revisit Michael Kremer’s classic 1993 paper on which Jones builds. The name of the theory comes from the cause of the Challenger space shuttle explosion.

Despite the common public brawls, a paper presented at the American Economic Association annual meeting by Gordon and Dahl shows high levels of consensus between economists on most economic issues. Based on questions to a 41 economist panel established by the Chicago Booth School of Business, on average only 6 per cent disagree with the “consensus” answer to a question, with around 25 per cent uncertain. This observation holds for what might be viewed as relatively controversial questions, including the effect of stimulus on jobs (although the phrasing of the questions could be changed to increase dispute - such as asking whether the benefits of the stimulus outweighed the costs.

Justin Fox has asked whether the age of economic imperialism is coming to an end and whether economics may be vulnerable to imperialism itself: Lately, though, I've found myself talking to and reading a little of the work of sociologists and political scientists, and coming away impressed with how adept they are in quantitative methods, how knowledgeable they are about economics, and how willing they are to challenge economic orthodoxy. .

Is Poverty in Our Genes? is the title of a new extended critique of Ashraf and Galor’s forthcoming American Economic Review paper on genetic diversity and economic development. Published in Current Anthropology, the critique is an extension of an earlier piece by a group of academics (mainly from Harvard) who argue that Ashraf and Galor’s work is false and undesirable. The critique spends some time focusing on the data underlying Ashraf and Galor’s work, which provides a good reminder of the complexity of human migratory history.

As is normally the case, my annual list comprises the best books I have read in the past year, irrespective of their date of release. I read fewer books this year than usual, so I’m drawing from a smaller pool than for the last couple of years (2010 and 2011). Here are my favourite six for 2012 - links are to reviews: Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by Robert Frank: A book I should have read a long time ago.