The paper’s main table:

Also speaking were Linda Gottfredson, on how IQ matters lots for everything, how surprisingly stupid are the mid IQ, and how IQ varies lots with race, and Garett Jones on how IQ varies greatly across nations and is the main reason some are rich and others poor.  I expected Gottfredson and Jones’s talks to be controversial, but they got almost no hostile or skeptical comments - it was my talk that was clearly most controversial!  Alas I don’t have a recording of the open discussion session to show you.

While I think I have a solid grasp of the long-term basics, I feel very conscious of all the things I don’t know about who exactly has just said what about which proposals that may or may not have what features depending on who makes what deals.  I suspect the fear of looking stupid on all those ephemeral details detracts most pundits from taking the time to really understand the fundamentals.

Added: Here is one video.  I was on twice before then, but can’t find those yet.

We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy.

So instead of war being conflict between natural genetic alliances, war is sibling rivalry writ large?  Perhaps this won’t hold up to further scrutiny, but it sure is provocative.

The difference I think is parental control.  Because high school kids are legally under the control of their parents, their home schooling is thought to mostly signal parent features, not kid features.  In contrast, since college kids control their own lives more, their home schooling would mostly signal their personal features.  A kid who taught himself college topics at home would be expected to lack discipline and consciousness enough to follow someone else’s plans.  (I avoided this by staying in college while I home-schooled myself.)

Interestingly, this suggests that parental control over kids lives can give kids a signaling advantage.  Kids who do weird things maybe be ostracized less because we assume it was probably their parents who made them do such things.  Being in control of your own life comes at the cost of being more penalized for your weird choices.   What does this say about the best age to let kids run their own lives?

These redistribution advocates usually aren’t very interested in redistributing across the world to poor nations, or across time to poor eras.  So they usually explain that they just don’t feel much sympathy for such distant poor.

Such advocates also usually aren’t very interested in giving money to people who suffer because they are short, ugly, boring, clumsy, unpopular, etc.  Yet a bit of money might go a long way to brighten these lives as well.  Explanations offered for why folks sympathize with the poor but not the short etc. have long left me puzzled.

Garrett Jones has just convinced me that a pretty simple explanation is available: the redistributive urge just doesn’t have much to do with sympathy.   Our ancestors would sometimes notice that some folks in the tribe had a lot more tangible portable stuff than the rest, and those with less would then be tempted to find an excuse to grab a bunch of that stuff.

Would-be-grabbers would look for the most believable excuse they could find.  Sometimes the excuse would be that stuff-holders had violated some tribal norm and needed to be punished.  (Hence our hyper-willingness to believe the rich freely violate treasured norms.)  But lacking a better excuse, they’d fall back on the old favorite, that those with less stuff would sure appreciate each thing more than those with lots.

Our ancestors weren’t in the habit of making up similar excuses to grab stuff from the tall, pretty, witty, coordinated, or popular, for the obvious reason that those people didn’t usually have much stuff to grab.  So our ancestors focused on finding excuses to grab stuff from people with lots of stuff for the same reason folks have given for robbing banks, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Using a unique data set matching administrative and survey data, this study explores trends in [U.S. mortality] differentials by lifetime earnings for the 1983 to 2003 period. … There are large differentials … in different quintiles … Controlling for race, Hispanic origin, marital status, and education only slightly reduces these differentials. … Differentials decrease markedly with age. … In the period 1983 to 1997, men ages 35 to 49 in the bottom lifetime earnings quintile had mortality 5.9 (1.8 for women) times higher than those in the top quintile; in the period 1998 to 2003 this ratio increased to 8.3 (4.8 for women).

8.3!! For a mortality risk ratio, 8.3 is HUGE. For ages 50-64, that number drops to 4.8, which is still huge. Wow. Income, or something correlated, sure is important for health.

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to test whether and to what extent individuals succumb to the conjunction fallacy. Using an experimental design of Kahneman and Tversky (1983), it finds that given mild incentives, the proportion of individuals who violate the conjunction principle is significantly lower than that reported by Kahneman and Tversky. Moreover, when subjects are allowed to consult with other subjects, these proportions fall dramatically, particularly when the size of the group rises from two to three. These findings cast serious doubts about the importance and robustness of such violations for the understanding of real-life economic decisions.

Hat tip to Dan Houser.

Over the past couple of decades, a tremendous amount of attention has been devoted to improving corporate boards. New regulations, along with pressure from big investors, have forced companies to appoint more independent directors—people who have no direct connection to the company—and have tightened the definition of independence.  … All these changes, though, have had a much smaller impact than expected. …

There are ways to make boards proactive and more than nominally independent. Investors need to be able to play a much bigger role in determining who ends up on boards, nominating candidates themselves, instead of choosing among the C.E.O.’s picks. … On top of that, … big institutional investors [should] create a cadre of full-time directors, people whose only job would be to sit on corporate boards and look after shareholder value.

Problem is, investors need to own non-trivial fractions of companies to make this worth their while, and so this proposal needs a lot more concentration among investors than we have now, and probably more than most folks are comfortable with.   In contrast, my proposal to use prediction markets to advise key board decisions like firing a CEO requires no investor concentration.

I don’t really know if Surowiecki likes my proposal, or even knows of it.  He’s never returned my emails, though maybe he’ll see this post.  I suspect that he sees my proposal is too “out there” to befit a respected New Yorker columnist, and so wouldn’t endorse it even if he knew of and privately liked it.

A man sometimes thinks that after all he has done for a woman surely she must know he loves her and he doesn’t need to keep showing it by saying so, giving gifts, holding doors, etc.  Usually such men are in for a rude awakening.  Signals are forever, because we can always change.  Yes, she might have been very sure that he loved her last year, but today there is a small nagging doubt about whether he still loves her.  So he must continue to signal to reassure her.

He might think that since the chance is very small that his love has changed since yesterday, the signal needed to reassure her is also very small.  But in the simplest standard signaling models, the amount that each type must signal is independent of the distribution of types; it only depends on what types have a non-zero probability.  As long as there is any chance that your love has changed, if you don’t signal your continued love she may well conclude that your love has in fact changed.  And you have to work hard enough with your signal to distinguish yourself from someone who doesn’t care as much as you.

Even if you’ve come to work in a suit and tie for twenty years, the day you come in a bathing suit, your coworkers may well suspect that your work ethic has changed.  So you have to wear that suit one more day.