It would be more informative to see the distribution not based on individuals but on grants. Right now it says, "Of all people who received a grant, what percent were of age X?" If the y-axis label means what it seems to mean. But we really want to know, "Of all grants given out, what percent went to someone who was of age X?" 
 
The ministers of defence example is actually from my pay blog, but thanks for the plug! 
 
So what does the NIH shift mean? It could mean that grants are given to a different style of research -- one that older people are better at. Perhaps in 1980, hotheaded risky pie-in-the-sky research was more rewarded than now, while now the NIH rewards research that requires having a lot more experience to think up and carry out. 
 
Or it could be related to changing demography, as the population was youngest somewhere around 1980. (Off the top of my head, that's when the 15-24 group was the largest % of the pop.) If so, it says the NIH isn't rewarding based on merit but based on political clout, which is an increasing function of your cohort size as a % of the whole population. 
 
It's not as though the superstar sports players used to be 27 in 1980 but are now 37. There, it is based on merit, so a large aging cohort can't use its political influence to get more recognition. (Although maybe they would try to poo-poo the sports where younger people excel and lobby for greater prestige of golf.) 
 
And it's not as though the average Miss America used to be 23 in 1980 but is now 33 (though there is a secular trend upward in many similar cases, just not *that* big). Again it's based on merit -- women from a large aging cohort (like Sharon Stone) will try to lobby for greater attention to cougars, but beauty contests are based on merit. Hard to misjudge beauty. 
 
I can't say how much support there is for the first hypothesis about grants shifting to different styles of research per se, where older people would naturally have a leg up on the whippersnappers. But given that the NIH, NSF, etc., are government bureaucracies, the hypothesis I'd go with is the second one -- that they reward based on political influence more than merit (not to say that merit isn't involved at all obviously).

Also, look at the huge boost in happiness that you get from feeling like you're part of a larger trusting and giving community, whether an extended family or social circle that includes non-blood relatives. 
 
Is it any wonder that the more money-obsessed cultures, such as East Asians (John mentioned Taiwan), are much lower in reported happiness than European ones where people engage in all sorts of non-monetary gift-giving? 
 
It's also fitting that the clueless economist titled his book after Scrooge. Perhaps people buy gifts because they don't want to feel crotchety and miserable like Scrooge!

(i'll keep repeating myself, since it is clear that commenters don't read these boards closely) 
 
On this issue in particular, it's pointless. Everyone believes that the level of violence was more or less static (maybe even lower) back to whenever their Golden Age is (The Fifties, Victorian era, Renaissance, whatever), and then it shot up during the '60s and fell again in the '90s. 
 
No one is interested in the level of homicide through time and space, even though there's pretty good data on it (I even posted the time series plots on GNXP not long ago). 
 
Homicide, violence, crime, etc. -- it's all just a springboard to rant about what they don't like about the past couple of generations. Otherwise the crime wave of the early 20th C would be as well established in the public mind -- and certainly in the elite mind -- as the Great Depression is when we think about banking, finance, and unemployment. 
 
A couple of the icons from that wave have remained as fossils -- actually, pretty much just Al Capone -- but the big picture has been lost. It lasted through the Looney Tunes in popular culture, but not too long after that. Some '90s rappers tipped their hats to the "original gangstas," but again no one knew what the big picture was that they were talking about. 
 
Anyway, point is that no one wants to know about crime or violence; just to use it to grind an ax about the recent past.

That map is a pretty strong signal that people in Appalachia need to evacuate and move to the Rocky Mountains. There's still a mountain boy culture, but they'll actually have good jobs. 
 
But why should people have to leave the idyll of West Virginia just because it's not sustainable? We need bigger subsidies just to make sure our Appalachian menagerie stays intact. 
 
Anyone with common sense, like my mother's side of the family, gets the hell out. Other people need tougher incentives, and running low on food is about as clear as it gets.

This goes for standard of living in general. Look at how good the "poverty-stricken" in America have it: 
 
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/the-economic-condition-of-poor-americans-and-the-rest-of-us-continues-to-improve.html 
 
The most recent data is from the recent easy money binge, so it may be a percentage point or so lower right now, but still. 
 
