Have just discovered the upcoming Consilience Conference. From the blurb: Speakers at this conference are all top researchers in biology, the social sciences, or the humanities. All the speakers know the level of consensus in their fields and can recognize major changes taking place, identify the major unsolved problems, and point toward future directions of research. They can all also discuss relations among at least two of the three areas (biology, the social sciences, and the humanities).

Tyler Cowen writes: How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I have written before about how decreased social mobility may be a sign of equalised opportunity. In a perfect meritocracy, assortment will largely be through genes.

Bryan Caplan makes an excellent point: Female income has greatly increased, and men with low status jobs are "inferior goods" in the mating market. As a result, the demand to date and marry such men has sharply declined. The average guy with a low-status job is only modestly more dateable in women's eyes than the average guy with no job at all. Men respond by either working _much _harder to become "

[See my 2016 update] On glancing down the chapter list of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I saw a list of heuristics and biases that behavioural scientists have discovered over the last few decades. I am often critical of behavioural science in that it is often presented as a list of biases with no linking framework, so the chapter list played to my fears. I was not confident that the book would present me with many new ideas.

First, from Donohue and Levitt’s The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, which argued that the legalisation of abortion contributed to later declines in crime: More interesting and important is the possibility that children born after abortion legalization may on average have lower subsequent rates of criminality for either of two reasons. First, women who have abortions are those most at risk to give birth to children who would engage in criminal activity.

A couple of months ago, David Sloan Wilson posted on a project he has been involved in with in the Binghamton City School District, which is also the subject of an article in PLoS ONE by Wilson and his colleagues. The concept behind the project is that “[K]nowledge derived from general evolutionary principles and our own evolutionary history can be used to enhance cooperation in real-world situations, such as a program for at-risk high school students.

Bryan Caplan has picked up on an interesting interview of Irving Fisher in the New York Times archives. Fisher states: If war would weed out only the criminal, the vicious, the feeble-minded, the insane, the habitual paupers, and others of the defective classes, it might lay claim, with some show of justice, to the beneficent virtues sometimes ascribed to it. But the truth is that its effects are diametrically opposite.

Robin Hanson writes: Zahavi’s seminal book on animal signaling tells how certain birds look high status by forcing food down the throat of other birds, who thereby seem low status. While this “altruism” does help low status birds survive, they rightly resent it, as their status loss outweighs their food gain. In our society, “sympathy” by high status folks for low status folks usually functions similarly — it affirms their high status while giving little net benefit to the low status.

Arnold Kling writes: The story I tell for bimodalism is mating behavior. When high earners marry high earners, class divisions will emerge. But this has implications for the IQ distribution. One would expect bimodalism to appear in the IQ distribution, with the children of high-IQ parents tending centered around one mode and the children of low-IQ parents centered around another. Kling’s expectation depends on our assumptions about the nature of the assortive mating.

The core message of Sheldon Garon’s Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves is that people’s savings behaviour responds to incentives and in particular, to the institutional structure and norms created by government. These incentives range from the availability of convenient savings accounts to the establishment of social norms. The incentives described by Garon are not those typically discussed by economists. Garon argues that economics has failed to explain cross-national differences in savings and that the life-cycle hypothesis of savings does poorly.