Thorstein Veblen has been ranked seventh in a poll of economists on their favourite, dead, 20th century economist. He ranked behind Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Hayek, Schumpeter and Galbraith. His supporters were among the least liberal (in the classical sense of the word) of the survey participants. Given his approach to consumerism and the leisure class, as detailed in The Theory of the Leisure Class, this is no surprise. Following from my earlier posts on the book (here and here), I have finished reading it, with the rest of the book largely applying Veblen’s framework to sport, religion and education.

The media and blogosphere has dedicated plenty of column and blog inches to a recently published study by Danziger and colleagues on how parole rates by Israeli judges vary through the day. From the abstract: We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break.

I’m back on the population bandwagon today, and I wanted to define a point where economists and ecologists often appear to be talking across each other (and where I disagree with both). The best way to delineate this is by revisiting the Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich bet. Simon and Ehrlich entered into a wager in 1980 as to whether five metals would increase or decrease in price over the next ten years.

Belief in evolution is often considered the domain of “the left”. Apart from being true, evolutionary theory provides a ground for opposition to creationists. It is often used to argue that competition can be wasteful and that self-organising systems (such as the economy) do not always operate for the good of society. However, evolutionary psychology has not been embraced to the same extent. Ever since Gould and Lewontin led the sociobiology wars against E O Wilson and others, the concept that evolution shaped human minds has faced much opposition, even among those who otherwise accept that evolution is true.

Given the recent discussion on population that the release of Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reason to Have Kids has triggered (my posts here, here and here), I have been contemplating some physical limits of what the ultimate human population could be. The current global population is around 6.8 billion and is growing at around 1.2 per cent per year. Let us suppose that the population growth rate persists (as I argued before, there is a case to argue that it might increase).

Robert Frank has written a piece for the New York Times on why worrying is good. He writes of the well-known phenomena that after large life changes, people’s level of happiness tends to drift back to where it was before the event. Humans are also particularly bad at predicting this effect, placing far more importance on events before they occur than the later effect on happiness would warrant. The point of Frank’s post is how much sense this makes from an evolutionary perspective.

Following last week’s post on Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, I’ve progressed through some more of the book (to chapter 9). It hasn’t got any easier to read, but Veblen’s interesting observations on conspicuous consumption, beauty and evolution keep flowing. One of his more interesting perspectives is on how costliness masquerades under the name of beauty. Veblen argues that cost determines what is considered beautiful, with the marks of expensiveness becoming known as beauty.

The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world with a fertility rate close to the replacement rate - that is, the rate of fertility required to maintain existing population levels. The two reasons most often cited for this is are high levels of fertility in the Hispanic immigrant population and the high level of fertility of religious people. Even when you control for income and education, religious people have more children than non-religious people (on average).

Like all economists, I am familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons. However, possibly like most economists, I had not read Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article from where we derive the phrase - that is, until yesterday. As a result, I did not understand the extent to which overpopulation concerns underpinned Hardin’s writing (HT: Daniel Rankin). Much of Hardin’s career focussed on overpopulation. He wrote one article called Living on a Lifeboat in which he argued that the lives saved by food aid would only make life worse for later generations (a Malthusian world).

I have started reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. The book was published in 1899 and was one of the earliest books to explore the classical economic concept that people wish to consume more. I am finding it hard to read the book straight through (despite some classic satire), so I will break up my review into parts. This post covers the first five chapters. As I finish the book over the next week or so, I’ll post on the rest.