While the Cato Unbound discussion on Brain, Belief and Politics appears to have petered out (unfortunately, Shermer has not directly confronted most of the issues in the response essays), the site has linked to an interesting piece (pdf) by Will Wilkinson from the Cato Policy Report in 2005. In the article, Wilkinson addresses the link between capitalism and human nature. On property rights, he states: Property rights are prefigured in nature by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating.

The WSJ has published an essay by Steven Pinker on the decline of violence, which is adapted from his upcoming book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker points out six major declines in violence in human history, starting with the shift from the hunter-gatherer life: The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago.

Fitting nicely with my recent post on human nature and libertarianism, Rob Brooks has the following to say on the mega-rich and people’s sense of fairness: Hunter-gatherers keep their neighbours and tribe-mates in line. When everybody depends on everyone else, then reputation rules. You simply can't afford to be selfish, whether by failing to share or by freeloading, in a small community. Your allies will desert you. ... Where our early ancestors kept one another honest, elites in hierarchical societies tend to socialise with other elites who are equally self-interested in maintaining their own power.

It pays to be beautiful. Higher pay, increased chance of promotion, easier loans, more beautiful and intelligent partners, greater happiness - the benefits are significant. And Dan Hamermesh has done a nice job cataloguing these perks in his new book Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. In one United States study, an above-average looking man (rated 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5) commanded a 4 per cent wage premium in the labour market.

There is another interesting topic in this month’s Cato Unbound, with Michael Shermer arguing in the lead essay that human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy. Shermer (rightly) spends most of the essay shooting down the blank slate vision of humans that underpins many policies on the left, and suggests that moderates on both the left and right should accept a “Realistic vision” of human nature. He then simply states that the libertarian philosophy best represents this vision.

Over at the Evolutionary Psychology Blog, Robert Kurzban has posted a fairly harsh take-down of a paper by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. The paper proposes that as sex is a scarce resource offered by women, it can be subject to economic analysis. From this, they come to some predictions such as men offering women other resources for sex. Kurzban notes that the paper is a rehashing of work that dates back to Robert Trivers in 1972 and Don Symons in 1979.

David Brooks has written an article on some of the poor trade-offs people make when they spend. In a nutshell, “as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability.” Happiness research suggests that this trade-off does not maximise our happiness. Jonah Lehrer picked up on this piece and raised some issues around what he describes as a paradox: Our poor intuitions about the pursuit of happiness are a genuine paradox.

In the comments to my post last month on the Cato Unbound series New Girl Order: Are men in decline?, there was some suggestion that men were being disincentivised from working hard by the increasing income and resources of women. Bryan Caplan took up a similar argument when he looked at what was happening through the lens of two markets - labour and mating. He concluded that: Income and income potential still matter.

David Sloan Wilson has just written a book, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, where he catalogues the use of evolutionary theory to improve life in Binghamton. I haven’t read it yet, but a review by Mark Oppenheimer foreshadows the content. He writes: Mr. Wilson argues — more controversially than he lets on — that “human cultural diversity is like biological diversity.” .

As opportunity is equalised, more of the variation in outcomes between people will be due to genetic factors. This may have the somewhat ironic result of reducing social mobility. I generally take the view that assortment by genetic lottery is no more fair than assortment based on social factors such as being born to low socio-economic status parents. An alternative view is given by Garret Hardin in his famous article The Tragedy of the Commons, when he writes of the private property solution to the tragedy: