Micha Elyi is on the right track. The wealthiest societies are ones where men transmit a lot of wealth to women to engage in feminine conspicuous consumption. In neighborhoods where a sizable fraction of money is transmitted from women to men (e.g, from prostitutes to pimps so they can dress up) are not known for impressive wealth creation.

The current policy debate conventional wisdom is that anybody who points out that Mr. MaGoo is a bad driver because he doesn't wear glasses is an evil sightist.

You see something like this with hiring of sports coaches and managers. The superstars generally don't get coaching jobs, and when they do get them, they find them frustrating. Jerry West, for example, was a winning coach with the Lakers, but trying to beat into the heads of average players things that were totally obvious to him was frustrating for him, so he switched to the general manager job where he got to select players. In baseball, the ideal background for being a manager is believed to have been a marginally talented major leaguer at a difficult position: a journeyman catcher or utility infielder.

I think an instructive analog for Rwanda is Mexico. Both were invaded by taller people about 500 years ago. Despite twenty or so generations of intermarriage, taller people still tend to rule there. (E.g., the previous president of Mexico is 6'5"). In my movie review of "Hotel Rwanda," I explained a likely mechanism for these patterns: Unfortunately, the screenplay aims at self-absorbed white liberals who think all Africans look alike and that white racism is the root of all evil. The script even claims that it's merely a white myth that Tutsis tend to be taller than Hutus, asserting that the Belgian imperialists arbitrarily assigned those identities to random Rwandans. Yet, soon the Hutu Power radio station is broadcasting the prearranged code to begin exterminating the Tutsis: "Cut down the tall trees." Rwanda's true history is more instructive. The medium-height Bantu Hutu farmers arrived 2,000 years ago and drove the pygmoid hunter-gatherer Twa into the forests. Then, about the time of Cortez, the tall, slender Tutsi herdsmen invaded from the north and, according to Gary Brecher, the acerbic "War Nerd" columnist, "claimed all the land, on the legal basis that if you objected they'd kill you." The Tutsi rulers treated the Hutu peasantry with the same contempt the Norman lords display toward the Saxon yeomen in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Commenting on Rwanda's "indigenous racism," Congo-born sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe reported that the Tutsis, like other aristocracies, saw themselves as "astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel." The Tutsi ascendancy resembled the white pre-eminence in Latin America. Intermarriage was frequent, yet physical differences between the classes endured, just as they have in Mexico, where despite five centuries of intermarrying, the elite remains much taller and fairer than the masses. The trick is that Mexico's most successful short, dark men often wed tall, blonde women and have more European-looking offspring, thus replenishing the caste system. Likewise, in "Hotel Rwanda," Cheadle's ultra-competent Hutu executive is married to a Tutsi beauty who is taller and fairer than he is. (She's played by Sophie Okonedo, whose mother is a Jewish Englishwoman.) Prudent imperialists divide and rule, employing as their local surrogates a well-organized minority like the Tutsis in Belgian Rwanda or the Sunnis in British Iraq.

"Other things being equal, it is better to give a benefit to a sibling than a nephew, a nephew than a cousin, and so on." But what if your sister asks you to give a benefit to her son?

"If your sister uses the resources herself she can make more nephews." Okay, but I'm not clear on real world examples where this distinction is all that distinct. Say your sister confides in you that her marriage is stressed by the financial and energy burdens of providing and entertaining for her young daughter, your niece. You offer to take little Jenny off their hands for a week and you take her to Disneyland. Nine months after her trip to Disneyland, little Jenny gets a baby brother. Did you give the benefit to your sister or your niece or your new nephew?

Synaesthesia is interesting because it's a qualitative difference between individuals, not just a quantitative one. Vladimir Nabokov was a lifelong synaesthete. He was also a math prodigy at age 5 -- he could calculate logarithms in his head -- but then he got a severe fever and that skill vanished. Nabokov is a good example of the genius as a well-rounded, successful, happy man. But he had one lack: he couldn't hear music at all. I wonder if his synaesthesia and amusicality were related?

Something to keep in mind is that when Edward O. Wilson worries about extinction rates, he's worrying about extinction of beetles and other small, creepy animals. To Wilson, the Creator has a most ordinate fondness for beetles. When most other people hear Wilson worry about extinction rates, they worry about giant pandas and condors and the like. But, those are things that need a lot of habitat room.

Thanks. Most informative. How much do doctors get paid in the U.S. versus in European countries? How about nurses?

Thanks. This is a very interesting topic with very little data available, so thanks for spotting this. Do any of the on-going longitudinal studies such as NLSY-79 or NLSY-97 break out colleges? By the way, Tennessee is one of the lowest cost of living states in the country, so most people who move out of state will wind up making more money but they won't necessarily have a higher standard of living. Cost of living differences between places haven't traditionally been accounted for in studies (although cost of living differences over time have always been adjusted for over the last 30 or 40 years), but the cost of land is becoming a big enough component in the cost of living that social scientists will need to start thinking about it.

The impact of college on career networking should be studied quantitatively as well, as should the impact of college choice on marriage. Everybody has an opinion on these subjects, but nobody seems to have any data.

The original Zionists didn't intend for Israel to be a particularly rich country, they intended for it to be a normal country, with a lot of farmers, soldiers, and other low-paid people. They strove hard to change Jewish culture from being a middle-man minority culture to a less elite, less intellectual, and less capitalist one suitable for being a majority culture. To some extent, they succeeded.

I recall Freeman Dyson arguing for the advantage in intellectual productivity of a world with multiple semi-permeable languages back in the 1970s.

"The manipulative con-man. The guy who lies to your face, even when he doesn’t have to. The child who tortures animals. The cold-blooded killer." I used to see a distinction between "sociopaths" (#1) and "psychopaths" (#3). It seemed helpful, so why has it disappeared?

It seems like it would be a useful study to look at the genes of people who respond to different psychiatric drugs. How are people whose, say, depression is alleviated by Prozac different genetically from people whose depression didn't respond to Prozac but was then alleviated by Wellbutrin? Somewhat similarly, it's common for a psychiatrist to arrive at a diagnosis of depression, then try different anti-depression drugs: e.g., start with Prozac, and if that doesn't work, try Wellbutrin, then try something else. (Or maybe the depression goes away by itself -- it's hard to tell [although not always impossible]). Or, sometimes one drugs works for a variety of diagnoses: Prozac sometimes works for depression, sometimes for OCD, sometimes for whatever.

Thanks. Very helpful. I was doing some research recently on twins and I realized that there a quite a few pairs where nobody seems to be sure if they are identical or not -- for example, the 7-foot-tall Lopez twins and the 7-foot Collins twins in the NBA, or the Olsen twins of TV fame. This can help explain this phenomenon of twins who seem too similar to be fraternal but not quite similar enough to be identical.

Why wouldn't some mental illnesses be caused by infections? For example, if you get three or four colds per years, and they average 10 days each, then you are metabolically sick ten percent of the time, the same figure Razib cites for the prevalence of mental illness. People who currently have colds are less likely to conceive children and, in Malthusian societies, are more likely to die soon, such as by developing pneumonia or by lacking the endurance to catch game or get all of the harvest in. So, why haven't colds been eliminated by natural selection? Because cold germs are co-evolving along with defenses against them. So, why couldn't some mental illnesses be caused by infections? It's commonly observed that psychiatrists are more prone to mental illness than the average -- perhaps they get some mental illnesses from shaking hands with or being sneezed upon by their patients?

How do we know this gene variation doesn't affect the immune system and thus makes some people more or less resistant to infections that affect the mind? There are a lot of possible examples of infections affecting the mind: Tuberculosis, for example, was widely believed in the Romantic era to make poets and painters more brilliant and unstable. The theory of Natural Selection was dreamed by Alfred Russel Wallace during a fever. Bow do we know that other, still unknown infections don't play a role in mental illnesses?

Thanks. Very helpful. Please allow me to suggest that you put a concrete example or two near the beginning of essays to snag readers. I'm glad I read the whole thing, and the arrowhead example at the end was illuminating, but the beginning was a little abstract.

Ah, so those pictures explain why De Vany put out that ridiculous paper claiming that performance-enhancing drugs didn't have much effect on all the homers that suddenly got hit in big league baseball. He's on the juice, too!