From Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal: Back in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic, inequality had reproductive consequences. The successful hunter, providing valuable protein for females, got a lot more mating opportunities than the unsuccessful. So it's possible that men still walk around with a relatively simple equation in their brains, namely that relative success at obtaining assets results in more sexual adventures and more grandchildren. If so, this might explain why it is relative, rather than absolute, inequality that matters so much to people today.

Two papers in which Gerald Crabtree argues that human intelligence has declined since a peak thousands of years ago (Part I and Part II) have been the subject of the popular science media rounds over the last week (such as this piece in The Independent). Crabtree’s argument has two components. The first is that intelligence is fragile and vulnerable to genetic load. He estimates that within the last three thousand years, the average person would have accumulated at least two mutations that have harmed our intelligence.

Last week, I presented my paper on conspicuous consumption and economic growth at the annual PhD Conference in Economics and Business. The basic argument of the paper is that the evolution of the propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption is a factor underlying modern economic growth, as conspicuous consumption requires productive activity to produce the resources to consume. One of the great features of the conference is that each presenter is allocated a discussant who reviews the paper and presents a critique - and the task is taken seriously.

From the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics (ungated prepublication version here): _[Genes, economics, and happiness](https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030292)_ De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel; Christakis, Nicholas A.; Fowler, James H.; Frey, Bruno S. We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first show that ∼33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation. Although previous studies have shown that baseline happiness is significantly heritable, little research has considered molecular genetic associations with subjective well-being.

When I asked for suggestions for my evolutionary biology and economics reading list earlier this year, Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures was one of the most recommended. Their exploration of cultural evolution has many elements that are relevant to economics, including the development of institutional frameworks, the evolution of cooperation and the transmission of technology. The book comprises 20 papers (published between 1987 and 2003) that are grouped into five thematic groups: the evolution of social learning; ethnic groups and markers; human cooperation, reciprocity and group selection; archaeology and culture history; and links to other disciplines.

An article by Josh Fischman in the Chronicle suggests that economists have been slow to take up the insights of neuroeconomics. Paul W. Glimcher, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics at New York University and author of the standard textbook in the field, wrote in a 2004 paper published in _Science_ that "economics, psychology, and neuroscience are converging today into a single, unified discipline." Today he is more measured. "We are a very young science,"

I’ve been working through Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family: Enlarged Edition over the last couple of weeks. One interesting section included Becker’s thoughts on why people demand their own children, as opposed to being satisfied with the children of others. [T]he demand for own children, the distinguishing characteristic of families, need not be postulated but can be derived. Women producing children can use their own milk as food and can more readily take care of young children while pregnant than while working in the marketplace.

A couple of weeks ago, Razib Kahn wrote a post in which he argued that “you don’t need to know the exact gene of major effect to conclude that a trait is genetic.” Where a lot of research is invested in finding the specific genes behind traits, and with a media hungry for these kinds of stories, many people have forgotten how much can be understood without knowledge of the specific genes.

There have been a few recent pointers to Gregory Clark and Neil Cummin’s work on long-term social mobility using surnames (papers here, here and here). The basic method used in these studies is to examine the share of rare surnames in high or low status occupations and compare it to the overall prevalence of that surname in the population. By tracking the relative status of the rare surname through time (effectively treating those with the same surname as a large family), the change in status through the generations can be measured.

In a National Review article a couple of months ago, Kevin Williamson questioned Obama’s status relative to Mitt Romney’s because Obama’s children were daughters, while Romney had sons. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — _Willard_, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to _Homo sap_.