Evolution vs. Economics

[Absentminded_Wizard]

I just came across this, the first in a promised series of blog posts by an evolutionary biologist on whether the assumptions of economics are compatible with evolutionary theory as we know it. Given how much Denners like to discuss social sciences vs. hard science, I figured the series might generate some interest.

[Josh_Kablack]

Fascinating subject, but his blogpost #1 says so very little that I can't care.

Bump this in a month or two when he has meatier stuff up.

[Username17]

Fascinating subject, but his blogpost #1 says so very little that I can't care.

Bump this in a month or two when he has meatier stuff up.

+1.

In general, I am usually pretty worried when people start talking about Evolution and Economics together, because historically that combination has been used by representatives of people in power to announce that because the current power structures had evolved, that they were good. There's a really great article written for a popular audience on precisely this in the New Yorker of all places.

But I don't know. Maybe coming at it from the standpoint of evolutionary biology might produce some results. Couldn't do worse than economics as a solitary field has done in the last few decades.

-Username17

[Gelare]

So far that guy has written a combination of self-congratulatory backstory, vague references to unnamed sources, and a deceptive framing of a solution in search of a problem. But, as Josh and Frank have pointed out, there's literally no substance in there anyway, so I don't care.

In summary, +1.

[Crissa]

Evo biology is usually just a way to sell 'just-so' stories 'proving' that girls like pink or other social constructs which break all to hell when you actually bring in examples from historical and isolated societies.

-Crissa

[The Lunatic Fringe]

Couldn't do worse than economics as a solitary field has done in the last few decades.

-Username17

You are referring to the Monetarists?

I have never had the opportunity to take an economics class and don't know much about the field.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You are referring to the Monetarists?

If only. Monetarists have the distinction of looking sane because it's the least stupid of all schools to the right of Keynesian economics. At least Friedman actually produced some real, useful work that is still used by Keynesians.

Remember, not too long ago we had a serious Vice-Presidential candidate (Jack Kemp) who completely believed in a full, non-fractional gold standard. An economic theory only a few steps above mercantilism. To put this into more understandable terms, this is like a candidate for the Surgeon General supporting phrenology. Or a Nobel-prize winning biology supporting Lamarckian evolution.

Economics is in some serious fuck right now, probably because the stakes are much higher than other sciences. So there's obviously a vested interest by certain groups to keep fringe/discredited theories acceptable. Frank said that Economics is not a valid science right now and as much as I think that it could be made to be a real science it's just too hijacked by cranks to be taken seriously. Imagine if it was possible to become the world's top archeologist while claiming with full seriousness that Atlantis used to exist. That's Economics right now.

If you think that I'm exaggerating, look up 'Pinochet' and 'Chicago Boys' to realize how insane the field is right now and why certain people want to keep it insane.

[The Lunatic Fringe]

Thanks for the search terms

Could someone with knowledge of the topic explain this graph to me (and others)?

[Judging__Eagle]

Evo biology is usually just a way to sell 'just-so' stories 'proving' that girls like pink or other social constructs which break all to hell when you actually bring in examples from historical and isolated societies.

-Crissa

I've never really seen it used to prove social constructs. Usually to help explain biological ones.

Girls like pink, b/c our society tells us, and them, that they should. This is a long, and old, social construct hundreds of years in the making.

Infants will stare at a smiley face probably b/c looking at a face means that someone is looking at you, and if you're an infant, having someone looking at you means that a dingo isn't going to eat you. Since someone is keeping an eye on you, and thus preventing dingo-dragging of the infant.

Evo Biology things tend to be based on things humans did, and do, when we were still leaving the trees, and moving to the Savannah.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The 1974-1975 dip was caused by the shock of the Chicago boys instituting their twisted conservative policies, which caused unemployment rates of Great Depression level. Yes, there was a steep recovery but when you actually average it out you can find out that through the 70's Chile had one of the worst rates of economic growth in Latin America.

The 1981-82 dip reflects the international recession hitting Chile unusually hard, mostly because Chile's economy transformed from manufacturing to the marketing/financial centers during the 1975 recovery and foreign investment dried up. You can see sort of the same thing happening with the current U.S. recession. I don't remember the exact unemployment rates but I think they had more than 50% worse unemployment than the peak of the U.S. Great Depression (where it reached a peak of ~20%).

