In the New York Times profile of Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, Motoko Rich writes: Still, data alone can’t explain everything in life. Before Matilda arrived, Ms. Stevenson reviewed research on children and their effect on adult happiness. “I was really put off by the fact that people with kids were less happy,” she said. But at their home last month, their delight in their daughter was clear. Mr. Wolfers has written about the joys of fatherhood: “It’s visceral; it’s real; it’s hormonal and it’s not in our economic models.

The title of this post comes from a 2002 paper by Paul Zak and Kwang Woo Park. The title is mildly deceptive, as the paper has many elements and ideas crammed into it beyond population genetics. The model described by the authors includes working, consumption, saving, marriage, genetic diversity, sexual selection, intelligence, beauty, education, the Flynn effect, family size effects and more. While many of these elements deserve consideration, this is ultimately the paper’s weakness.

Several times over the last few years, I have come across someone willing to claim that risk aversion is a bias or that standard economics cannot explain it (such as this claim by David Sloan Wilson - although he mistakenly named it the Allais paradox). Yesterday, I saw the other half of the equation. I was looking for reviews of Richard McKenzie’s Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics,when I came upon an article by McKenzie containing a snapshot of the argument from his book.

In The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Robert Trivers asks “Is economics a science?” He answers: The short answer is no. Economics acts like a science and quacks like one - it has developed an impressive mathematical apparatus and awards itself a Nobel Prize each year - but it is not yet a science. It fails to ground itself in underlying knowledge (in this case, biology).

Robert Trivers is one of the giants of biology. His work in altruism, parental investment and parent-offspring conflict is seminal. For this, he has been justly rewarded. Trivers’s later work on deception and self-deception is also important. His basic argument is that self-deception is not irrationality in the way we might normally categorise it. Rather self-deception plays an important role in convincing others of the “truth”. Believing in something prevents one from giving signs of deception, while possibly reducing cognitive load.

I am reading Robert Trivers’s The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I will review in the next few days, but these passages on the benefits of outbreeding are particularly interesting: US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world. Although in its history rules of immigration have favored some groups over others, all have had some opportunity.

One of the more interesting issues in the inequality debate is how we should treat the genetic lottery that contributes to unequal outcomes. In a recent Econtalk podcast, Mike Munger and Russ Roberts touched on this issue in their discussion of profits and entrepreneurship (the quotes below are from the Econtalk website, so are not exact): Munger: [T]he question that John Rawls raised in the _Theory of Justice_ and elsewhere was: Why would any of us think that we deserve any of the character or effort or intelligence that lead us to perform well?

Fernando Teson writes: Yet, outside the rarified circles of political philosophy journals, I haven’t heard many folks ask two other important questions about the President’s approach. Yet these questions are, to me, obvious. First, why should reducing income equality be a worthy goal? If we are concerned with the poor, then we should focus (as Rawls famously does) in improving their lot in absolute terms, regardless of the effect of such improvement on the gap between them and the rich.

Following my reading of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy, I decided to read some of Frank’s back catalogue. I started with Luxury Fever: Weighing the Cost of Excess, which was first released in 1999. I quickly realised that The Darwin Economy is not so much a new book, but rather a refinement of Luxury Fever, updated for the events of the last 10 years and with a few of the weaker arguments replaced or improved.

Robin Hansen writes on the sex selective abortion of females: A simple supply and demand analysis says that selective abortion both expresses a preference for boys and causes a reduction in that preference as wives become scarce. In South Korea this process is mostly complete, with excess girls down from 15% in the 1990s to 7% today (with ~5% as the biologically natural excess). … Over an evolutionary time scale, the pay-offs to male and female children is, on average, equal, which would tend to balance numbers.