In a post a couple of months or ago as part of a debate on complexity in aid, I recommended Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior as a good starting point for understanding complexity science. The book predates a lot of the language associated with complexity science (in fact, I don’t think it uses the word complexity at all), but it provides an excellent illustration of some of the basic tenets of complexity science.

As I noted in my recent post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gladwell ignored the possibility that traits with a genetic component, other than IQ, might play a role in determining success. His approach reminded me of a useful paper by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis from 2002 on the inheritance of inequality. Bowles and Gintis sought to explain the observed correlation between parental and child income (a correlation of around 0.

In a classic behavioural economics story, research participants are offered the choice between one bottle of wine a month from now and two bottles of wine one month and one day from now (alternatively, substitute cake, money or some other pay-off for wine). Most people will choose the two bottles of wine. However, when offered one bottle of wine straight away, more people will take that bottle and not wait until the next day to take up the alternative of two bottles.

Mike the Mad Biologist has posted this piece on economists’ understanding of biology. He pulls apart some statements by Russ Roberts and suggests that if economists are going to use biology as a model for the economics discipline, they should try to understand it first. Naturally, I agree with this. Apart from preventing the mangling of biological concepts when using a biological analogy, there is a lot in biology that could benefit economics.

After flipping through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success late last year, I have finally read the book (nothing like over 30 hours of travel to get through a few). Having heard a few podcasts involving Gladwell (such as this), I knew largely what to expect. Gladwell is strongly on the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate and is dismissive of explanations involving the individual or their inherent traits. While he does (at times) concede that nature might play a role, he suggests this is uninteresting and that we pull this explanation out too often.

On Friday afternoon, as has happened a few times, I was asked if I had read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. How could an evolutionary analysis of development accommodate Diamond’s thesis? As Diamond frames his book in the prologue, Guns, Germs and Steel provides an environmental explanation of human development. Diamond states that you could summarise his book with the following sentence: History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

Robin Hanson has had another stab at the oft-quoted paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It. The first couple of sentences of the paper’s abstract gives Kruger and Dunning’s basic (and somewhat amusing) claim: People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

It is a bit over a year since Geoffrey Miller wrote this piece foreshadowing a crisis in conscience by human geneticists that would become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis had two parts: that new findings in genetics would reveal less than hoped about disease and that they would reveal more than feared about genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and race. Now that we are through 2010 with no crisis (that I was aware of - is this crisis still happening in private?

The History and Geography of Human Genes has heavily influenced the way I think about human evolution. Even though it is getting old at a time when masses of population genetic data are being accumulated, a flip through the maps depicting the geographic distribution of genes provides a picture that is available in few other places. It was only a matter of time before some economists grabbed this population genetic data to see whether it could shed any light on economic development.

Economic theory tells us that trade makes the parties involved better off. Through trade, a person can specialise in the activity in which they have a comparative advantage. A person is better off even if they are trading with someone who is better than them at all activities. This is because the less productive person will still have a comparative advantage in some activities. By specialising, an individual can use income from the activity in which they have a comparative advantage to buy other goods and services.