Yes, this period should have completely discredited the Chicago School (and by extension the vast majority of supply-side thought) but like I said certain people have a vested interest in promoting their evil, insane theories. The United States made out like a bandit during Chile's assfuck, even supplying the vast majority of Chile's economic advisers. When the American media occasionally allows news of South American grumbling to pierce the thick shell of 'America is the tops!' bullshit, a lot of the hatred stems from this latest piece of bullshit.

[Crissa]

Girls like pink, b/c our society tells us, and them, that they should. This is a long, and old, social construct hundreds of years in the making.

That may be, but Evo Bio is doing things like saying that boys like sticks and girls like dolls because that's what they did on the savannah.

Except that we just found out humans first developed walking in a forest. And parents and peers are often sources for the doll and stick thing.

-Crissa

[tzor]

That may be, but Evo Bio is doing things like saying that boys like sticks and girls like dolls because that's what they did on the savannah.

Except that we just found out humans first developed walking in a forest. And parents and peers are often sources for the doll and stick thing.

Crissa, there is only one thing I can say with certainty: A slinky is fun for a girl or a boy. (*) Everything else is hearsay.

Back in my time, sonny, GI Joe was the same scale as Barbie and Ken. Of course he had to dress modestly, that ball bearing pelvic region wasn’t a big hit at the beach, if you know what I mean. Before Barbie has her wheels, my GI Joe had his Jeep!

Yes there are some fundamental things that drive what we do, but most of the things we do are driven by either marketing strategy or because we have always done it “that way” (because of someone’s marketing strategy generations ago).

(*) I actually did a mean thing, a passing of the old secrets from one generation down to (well down a couple of levels actually) in revealing to my cousins’ youngest daughter the true joy of the slinky, even though hers was a plastic one … “what walks down stairs.” She had a blast discovering this interesting feature of her toy.

[Josh_Kablack]

The first thing you gotta remember when mapping evolution to economics is that Parasites always win.

[Username17]

Economic Growth is a weird number. When it's low, that's almost always bad, but when it's high that's not always good. What it is is the net percentage increase in total sales of goods and services in the economy. The assumption is that it will over time be positive - because we have population growth and science. Indeed, if economic growth is not positive while population growth is that indicates a falling standard of living. Indeed, because science continues to march forward whether you do or not, chances are even a positive growth in production is going to involve a lot of people losing their jobs and (if you don't have a good social safety net) starving in the street. What level of growth is required to keep your head above water varies from place to place. The United States needs an average growth rate of 3% or so, while the PRC needs an average growth rate of 8%! Partially that's the rather disingenuous methods they use to calculate growth, but to a great extent that's because they have an export and foreign investment based economy, and if there isn't a great deal of productivity gain year to year, it means that the factories shutting down aren't being replaced by as many of the newer factories, and people are going jobless by the tens of millions (literally).

So growth curves take a lot of interpretation, and because of that fact, they have a lot of misinterpretation. But it's not just the actua value that can be construed as good or bad, but the contents of that value. The growth is an aggregate of everything made for the market - even things that probably shouldn't be made like cigarettes. Was the US economic growth in the Bush years good? Well, much of the "growth" was driven by increases in the "production" of newly deregulated financial services, so probably not.

But pretty much everyone can agree that a negative growth value is bad. It means that the value of stuff being produced and sold (including productive labor) is falling. That despite the fact that new and better productive techniques are continuing to be made and people keep getting born and graduating from universities that less total stuff is being made. It means a lot of businesses are shutting down and a lot of people are out of work.

Which then comes to the question of why things go up and down. There is a thing that was described way back when by Karl Marx as the "Crisis of Overproduction" which leads to the business cycle. The basic idea is that the reason a factory is willing to pay you money to make widgets in the first place is that the widgets you make cost more than they are paying you - that's how the factory makes its money. But every other factory is doing that too. You, and every other factory worker collectively don't make enough money to buy up all the stuff that you've all made. And then, once the factory has a backlog of products on the shelves, it doesn't need to keep paying people until those products are sold, so people get laid off and they have less money and less products get sold and it's a whole bad thing. That's a Depression.

