1. Marlene Zuk.

My objection is to the assumption that what we did before — say, pre-agriculture — was healthier, or even ideal, and then, somehow, we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and it’s all been downhill. Diamond talks about the ways in which agriculture was bad, and he is right about those costs. Of course, walking upright is bad for us too, at least in some ways, but that ship has sailed. I think a deeper understanding of evolution helps you better understand the futility of pointing to a moment in time as being the perfect one.

2. Gary Becker.

In terms of understanding the crisis, I do not think that more realistic behavioral assumptions would solve the problem. It has always been difficult in rational choice models to adequately account for the coordination of people’s expectations. To some extent, the crisis involved the coordination of irrational expectations…the theory of rational expectations always said that people make a forecast and could coordinate on a bad forecast. That has always been part of the theory, however there is more attention being paid to that phenomenon now.

He takes some swipes at Austrian economics.

Pointers to both from Jason Collins.