More people means more ideas. This concept underlies arguments ranging from Julian Simon’s belief that human living conditions will continue to improve through to Bryan Caplan’s argument that we should have more kids. While I don’t always take this concept to the extent of Simon or Caplan (as I have posted on before), the concept must be right at some level. One person will have more ideas than zero people. One hundred people will have more than one person.

This month’s Cato Unbound has another interesting subject, this time on the decline of men. In the lead essay, Kay Hymowitz runs through the mass of ways men are starting to fall behind women. Many of the statistics were a surprise to me. Take the following: In an analysis of recent census data, Reach Advisors found that childless twentysomething men now earn 8% less than their female counterparts in 147 out of 150 of American cities.

While many have dusted off Keynes during the last few years and asked “what would Keynes do”, it is fair to question whether Keynes would have done anything at all. If he were here today, he might be writing a mountain of blog posts and opinion pieces, but from the perspective of 1930, it is unclear whether he would consider the developed world to have a problem. In his essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (pdf), he figured that over the next 100 years the economic problem might be solved:

There are always trade-offs. From the British Medical Journal in June: We think these results have important implications. They show that overweight and obesity were already common among women who had never smoked in this population more than 35 years ago, its true extent concealed by the high smoking rates in the population as a whole. They suggest the decline in smoking rates in recent decades may have contributed to the increase in overweight and obesity.

I am slowly re-reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man and came across the following gem: The female, on the other hand, with the rarest exceptions, is less eager than the male. As the illustrious Hunter ... long ago observed, she generally "requires to be courted;" she is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape from the male. ... Or she may accept, as appearances would sometimes lead us to believe, not the male which is the most attractive to her, but the one which is the least distasteful.

From The Economist’s Free Exchange: Economists often argue that polygamy ... benefits women because it enhances their market power. That’s because it means more marriageable men for every women. ... But once a woman enters into a polygamous arrangement, it seems she’d have less power. Bargaining power in a household is often based on who contributes what to household production and utility. Each person provides certain services and resources to make the household function and this keeps the marriage balanced.

From Dan Ariely: Last year, the Danish government announced that sterilization, which had been free, would cost at least 7,000 kroner (~$1,300) for men and 13,000 kroner (~$2,500) for women as of January 1st, 2011. Following the announcement, doctors performing sterilizations found that their patient load suddenly surged. People were scrambling to get sterilized while it was still free. Now, it could be that the people who were already planning on getting sterilized at some point in the future just made their appointments a bit sooner, and conveniently saved some money.

A post on Cheap Talk reminded me about an old paper of Bill Hamilton’s on the potential for extraordinary sex ratios. Apart from its importance for the particular topic (Hamilton considered it to be one of his best papers), it is one of the more interesting expositions that what is good for the individual (or more specifically, the gene) may not be good for the species. It also raises the implicit question of how quickly something can return to equilibrium.

Andrew Gelman makes the following observation: Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments: People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient. …. Economists are different from everybody else, because .

A paper that is getting some attention at the moment is a critique of evolutionary psychology by Bolhuis and colleagues, titled Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. They critique a number of tenets of the “Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology”, including the notion that human psychological mechanisms evolved in response to stable ancestral environments or that there is a universal human nature. As there has been some commentary on the general point of the article by some other bloggers (check out John Hawks or Razib at Gene Expression), I won’t spend much time questioning the accuracy of the critique or the lack of concrete suggestions by Bolhuis and colleagues.