Conspicuous consumption and economic growth

April 24, 2012

At this week’s Consilience Conference I am presenting a poster called Conspicuous consumption and female choice: How sexual selection shaped economic growth. The summary: The evolution by sexual selection of the human propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption contributed to the emergence of modern levels of economic growth. Males who engaged in conspicuous consumption had [...]

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The recent evolution of musical talent

April 22, 2012

From a debate between Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller on the biological basis for musical talent: Miller: Music’s got some key features of an evolved adaptation: It’s universal across cultures, it’s ancient in prehistory, and kids learn it early and spontaneously. … Marcus: “Ancient” seems like a bit of stretch to me. The oldest known [...]

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Why do we work less?

April 20, 2012

I am sympathetic to the argument by Robert Frank and others that competition for positional goods is a major factor driving our behaviour. The natural outcome of this is that we should want to work more, or at least more than anyone else. However, recent trends in working hours do not neatly fit with this [...]

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Selfish herding

April 18, 2012

Nicholas Gruen writes: [Y]ou’d think that economics would have a good theory of herding, or at least that it would be a prominent subject within the discipline. Alas, if you thought that, you’d be mistaken. When Oswald looked at the biology of herding, the canonical article was Hamilton, W. D. (1971). “Geometry for the Selfish [...]

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Ridley’s The Rational Optimist

April 16, 2012

A common recommendation for an addition to my evolution and economics reading list is Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. These thoughts are designed, in part, to explain why I don’t plan to add it. The core theme of The Rational Optimist is that exchange, and the associated specialisation and division of labour, [...]

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Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth

April 11, 2012

In The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Eric Beinhocker argues that the economy should be studied as a complex adaptive system made up of adaptive agents, with the economy emerging from the interactions of those agents. It is an excellent book and possibly the best discussion of why the [...]

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The three stages of evolutionary economics

April 9, 2012

Many of the suggested additions to my reading list in evolution and economics came from the fields of evolutionary economics and complexity theory. While my area of interest is sometimes described as “evolutionary economics”, evolutionary economics is a label generally applied to the study of the interactions of firms, institutions and agents in the economy [...]

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Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption

April 5, 2012

Over the last three to four decades, the social sciences have been subject to increasing examination under an evolutionary framework. Leading the charge into consumer and marketing theory has been Gad Saad, a pioneer of evolutionary consumer psychology who was responsible for the first evolutionary psychology papers to appear in any consumer and marketing journals. [...]

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The return of group selection

April 3, 2012

In 2010, Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O Wilson had their paper The evolution of eusociality published in Nature. They argued that inclusive fitness could not explain eusociality, and that competition between groups was required as an explanatory factor. The anti-group selection forces were quick to mobilise. Apart from the many blog posts and [...]

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An economics and evolutionary biology reading list

April 1, 2012

I have added a new page to Evolving Economics with a suggested reading list for those interested in the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology. It is here, and you can see it in the menu bar across the top of the page. The list is a work is progress, and I plan to update [...]

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Teaching evolution in economics

March 28, 2012

At the start of the concluding chapter in Gad Saad’s The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (review coming soon), Saad quotes Kenrick and Simpson as follows: Nisbett introduced the series [on evolution and social cognition at the University of Michigan] by saying that he once thought every psychology department would need to hire an evolutionary psychologist, [...]

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