Do nearly 100% of the poor in India, Bolivia, or wherever, have a refrigerator, stove, and color TV? Do 79% have an air conditioner, and about 75% at least one car?

Aside from what you mentioned about males having to operate better in big groups, if we lived in a society with endemic violence (or the persistent threat of it), you'd see more balance between male and female harshness. 
 
Modern societies have consolidated the legitimate use of violence, so that closes off the primary margin that men compete along, as far as going for the jugular. We haven't consolidated the legitimate use of gossip and rumor, pointing-and-laughing, and other forms of ostracism. So girls are just as savage as they always have been.

the idea that carbs necessarily lead to fat gets tiresome 
 
Oh no one says that, though. They say that it's necessary, not sufficient. Some of the army experiments that Taubes reviews are of men who are not overweight because they're subsisting on a tiny number of calories, almost all of which are carbs. And we're familiar with images of scrawny peasants who were eating only carbs. 
 
But it's rare to find really overweight people, let alone obese, where they consume few carbs. That's a key and necessary step in the chain. 
 
The last few thousand years of human evolution has produced clear individual and group differences above the neck, but not in the gut? 
 
Yep, that's right. The changes above the neck were dialing up something that already had been designed. Say, how much axon growth you have. Or sheer size of the brain. Etc. No one in HBD says that we evolved some completely new lobe in the past few thousand years. Some just have more of what was already there than others. 
 
The gut story is totally different. It's not true that humans were designed to eat grains or even that much vegetable matter -- else we'd have more vegetarian guts. Our primate relatives don't eat grains either. So thriving on grains would have to have been an entirely new design system. Can't build it that quickly; everyone acknowledges that. 
 
Read Cochran & Harpending's book The 10,000 Year Explosion. They go over the distinction between tweaking the level of some really complicated existing system (say, turning down melanin production) vs. designing something new (like an eye). They emphasize that evolutionary change within the past 10,000 years must be of the tweaking kind due to time constraints. 
 
Sickle-cell is another example: tweaks the shape of your red blood cell. The red blood cell itself took muuuuch longer than a few thousand years to fully evolve. The analogy with eating grains is correct: we aren't adapted to eating grains any more than Africans are adapted to malaria. They've evolved a pitiful, slapdash defense against it, but it's too new to have come up with an impressive design to master grains or malaria.

You find these ailments even among hardworking, backbreaking people, though. Google "gary taubes lecture" and you should find a few video talks of his, half of which usually focuses on the biochem and the other half of which usually focuses on the history. 
 
Chilean factory workers are noticeably overweight despite their daily toil. 
 
Also, there's a plausible mechanism for how carbs give you heart disease. They're what drive up the concentration of the small, dense LDL particles, which are the ones associated with heart disease (the big, fluffy LDL particles aren't; neither are HDL particles).

While the diet of any one mummy could not be determined, eating meat in the form of cattle, ducks and geese was not uncommon during these times. 
 
lol, that's why hunter-gatherers suffer from arthritis, heart disease, and dental decay. Forget Occam's Razor by looking for a single dietary change -- like one that would cause tooth decay (answer: not meat). Bunch of vegan queers. 
 
The ancient Egyptian upper class were also obese: 
 
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/obesity-in-ancient-egypt/ 
 
Odd how we only observe that in agricultural populations. Maybe it's those boatloads of carbs that they began chowing down on.

A corollary is that you could find greater sorting among H-G's as the signal of being a high-scorer becomes more private. 
 
Figuring out someone's height, weight, % fat, and BMI -- their deviation from the average, anyway -- is fairly easy. Just look. So, any two who tried to sort on these traits would stand out and be ostracized or attacked. 
 
But where someone ranks on hand grip strength isn't a no-brainer -- it requires making lots of rare observations vs. simply sizing a person up. So super-grippers could sort with lower risk of detection.

I think in an H-G group like the Hadza, the potential for the envious to act violently on their envy is a powerful check on the genetic returns to all sorts of traits. 
 
If the top hunter got lots of (maybe most of) the matings, a mob of the other guys will gang up on him and threaten or carry out violence to "persuade" him to not act so selfishly. Ditto for the guy who's the tallest, smartest, or who has the best business sense (he'll be expropriated by the mob). 
 
