Having put it in the top ten books I had read in 2010 despite being only halfway through it then, I feel somewhat obliged to offer a review of Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (or more accurately, some observations). I have now finished it, and I am pleased to say that it can stay in the Top 10 and that I don’t intend to make any late retractions. Voyaging is the first volume of a two-part biography.

I have just listened to the recent Econtalk podcast with Arnold Kling on his new “paradigm”, Patterns of Sustainable Specialisation and Trade (PSST). On first thoughts, I am not convinced about the idea. If anything, the paradigm appears to need a lot more development - although reading Kling’s blog posts, he may agree. I felt that many of the stories involved too much hand-waving and not enough empirical backbone to be convincing.

As I posted a couple of months ago, a higher level of violence in a society may lead women to prefer more masculine appearing men. In such an environment, picking the healthiest appearing male is more important than the level of parental care the woman expects the man to give. The latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior has an article examining the link between female preference and violence, with Jeffrey Snyder and colleagues examining whether a woman’s fear of crime might be a predictor of her preference for “aggressive and formidable” mates.

Most of my interest in the use of biology in economics concerns humans being subject to the forces of selection like any other biological organism. With this starting point, it is natural to use many of the tools, models and methods of analysis that evolutionary biologists use. But sometimes those models and tools are of value without the biological underpinnings. Evolutionary economics is one area where this is done, with the concepts of selection applied at the level of firms (as discussed in my last post).

As my research intersects economics and evolution, I have found it inconvenient that the term “evolutionary economics” is already taken. Evolutionary economics is an area of economics inspired by biological processes, with interactions between firms, industries and institutions examined using evolutionary methods. The economics is evolutionary by analogy. I find the ideas in evolutionary economics attractive, which is natural given my interest in complex systems, out-of-equilibrium processes and the dynamic, emergent properties of economies.

An economist typically bases their economic models on an assumption that the economy is composed of agents who gain utility from consumption. From the beginning of the model, they take consumption to be the objective and all decisions by the agents aim to maximise their level of consumption within the budget constraint that they face. While I recently posted on how most economists’ fixation on consumption might be biologically justified, I would like to approach the issue from another angle.

For several years, I have been relatively convinced that beyond a certain threshold, parenting does not matter. This belief came from two sources. The first was Judith Rich Harris’s book The Nurture Assumption in which she effectively argues that the children are socialised by other children, not their parents. The second was the concept that the variation attributable to genetic factors increases as you age (from memory I first read this in Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture - called Nature via Nurture in Australia).

Since Bill Easterly stuck his head above the parapet last week and referred to complex systems in response to Paul Collier, the “complexity” community has been up in arms. In a quick reference to complexity, Easterly wrote: A popular topic in the aid blogosphere this week was not about Haiti or Ivory Coast or south Sudan but about complex systems, i.e. systems that cannot be reduced to a simple mathematical or statistical model, where actions often have unintended effects.

Any theory that seeks to invoke human evolution as a factor in the Industrial Revolution needs to deal with how quickly humans can evolve and whether this rate of change is fast enough to be a factor. I was recently browsing Gregory Clark’s web-page for his book A Farewell to Alms and came across a video of a seminar in 2007 involving Clark, Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen. There were some interesting points throughout the session (and it is worth watching it all) but one interesting point was an argument by DeLong on the pace of evolution.

Having recently discussed cross-country variation in time preference and the pace of life, I have found it interesting reconciling the conclusions. Richer countries tend to have residents with lower rates of time preference and a higher pace of life. Wang, Rieger and Hens noted this relationship and showed that pace of life is strongly and positively correlated with propensity to wait, an indication of time preference. The residents of the country where everyone is scurrying around have a higher ability to delay gratification.