A new journal that looks interesting.
emergent orders are unplanned and exhibit orderly development trajectories, but only some of them are spontaneous orders in the sense of providing easily interpreted feedback to order participants. Examples of emergent orders that are not spontaneous in the sense of Hayek or Polanyi are civil society, the ecosystem, and human cultures.
That is from the editorial introduction by David Emanuel Andersson. Pointer from Jason Collins.
This week’s links from Jason Collins are interesting, as usual. For example, Alison Gopnik writes,
When psychologists first started studying twins, they found identical twins much more likely to have similar IQs than fraternal ones. They concluded that IQ was highly “heritable”—that is, due to genetic differences. But those were all high SES twins. Erik Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues discovered that the picture was very different for poor, low-SES twins. For these children, there was very little difference between identical and fraternal twins: IQ was hardly heritable at all. Differences in the environment, like whether you lucked out with a good teacher, seemed to be much more important.
If you read this paragraph, you may pick up inferences that I suspect are not supported by the data. One inference is that IQ is not heritable among low-SES children. I do not know much about genetics, but it is hard for me to see how a characteristic can be heritable at one SES level but not at another. Yes, I can see how a characteristic can be affected by the environment at one income level but not another.
The other inference is that what accounts for the difference in IQ between two low-SES children could be having “lucked out with a good teacher.” There is no evidence that teachers have anything to do with this.
Both states and corporations are, at some fundamental level, cooperative enterprises. Yes, political elites and corporate managers are motivated by personal gain, power, status, and prestige. And that even can be the majority of their motivations. But in addition there has to be something else, at least some of these elites (whether political or economic) some of the time must behave in a cooperative prosocial manner, that is, putting the common interest of their state or corporation above their private interests. When they stop doing that, states crumble and corporations go bankrupt.
Pointer from Jason Collins. I would add that as a business grows, it changes as its size exceeds the Dunbar number. Once there are more than 150 people, you have strangers dealing with one another within the business, and the dynamics change. In order to maintain prosocial behavior, you need a lot more formal rules at that point, and veterans of the smaller, informal company often cannot adjust.
Having said that, the formal rules help to make the company more robust. So I think it takes more than a few rogues to cause a breakdown in the company. It takes a more systemic cultural decline.
He makes three interesting points. (Pointer from Jason Collins)
I note many writers I otherwise admire, usually libertarian leaning, are quite averse to the Easterlin conclusion, thinking it will lead us to adopt a luddite policies because growth would not matter in such a world
I am one of those libertarian writers who is averse to happiness research, but my aversion holds regardless of the conclusions reached. Happiness research embodies the claim that you, the researcher (I am not referring here to Falkenstein), can know more than me, the subject, about what gives me happiness. I believe that claim is false. Further, from a libertarian perspective, I believe that claim almost surely will lead you to devalue my liberty.
When an economist tells you a symmetric ovoid contains a highly significant trend via the power of statistics, don’t believe them: real effects pass the ocular test of statistical significance (ie, it should look like a pattern).
See his charts to understand his point. Putting Falkenstein’s point in more colloquial language, I would say that when the data consists of a blob of points, just because the computer can draw a line of best fit does not mean that you have demonstrated the existence of a meaningful linear relationship.
evolution favors a relative utility function as opposed to the standard absolute utility function, and the evidence for this is found in ethology, anthropology, and neurology. Economists from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and even Keynes focused on status, the societal relative position, as a motivating force in individual lives
Rory Sutherland makes a valid point about education.
while we may want everyone else to be equally healthy (bee), we want our children to receive a better education than our neighbour’s children (chimp). If parents were more honest about their chimp heritage, they might also admit that, when choosing a school, they care less about the staff or the facilities (something government might solve) than about placing their children within an appropriate peer-group (something it can’t).
Pointer from Jason Collins. I agree that status-seeking plays a role in education, but I disagree that it plays no role in health care.
However, Sutherland goes overboard in his description of life as “Darwinist.” He focuses on status as a zero-sum game. The point that economists make is that while this game is going on, there is also a positive-sum game, involving trade, innovation, and growth.
That is the prediction of Jason Collins.
As those with higher fertility are selected for, the “high-fertility” genotypes are expected to come to dominate the population, causing the fertility rate to return to its pre-shock level. We show that even with relatively low levels of genetically based variation in fertility, there can be a rapid return to a high-fertility state, with recovery to above-replacement levels usually occurring within a few generations. In the longer term, this implies that the proportion of elderly in the population will be lower than projected, reducing the fiscal burden of ageing on developed world governments.
The BBC covers a study that suggests that social status depends on grandparents, not just parents.
“It may work through a number of channels including the inheritance of wealth and property, and may be aided by durable social institutions such as generation-skipping trusts, residential segregation, and other demographic processes.
Pointer from Jason Collins. He also has more.
My first thought is “mean reversion.” That is, suppose that you have two genetic types–rich and poor, call them R and P. Suppose that R and P each have children. Some of R’s children get unlucky and some of P’s children get lucky. Now the grandchildren of R still carry the R gene, so unless they are unlucky, they will revert to being rich. And conversely for the grandchildren of P. So you could observe a strong grandparent effect, based on mean-reversion and genetics alone.
But I have not read the paper.