Only when a society moves to a "natural state" (in Douglass North's term) do we see a dramatic drop in violence. We also see a sharp rise in inequality, as those who would be ostracized or downright beaten and perhaps killed in an H-G society, are now free to accumulate an "unfair" share of good stuff -- material possessions, matings with the young babes, etc. 
 
That explains why there are much greater gains to these desirable traits in agrarian and industrial societies than in H-G societies. 
 
I think the same explains why there isn't so much assortative mating among H-G's. Imagine that you're a short male and you see the tallest man and tallest woman pair up -- 
 
"Well, look at those two, trying to hog all of the tall genes for their own children, rather than spread the genetic wealth around! Let's have a little talk and persuade them not to be so selfish." 
 
Same goes for sorting on any desirable trait -- Look at those two smarties, savvy businesspeople, athletes, hotties, etc.! 
 
Again, high-scorers can only start sorting once a natural state curbs the power of the envious mob to use violence (or the threat of violence) to redistribute wealth, broadly conceived. That can continue into an industrial order too.

There's very little plausibility for the idea of the masses' phenotype being a lagging indicator of the elites'. Simples case: fashion in baby names. Lieberson in A Matter of Taste shows that there's not really anything to the idea. 
 
When a new name becomes fashionable, it strikes high and low classes at more or less the same time. I think it's slightly earlier in the elites, but not by much -- probably just because they're more in touch with what's hot and what's not, so they can jump on the bandwagon earlier. 
 
Same is true for clothing. Lower classes today don't dress like the upper classes of yesterday, in general. (They do dress more colorfully, though, like elites used to.) Keep price the same -- you still don't see working-class people wearing some variant on a white shirt, dark jacket, and dark pants. Blue-jeans and a black t-shirt is more like it. 
 
And there were other elite belief systems akin to religion -- Marxism, for one. As far as we can tell, that never caught on big-time among the working classes of industrialized countries. Unions, sure. But I mean the larger belief system of how history works, what important forces there are, etc. -- just like how religions explain the history of the world, our place in the universe, etc. Working people never bought into that aspect of Marxism. 
 
I think a better model is that the masses don't change as much as the elites do over time. True for homicide -- elite violence fell much more sharply than lower-class violence over the past 500 years. 
 
So, it looks like the lower classes now are copying the violent behavior of yesterday's nobility. But in reality, the same secular trend is striking at both groups' level of violence, just more strongly among elites. Maybe elites have easier access to information, people to discuss things with, etc., so that the influence these things have on changing behavior long-term affect the elites more strongly.

Heh, I never said we trust them 100% -- but much more so than a foreign aid org!

What a huge waste of time for every individual to try to monitor everything.  
 
Most aid organizations have little incentive to get things right. Like politicians, they play with other people's money and have little in the way of feedback mechanisms from the recipients. Certainly not the kind you get through having to compete and either sink or swim. 
 
Therefore, we shouldn't trust what they say in the same way we trust our car mechanic when he says what's wrong with our car and what we should do to fix it. 
 
Then you read Bill Easterly's books on the abysmal empirical results of most foreign aid, and you trust them even less. 
 
Based on the incentives in place and the real-world track record, aid orgs -- unlike car mechanics -- have to prove that they're competent and effective before we believe them.

The stories about Standard Oil were not bogus. 
 
Yeah they were. Leading up to the Standard Oil case, prices had been plummeting and output increasing. There were over 100 oil companies, some of them big ones that are still around (Gulf, Texaco, etc.), and Standard Oil's market share had been falling as well. 
 
Like I said, this new view of antitrust is virtually a consensus, Chicago School affiliation or not. Here are a few more examples of really big antitrust cases that embarrass contemporary economists: 
 
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28207.html

But the same stock objections seem rather tired after a few thousand years. 
 
And of course, it's equally mind-numbing to keep hearing about how the latest doo-hickey is going to totally revolutionize human nature and turn the laws of the world upside-down. 
 
We'll have to judge things case by case to see what's really revolutionary, and if so whether it has been good or bad. Trumpeting the outcome with few real results in is stupid and by now boring. 
 
Against the backdrop of agriculture and industrialization, it's hard to see what's so radical about an iPhone app that notifies you every time your favorite indie rock band takes a shit.

Here are a couple of predictions of the hypothesis. People would vary in the magnitude of harm suffered if the doctor (medicine man, etc.) screwed up. So even if the probability of a screw-up were the same across patients, the risk (= probability of harm * harm done) would vary a lot. For example, if he gave you a new infection, it would wallop your fitness a lot more if you were elderly than adolescent. 
 
So, the groups who had greater expected risk should be more inclined toward the supernatural than those whose risk was lower. 
 
The elderly, with their weaker immune systems and general greater frailty, should be more religious than the young -- yep. 
 
Women, who could die from an infection during childbirth, should be more religious than men -- yep. (I think this effect is much smaller than the age one because men are also more likely to need battle wounds tended to than women, so this will reduce the male-female gap compared to the young-old gap.) 
 
Others maybe?

Well, the real claim is about having materialist beliefs vs. supernatural beliefs. If a medicine man is part of religion, then I'm not counting their services under the benefits of religion. I mean the supernatural, non-materialist parts of religion that would have steered you away from treatment based on materialist claims. 
 
And sure, doctors (or whoever) could have done some good -- but just ask the i-bankers what happens when you profit, profit, profit, and then fail. You fail for good. A doctor could have set a bone here, given you a purgative there, but all it takes is that one infection that he gives you, or that one kooky fad that he starts adopting. 
 
And that's the upper-bound of their contribution. It seems hard to escape the idea that those who avoided such people would've done better, all things considered.

With neither hype nor utility being measurable, math here is a hammer looking for a nail that isn't there. 
 
You don't get what the point of modeling is. And sure you can measure hype, although no one said there's one perfect way. Take a stock that's being hyped -- there is some consensus estimate of the company's earnings, a measure of fundamentals rather than hype. Now look at how much greater the price is being bid up by the speculators and divide by the number of speculators to get the average contribution of each to the overall hype. 
 
The intrinsic merit and utility would also be measured in dollars -- how much would you part with. Measure it however you want, as long as it's sensible. 
 
In any case, you're wrong to say "no math allowed" just because you can't measure one of the quantities involved. Science would be crippled with no models until measurement was precise enough. You might not be able to decide between models until then, but without models, you have no ideas to test. 
 
And it may not even need good measurement to tell if the model is right. Say one model allows for the thing under study to rise and fall over time, while this is impossible in another one. To decide between rival theories, we only need enough precision to see if the thing rises and falls in the real world -- and no more than that.

OK, so we just make s an increasing function of h.  
 
I think we should also make s an upside-down-u function of i -- you're most sensitive to hype when the intrinsic worth is halfway between nothing and its maximum. If its intrinsic worth is nothing (dirt for food), it's hard for hype to exert much influence, and ditto if the intrinsic worth is as high as possible (sex with a 20 y.o. Audrey Hepburn) -- in those cases, it's a no-brainer and the opinions of others add nearly nothing extra.

I think the feces-shaped brownie and pricey wines are totally different cases. The wine cases sound like an example of goods with a network effect -- you derive utility from its intrinsic worth plus some extra from how hyped it is. 
 
Say each of the N people in the group put out, on average, h units of hype for the thing. Then total hype, H, is h*N. Let the utility, U, be a linear function of the thing's intrinsic worth, i, and total hype, H: 
 
U = i + s*H = i + s*h*N 
 
Where s is how sensitive you are to the amount of hype. 
 
So, what it's worth to you is an increasing function of group size, like a piece of network technology such as a cell phone or QWERTY keyboard. 
 
Basically, we're using those others in the group, or the hype they generate, to better inform our taste or response (to learn socially). They might know something we don't, or they might have a more sophisticated palate than we do. 
 
The feces-shaped brownie doesn't have these properties. There is some extra funny business added onto the intrinsic worth to give us utility, but it's not a social observation / learning thing. 
 
The social learning part may be easier to dial down because we know that the group doesn't always know more than we do / can sense more than we can, so we aren't going to be totally gullible. But we will always know that shit is shit, so the sensitivity parameter there presumably shouldn't be very tweakable.