After sitting on my reading list for a few years, I have finally read Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. Ormerod’s basic argument is that failure is all around us and given the complexity of the world, there are limits to how much corporations can control their fate or governments can control the success of their policies. Governments, firms and households lack complete information. They do not have the cognitive power to process the available information to determine the optimal choice.

From a new paper in PLOS Genetics: [R]efined analyses of modern human genomic data have changed our view of evolutionary forces acting on our genome. While most people assumed that the out-of-Africa expansion had been characterized by a series of adaptations to new environments leading to recurrent selective sweeps, our genome actually contains little trace of recent complete sweeps and the genetic differentiation of human population has been very progressive over time, probably without major adaptive episodes John Hawks draws a different conclusion:

In outing Irving Fisher as a Social Darwinist, Bryan Caplan writes on how Fisher reconciled eugenics and economics. First, Caplan quotes Fisher: The core of the problem of immigration is, however, one of race and eugenics. If we could leave out of account the question of race and eugenics I should, as an economist, be inclined to the view that unrestricted immigration, although injurious to some classes, is economically advantageous to a country as a whole, and still more to the world as a whole.

In my last post on group selection, I described how multilevel selection differed from more traditional (and popular) concepts of group selection. One difference is that the multilevel selection framework defines groups as any subset of interacting individuals, such as a cooperating pair or family unit, rather than restricting the definition to population size groups. There are few tangible examples available on how a multilevel selection framework works, so below is an attempt to offer an illustration of how the definition of group in a multilevel selection framework is used.

Herbert Simon’s autobiography is probably not the best introduction to his work (I would suggest other starting points), but below are two paragraphs that caught my eye. First, describing Chapter 15 of Models of Man: Bracketing satisficing with Darwinian may appear contradictory, for evolutionists sometimes talk about survival of the fittest. But in fact, natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.

The arguments in the group selection debate at The Edge, as kicked off by Steven Pinker, contain some useful descriptions on what is meant by multilevel selection in a modern sense and how this varies from older formulations of group selection. Some of this is worth drawing out. The old story of group selection might run as follows. There are two types of people - altruists and egoists. Altruists are willing to incur individual costs for the benefit of the group, while egoists shirk this responsibility for their own benefit.

Steven Pinker’s essay on group selection (my initial post on it here) has now attracted a raft of interesting responses that are well worth reading. While it is hard to stitch together and reconcile the various arguments, in sum they confirm one part of Pinker’s argument. In his essay, Pinker wrote: The first big problem with group selection is that the term itself sows so much confusion. People invoke it to refer to many distinct phenomena, so casual users may literally not know what they are talking about.

Bryan Caplan points out a paper by Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel on the genetic and parental influences on savings behaviour. The first part of the abstract reads: Analyzing identical and fraternal twins matched with data on their savings propensities, we find that genetic variation explains about 33 percent of the variation in savings behavior across individuals. Parenting effects on savings behavior are strong for those in their twenties but decay to zero by middle age, i.

At the end of Moav and Neeman’s paper on conspicuous consumption and poverty traps, about which I posted yesterday, the authors suggest an experiment: It is well known that the rich spend a lot more on charitable contributions than the poor. There are at least three different explanations for this behaviour: charitable contribution is a luxury good, there is stronger social pressure on the rich to contribute more to society and our suggestion that charitable contributions provide a signal about unobserved income ('success').

Poverty is no barrier to conspicuous consumption. As Banerjee and Duflo wrote in Poor Economics: One hidden assumption in our description of the poverty trap is that the poor eat as much as they can. … Yet, this is not what we see. Most people living with less than 99 cents a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories.