In his new book A Farewell to Alms, Greg Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, contends that “[t]he New World after the Neolithic Revolution offered economic success to a different kind of agent than had been typical in hunter-gatherer society: Those with patience, who could wait to enjoy greater consumption in […]

Greg Clark’s broadly Darwinian explanation for the Industrial Revolution, A Farewell to Alms, should be hitting bookstores in the next few weeks. As previously mentioned, Clark argues that in pre-Industrial Britain, the “survival of the richest” was the norm, and so today’s Brits are largely the descendants of past elites. He says this process created […]

Was the drop in crime causes by a drop in lead exposure? This Wash Post piece does a nice job reviewing a few recent studies on this issue, focusing mostly economist Rick Nevin’s cross-country work. From the abstract to his key paper: This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent […]

We all know that homo economicus fails as a complete description of human behavior, as the new field of behavioral economics makes abundantly clear. So while the homo economicus model does a good job explaining things like the interaction of supply and demand, the random walk nature of stock prices, and photo #16, it misses […]

Recently, I’ve posted on economists’ attempts to use genetics to explain long-term economic growth. So far, I’ve talked mostly about data. Today, theory gets its due. Oded Galor (Brown) and Omer Moav (Hebrew U and Royal Holloway) have a simple story: The agricultural revolution set off a process of rapid human evolution that itself created […]

Economists Wacziarg (Stanford) and Spolaore (Tufts) are using Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic distance data. They find that countries that are genetically different from the rest of humanity tend to be poorer, even after controlling for lots of popular variables (like geography and colonial experience, two recent favorites). Their explanation: It’s easier to get ideas from people who […]

Economic historian Greg Clark is arguing that the British may be “Genetically Capitalist.” Tyler Cowen has his doubts. One of piece of evidence that should grab the attention of economists: The long term decline in inflation-adjusted interest rates over the past few centuries: All societies before 1400 for which we have sufficient evidence to calculate […]