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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.