Category:
Economy
Nov 14, 2013
Alan Greenspan, Human Nature, And Charles Darwin
Chairman Greenspan again uses the wrong model of human nature.Terry Burnham's response to Alan Greenspan's <em><a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140161/alan-greenspan/never-saw-it-coming"><strong>Never Saw It Coming</strong></a></em> at <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140161/alan-greenspan/never-saw-it-coming"><strong>Foreign Affairs</strong>.</a>
Jul 4, 2013
Darwin’s Invisible Hand: Market Competition, Evolution And The Firm
Designing effective organizations using Darwinian selection.The key [to designing an effective organization] is not to strike some (inefficient) compromise between the interests of individuals and their group, but to work with the grain of human nature to bring individual and group interests into alignment.
Jul 3, 2013
Economics Special Issue
The emerging new paradigm for improving public policy.In a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, more than two dozen scholars from around the world have written 13 articles with the important and difficult goal of making economics better.
Jun 5, 2013
Breadwinner Moms: Progress Toward Equity Or Sign Of The End Times?
Few subjects polarize as neatly along conservative-progressive lines as the changing structure of the family.The end of times, it would appear, is upon us. At least that’s the word from the Fox network. The signs manifest as a Pew Research Center report, published last week, showing that mothers are now the sole or primary provider in forty percent of United States households with children.
May 19, 2013
How Fairness Depends On Your Social Status
A growing body of research indicates that we do not hold people of different social status to the same standards.A growing body of research indicates that we do not hold people of different social status to the same standards: What counts as fair for a high-status individual does not necessarily count as fair for a low-status individual.
Mar 6, 2013
To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology
Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future.
Feb 11, 2013
Three Waves of Evolutionary Thought
What Darwin called “this view of life” has indisputably transformed the way we think about the living world.A renewed effort to rethink humanity from an evolutionary perspective didn’t gather steam until late in the 20th century. At first the enterprise was regarded as controversial but by now it has become part of mainstream science, which can be seen by perusing the academic literature.
Sep 1, 2012
The Evolution of Fairness
Can examining how inequality began in a hunter-gatherer society teach us how to fairly share the costs and consequences of how we use diminishing natural resources?
Feb 11, 2012
Evolution Begins to Occupy Center Stage in Economic Debates
A flurry of recent activity indicates that evolution is beginning to occupy center stage in economic debates—and not a moment too soon.A flurry of recent activity indicates that evolution is beginning to occupy center stage in economic debates—and not a moment too soon.
Feb 11, 2012
Five Short Questions to Gerd Gigerenzer
How can one make better inferences with less knowledge?We have shown that heuristics are often more accurate and faster in uncertain worlds than optimization methods such as multiple regression and non-linear algorithms such as neural networks. The reason is that simple models tend to be more robust than complex models with many free parameters, and are less hurt by overfitting.
Feb 10, 2012
Turning Evolutionary Science into a Political Narrative
A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of GovernmentThe Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government does a remarkably good job of distilling the science into powerful and appealing metaphors, such as the economy as like a garden that requires tending, rather than a machine that runs itself.