In Herbert Simon’s 1978 Swedish Bank prize lecture (pdf), he stated the following: Milton Friedman sums up his celebrated polemic against realism in theory (1953, p. 41, italics supplied): Complete “realism” is clearly unattainable, and the question whether a theory is realistic “enough” can be settled only be seeing whether it yields predictions that are good enough for the purpose in hand or that are better than predictions from alternative theories.

The Economist has an amusing reductio ad absurdum in its regular Daily Charts section. At current fertility rates, The Economist predicts it will take 25 generations for Hong Kong’s population to drop from its current 3.25 million to just one - which by their calculations will occur in the year 2798. China and Japan will be down to their last woman around 3500 AD, with Canada holding out until almost 4500 AD.

Robin Hanson writes: Consider: what elites did foragers worry most about? Foragers worried most about elite capacity for violence, and an inclination to use it. They also worried lots about unequal access to food and shelter, and to tools useful for all these things. So foragers enforced strong norms against giving orders or doing violence, and norms favoring sharing of food, shelter, and tools. In these senses foragers were egalitarian. However, foragers worried far less about unequal capacities for art, music, conversation, charm, social popularity, or sex appeal.

Most of Malcolm Gladwell’s appearances in this blog involve me complaining about his various writings (such as my review of Outliers), but his recent piece on the NBA lock-out is a gem (HT Rob Brooks). I wish I could write like that. Gladwell argues that owning a sports team is akin to owning a painting - there are benefits beyond the monetary. He writes: Pro sports teams are a lot like works of art.

It’s not normally a good sign when an attempt to skewer measurement of heritability opens with a link between genetics and eugenics via Francis Galton, and Brian Palmer’s critique of twin studies is no exception (HT Razib at Gene Expression). Twin studies are one of the primary methods to estimate the heritability of a trait. As monozygotic (identical) twins are more genetically similar than dizygotic (fraternal) twins, the similarity between identical twins and fraternal twins can be used to infer heritability.

A new book has just popped out - The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey - and accompanying it is the usual epigenetics-related suggestions that Darwin was wrong. Take this from Peter Forbes in the Guardian: [E]pigenetics finally reaches that "everything you've been told is wrong" moment when it claims that some epigenetic changes are so long-lasting they cover several generations: they can be inherited. This flouts one of biology's most cherished dogmas – taught to all students – namely that changes acquired during life cannot be passed on – the heresy of Lamarckism.

In an interview published in 1996, Garret Hardin stated: The view that I and a number of other ecologists share is that ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor specialty. (HT to Rob Brooks for the quote - it is at the beginning of his book Sex, Genes & Rock ’n’ Roll) I agree with Hardin’s sentiment. As I have advocated in this blog before, economics would be much richer, have more predictive power and offer a better description of the world if economists used the fact that humans are a product of billions of years of evolution and this process shaped our traits and preferences.

Sorry for the slightly inflammatory post title - but I went to a speech tonight that reminded me of one case where an economist was well ahead of evolutionary biologists in cracking a puzzle. The speaker was Michael Spence, 2001 Bank of Sweden prize winner and author of the recently released The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (the subject of his speech). In 1973, Spence wrote a paper called Job Market Signalling, one of the main reasons he won the prize.

Bryan Caplan writes: If people envy people richer than themselves, I say we should fight envy, not inequality. A number of people have objected that "Envy is 'hard-wired.'" They're right - but it doesn't matter. … “[H]ard-wired” does not mean fixed. All humans may feel these emotions to some extent. But there’s plenty of room to maneuver. You can become less envious than you are. Make an effort to monitor your thoughts and behavior.

At Gene Expression, Razib Khan writes: [T]he logical end point of a quasi-”blank slate” policy position is the diminution of environmental impacts so that **only genes matter** …. If it turns out that the heritability of intelligence is relatively high in the developed world, then it may be that the Left-progressive project of ameliorating class based differences in access to cognitively enhancing environments has succeeded to a large extent. Barring genetic engineering this is the “end of history” for this project.