Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms:
Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the door wide open. Could be parent-to-child cultural transmission, could be genes, could be both.
While much of the discussion of Clark's book has focused on his "survival of the richest" hypothesis, Clark himself appears to be equally devoted to demolishing the widely-held view that economic institutions are the key to modern economic growth. He notes that the British people had solid property rights, limited government, and sound currency for centuries before they had their Industrial Revolution. Drawing on early work by Nobel Prize-winner Douglass North, he argues that economic institutions are largely endogenous and relatively efficient, at least when we're talking about time horizons lasting a century or more. If institutional change wasn't the driving force behind modern economic growth, then what was? In Clark's view, the driving force was change within human beings themselves.
We talked about the book here. I will do a full review of it when it finally gets here in the mail.
Anterior Commissure on the evolution of brain size and how we bond:
This bonding strategy, reflective of reproductive/maternal adaptations and neuroanatomical phylogeny, may be one of the reasons that, according to Broad et al., in "humans and certain non-human primates...mother-infant bonding [can] occur outside the context of pregancy and parturition and in the absence of lactation." That is, our heavy dependence on visual input, plus our relatively complex cognitive capacity (including logical reasoning, judgement and prediction, complex motivational and emotional processing, even morality) inferred by our large cortical mass, suggests that primates and, particularly, humans have developed a phylogenetically advanced strategy for bonding with their offspring that is increasingly liberated from hormonal control.
If this is the case, parental behavior has become non-hormonally mediated and thus anyone might parent effectively regardless of sex or pregancy history. Which I believe is already firmly the case. Researchers have already documented a number of instances of alloparental behavior, or caregiving by a non-parent; many of these occur outside of hormonal regulation. Just consider what kinds of advantages that would confer to individuals of a complex and highly social species, such as our own!
Reason interviews Nathan Lewis about returning to the gold standard:
reason: You write that the 20th century gold standard post-war was "a rather crude and messy one, and it had only one tie to gold: the willingness of the U.S. government to keep the dollar pegged to gold." Won't that be true with your policy prescription of the Fed holding the dollar's value within a certain range of gold prices, rather than a true 100 percent dollar equality with a given weight of gold?
Lewis: A lot of the pure gold standard ideas are motivated by a desire to create a monetary system that's government-proof. True, if we all did business in gold coins then they can't lose value. But what happens when the government says gold coins are illegal, like it did in 1933? As long as we have government that sort of thing will be an issue. In the days when banks issued gold-redeemable notes, sometimes they became unredeemable and the government went along with that.
These ideas about government-proof monetary system are noble, but I can't see any system that would work without unseen problems that would cause government to get rid of it. You already have redeemability -- you can always trade paper with gold with somebody. But there will never be enough gold to cover all the paper; there's more paper than gold, [so one effect of 100 percent gold money could be] to make the economy much smaller.
Bora covers a movement to stop Open Access publishing by a group called PRISM:
There are now 2811 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, the seven PLoS journals just being the most well-known of them, with many smaller journals being published by BioMedCentral and Hindawi. Those are the visionaries, the organizations that are making sure that the new business world of Open Access, now quite inevitable, is reached in a way that is the best for everyone: researchers, readers/taxpayers, universities, publishers, libraries, students, medical practitioners, the governments of the world, etc. The old business model is quickly giving way to the new model and the early adopters are experimenting with it and showing that it can be done without too much pain and with universal benefit.
I will get to talking about this myself later, but frankly PRISM sounds like they want a corporate hand-out or government intervention to save them.
Read the whole thing.
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