Since reading Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy, I have been working through his back catalogue. The original and innovative Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions is the best of Frank’s books I have read so far. Frank’s major proposal is that the emotions act as a commitment device. When a dispassionate calculation shows that it is better to cheat, the emotion of guilt can act as a constraint to the “rational” course of action.

One blog in my feed is the excellent synthesis blog, which brings you the musings of Greg Fisher, Paul Ormerod and others. From their about page: We believe that this new approach, centred on the study of complex networks, has enormous potential to integrate, reconcile, and synthesise the social sciences. Viewing society as a complex network requires us to focus on actual human psychology and the nature of human interaction, rather than some inaccurate abstraction (such as “the rational agent”).

In Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (this is another snippet pending my finding time to write a decent review), Frank describes the free riding behaviour of economists in the public goods game: It is interesting to note that the only group for which the strong free-rider hypothesis receives minimal support in this vast experimental literature turns out to be a group of economics graduate students.

In Friedrich Hayek’s magnificent essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek writes: It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. After writing my recent post on Richard Conniff’s article about Irving Fisher’s eugenic leanings, it struck me that a similar framing can be made with respect to eugenics.

In the closing section to Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, Frank writes of the failure of critics of the self-interest model of human action to gain traction in their critique. The difficulty confronting critics is that they have failed to come forward with an alternative theory. None of the evidence they cite against the self-interest model is really new. The experiments with prisoner’s dilemmas date from the 1950s, those with honesty and victims-in-distress from the 1960s.

Average human brain size has declined for 20,000 years, a stark contrast to the steady increase over the preceding millions. While I would argue that translation of this reduced brain size into lower intelligence would have a negative result, I am not convinced that intelligence has dropped over that time. Eighteen months ago, Discover magazine published an article by Kathleen McAuliffe on the shrinking brain phenomenon and what this means for intelligence.

Matt Ridley writes on the fossil evidence that human brains have shrunk from around 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres over the last 20,000 years: This neither worries nor surprises me. We ceased relying upon individual brain power tens of thousands of years ago. Our civilization now gets all its inventive and creative power from the linking of brains into networks. Our future depends on being clever not individually, but collectively.

Richard Conniff’s Yale Alumni Magazine article on Irving Fisher’s support of eugenics has some great stories (HT Arnold Kling), but one of the closing paragraphs caught my attention. We know better now, of course. And yet eugenic ideas still linger just beneath the skin, in what seem to be more innocent forms. We tend to think, for instance, that if we went to Yale, or better yet, went to Yale and married another Yalie, our children will be smart enough to go to Yale, too.

Last week’s edition of Science has an interesting article by Sam Bowles on the role of conflict on human social evolution. Bowles covers some familiar ground on the debate around the role of group selection in shaping human altruistic preferences: [F]or most animals, gene flow (due to migration) would minimize genetic differences between groups, and hence nullify the genetic effects of group competition. But recent evidence suggests that this may not be the case for a number of species, including recent human foragers, whose population structures may resemble those of our Late Pleistocene ancestors.

I enjoyed the responses to Michael Sandel’s critique of markets in the How Markets Crowd Out Morals forum on the Boston Review website. Sandel’s essay follows in the wake of his new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Most of the response are worth reading, but I particularly enjoyed the one by Herb Gintis. Some of the more interesting parts of Gintis’s piece were as follows: