Razib Khan of Gene Expression has put together a series of charts on changes in trust in the United States over the last 40 years. The trust data comes from the General Social Survey, and shows a slight decline in trust over this time. Besides some interesting results, such as the level of trust in the media, what struck me was the strength of the link between trust and education or vocabulary scores.

Bryan Caplan has a simple recommendation. Have more kids. If you have one, have another. If you have two, consider three or four. As Caplan spells out in his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, children have higher private benefits than most people think. Research shows that parents can take it easy, as there is not much they can change about their children. He also argues that there are social benefits to a higher population, with more people leading to more ideas, which are the foundation of modern economic growth.

As I noted in yesterday’s post, Bryan Caplan has written the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on The Politics of Family Size. Caplan argues that as there are strong benefits to increasing population, libertarians should support “libertarian policies” to increase population, educate and persuade people to have more children and while they are at it, have more children themselves. Caplan suggests that people underestimate both the social and private benefits of having children.

This month’s Cato Unbound is on The Politics of Family Size. The lead essay is by Bryan Caplan, who is on a mission to get people to have more kids. Caplan frames his piece around Julian Simon’s argument that people are the ultimate resource and that increased population is a good thing. He suggests that decreasing fertility should be worrying for those who believe Simon’s argument and he makes a case for libertarian approaches to increasing population (I should note that as Caplan seems to be an optimist, this worry is probably not a case of foreseeing impending doom, but a suggestion that things could be even better).

Last week, the New York Times ran a profile of economist Robert Fogel in anticipation of the release of the book The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700, of which Fogel is a co-author. During his career, Fogel and his colleagues have amassed a mound of evidence on the shape and size of the human body and how this has changed over the last few hundred years.

Gary Becker’s 1976 article Altruism, Egoism and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology is an article that I cite often. Becker’s closing paragraph has one of the earliest statements of the benefits of combining economics and sociobiology. He wrote: I have argued that both economics and sociobiology would gain from combining the analytical techniques of economists with the techniques in population genetics, entomology, and other biological foundations of sociobiology. The preferences taken as given by economists and vaguely attributed to "

Following yesterday’s post on Ian Morris’s approach to biology in Why the West Rules - for Now, below are my thoughts on the some other elements of the book. In general, I found the book to be an interesting and easy to read description of the history of the West and East, and I will probably use it as a reference for that in the future. I recommend the book for this.

Over the Easter break, I read Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules- for Now. Morris seeks to develop what might be called a “unified theory of history” that can shed light on why the West rules the world and not the East. He covers from the emergence of the first members of the genus homo in Africa, through the development of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution to modern times. Morris looks at his question through the lens of biology, sociology and geography.

In my last post, I questioned whether a stranger sitting next to you on a train would be more similar to you than an ancestor from 10,000 years ago and suggested that this could be tested genetically. A few issues arise in testing this. First, as I suggested in the last post, the particular ancestor we choose might affect the result. If an ancestor contributed through only a single ancestral line (of the approximately 10^120 lines), any similarity due to ancestry will be very low to negligible, unless that person is, say, a direct male-male ancestor and has contributed the Y-chromosome, much of which does not engage in recombination (that is, the crossover of genes between the chromosomes inherited from ones parents).

I have just left the Social Decision Making: Bridging Economics and Biology conference, with one of the last speakers being Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers. I will post some thoughts on Seabright’s presentation (and some of the other presentations at the conference) after Easter and once I have read the related papers. In the meantime, the night before Seabright’s talk I flipped through the revised edition of his book (it is a few years since I read the first edition).