Now back in the 1800s when Marx was writing, it was common knowledge that theses crises were unavoidable. Indeed, they happened pretty much like clockwork once every ten years. It wasn't until the 20th century that people figured out ways to avoid them entirely. From 1939 until 1987, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had an economic crisis. Bad periods were marked by short term stumbling blocks that were rapidly compensated for or periods of reduced (but positive) growth.

So the fact that since the introduction of Reaganomics we've been averaging an economic crisis every ten years means that the people calling the shots in the US know less now than Karl Marx did in 1867. Which is inexcusable, considering that back in 1967, both American and Soviet economists knew a lot more. But Pinochet's Chile was really ahead of the curve in economic stupidity, having achieved genuine economic crisis in the 1970s. The 1973 blip is understandable, since at the time the United States was sabotaging the country's economy and supporting a right wing coup (this sort of external interference is another thing that makes reading raw growth charts hard to do). But the 1975 crisis is basically entirely mismanagement.

-Username17

[Crissa]

I find it both sad and hilarious that in the same sentence the architects of the 'Chilean miracle' can say they made things better than any other country...

...And that less than 50% of the population in the country actually participates in the investor-economy and safety nets they designed. The rest are just hand to mouth landless poor.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

I find it both sad and hilarious that in the same sentence the architects of the 'Chilean miracle' can say they made things better than any other country...

...And that less than 50% of the population in the country actually participates in the investor-economy and safety nets they designed. The rest are just hand to mouth landless poor.

-Crissa

The architects of that entire plot are evil monsters and war criminals. Proponents of the Chicago school never tell you that the only way they could actually get the populace to accept this brutal crackdown on workers rights and industry was by political repression and mass murder. If there was any justice in this world, Pinochet and the Chicago Boys would be fitted with oxygen masks, injected with antivenom, and thrown into a pit of fire ants. But no, we have those shitbirds still chillin' and advocating mass poverty.

Anyway, Chile used to have Social Security but then it got privatized at gunpoint. Fuck you, Libertarians.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Evo biology is usually just a way to sell 'just-so' stories 'proving' that girls like pink or other social constructs which break all to hell when you actually bring in examples from historical and isolated societies.

-Crissa

I've never really seen it used to prove social constructs. Usually to help explain biological ones.

Girls like pink, b/c our society tells us, and them, that they should. This is a long, and old, social construct hundreds of years in the making.

Infants will stare at a smiley face probably b/c looking at a face means that someone is looking at you, and if you're an infant, having someone looking at you means that a dingo isn't going to eat you. Since someone is keeping an eye on you, and thus preventing dingo-dragging of the infant.

Evo Biology things tend to be based on things humans did, and do, when we were still leaving the trees, and moving to the Savannah.

I assume Crissa means "evolutionary psychology," which is a field that has been dominated by self-promoters who often ignore whole eras of human evolution and don't bother to do even the basic available experiments (like surveying the attitudes of the few remaining isolated tribal societies) to test their theories. Much of the work of these people has been debunked by those kinds of experiments. But apparently, the people who actually conduct those surveys aren't really evolutionary psychologists, because that name is reserved for people who are wrong or disagree with Crissa.

Fascinating subject, but his blogpost #1 says so very little that I can't care.

Bump this in a month or two when he has meatier stuff up.

I fully intend to update this with his future posts as they come out. This one's unusually short for this guy, so I didn't want to link the whole series at once because the posts will probably get longer and more complicated. And his series about the history of the theory of group-level evolution ran to something like 16 posts.

[PhoneLobster]

But apparently, the people who actually conduct those surveys aren't really evolutionary psychologists, because that name is reserved for people who are wrong or disagree with Crissa.

But you can hardly blame her for acting like that because as it turns out every time any of us read an article about evolutionary psychology in anything outside of actual science publications it is either wrong or something Crissa disagrees with (or likely as not, both).

Because of two things.

1) Science Media is crap.
Science journalists are rarely scientists. Or even competent. Or honest. They LOVE the worst of evolutionary psychology. They also will take aspects of evolutionary and biological psychology, or even just psychology stories, quote scientists out of context, and generally sabotage the actual science to push some buzzy little story they think is "sexy".

2) Evolutionary Psychology's public face is dominated by idiots.
There are a set of "scientists" who fully understand and embrace point 1. They exploit it, they live for it. And a fair number of these guys have all sorts of weirdly perverted conservative, anti woman or racist agendas (or other even weirder agendas). They don't do science they just throw together some crazy fairytale about Gentlemen Preferring Blonds (chained to kitchen sinks in the savanna) and throw the chum to the rubes in the science reporters in the main stream press. They don't even need to publish a real peer reviewed paper or anything.

[Lago PARANOIA]

2) Evolutionary Psychology's public face is dominated by idiots.

Like Economics, Evolutionary Psychology is a legitimate science in theory but it has been so hijacked by popular media that the baseline trust I give to any declaration using that term is 'extreme skeptical'.

Hmm. Any other sciences that people want to throw up there while we're at it? I personally think that it's amazing that neuroscience has managed to ward off the cranks for so long since that, more than anything else (including Evolution) threatens the dualist mind/soul tripe that nearly every single religion in the history of ever builds their fables on. Neuroscience is probably helped immensely by the fact that it produces immediately visible and applicable work that a layman can grasp. Unlike, say, archeology.

[Kaelik]

Hmm. Any other sciences that people want to throw up there while we're at it? I personally think that it's amazing that neuroscience has managed to ward off the cranks for so long since that, more than anything else (including Evolution) threatens the dualist mind/soul tripe that nearly every single religion in the history of ever builds their fables on.

I consider that it's method of defense.

If you are a stupid duality fucktard, then you have a choice between trying to learn or involve yourself in either neurology or evo devo, you pick the latter. Because one of them involves saying "chemical interactions in the brain cause X." and the other is "women are best suited to making me a sandwich."

Even if X is something crazy as fuck, the fact that you have to start by admitting that you don't have free will to even start lying to promote your agenda forces most of the crazies away.

[Crissa]

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Not studying that species become other species. I meant studying evolutionary reasons why animals do things, usually people. Whoops.

-Crissa

[CatharzGodfoot]

There's a really great article written for a popular audience on precisely this in the New Yorker of all places.

I'm glad to see that someone else thinks Steven Pinker is a self-aggrandizing hack.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Not studying that species become other species. I meant studying evolutionary reasons why animals do things, usually people. Whoops.

-Crissa

Social biology and evolutionary psychology aren't all about proving that women should be barefoot in the kitchen. They're about determining, to the extent it is possible, how much certain behaviors are or aren't influenced by heredity. They're also about determining why we display the behaviors we do (regardless of nature or nurture).

The extent to which the effects of individual genetic differences should be studied is a deep ethical question. The influence of society on the results of research is very difficult to determine from within. Despite all that, most people have a strong drive to understand ourselves and each other. Social biology and evolutionary psychology are natural and valuable outgrowths of that drive.

[Neeeek]

You know what the greatest failing in the history of is? The idea that we should all continue to work hard. Or work at all.

As technology's uses and efficiency increases, there should be a reduction in the number of hours individuals work. Really, at this point, half the population could do nothing at all and there really wouldn't be a problem providing for everyone.

In my field, people are expected to work 80+ hours a week, as a rule, which is almost double what they'd have worked 40 years ago. And there is no real reason why this is true. And they make comparatively less than they did back then. Not comparatively based on hours, straight up comparatively.

People work more efficiently than they used to. Research that used to take months takes minutes. Where is the payoff? This idea that people ought to be working to make ends meet has a shelf-life, not because people need to work, but because the amount of work that needs to be done by people goes down with each generation.

[PhoneLobster]

This is going to sound very old school communist.

But the work ethic is a lie used by the aristocrats to keep the working man down.

The 40 hour work week (or less!) did wonders to boost our economy and create a healthy middle class that boosted quality of life for a vast swathe of humanity.

There is any amount of evidence that we have HARMED society, and even the economy, by trying to abandon the 40 hour week rather than make it smaller.

Excessive overtime, unpaid overtime, "casual" workers who work full time hours or more without the breaks and benefits. All these things hurt the economy and society.

But the inbred pig ignorant bourgeois managerial and rich prick class want it that way because.... ??????... profit.

[Koumei]

But I'm not sure how we can actually get it to change, short of a glorious (and bloody) communist uprising. Which I am all for. Though it'd be nice if there was a way that didn't involve assault rifles.