Prior to his work on evolution Price had corresponded with Paul Samuelson on the possibility of reworking the foundations of neoclassical economics, and, also had developed a close relationship with B. F. Skinner (though this soured as Price rejected Skinner’s Behaviorism Without knowing exactly what Price said in either case, it seems very possible to me that the world would have been saved a lot of grief and stupidity if the other two guys had listened to him.

From a libertarian or liberal point of view, epidemiological treatments of the role of communication in influencing voluntary behavior run the risk of encouraging or enabling authoritarian or social engineering approaches to communication at the expense of free speech. Pretty much anything (good, bad, or neutral) can be epidemiologically treated -- the spread of musical or other styles, religions, political movements, sexual practices, slang, etc. Suicide is obviously a bad thing, so you can calculate its spread and then look for vectors like death metal, goths, black T-shirts, pictures of skulls, etc.

It strikes me that you're talking about three things: A1.) "lack of impulse control" and B1.) "blunted emotional response to negative stimuli" and B2.)"hypersensitive emotional reaction". Not mentioned are B3.) normal reaction to emotional stimuli and A2.) normal impulse control. If you fill out the paradigm: 1. A1 B1 = psychopath 2. A2 B1 = criminal mastermind, cold-blooded but careful. Or, strategic planner. Or world conqueror. 3. A1 B2 = hot-blooded killer (murder 2nd degree) 4. A2 B2 = hysterical, moody 5. A1 B3 = impulsive but harmless: Kramer in Seinfeld 6. A2 B3 = normal The typology seems to be crime-based, so A2 B1 gets left out, since these are less likely to enter the criminal justice system. It's possible that A and B are correlated, but as far as I know that hasn't been shown. If they aren't, my typology is better. The given typology is distorted by the specific practical context it comes from, which is specifically intended to describe criminals. The pure, objective, dispassionate, univeralistic, morally neutral scientist, the Stoic philosopher, the Olympian observer, etc., all of which have valorized in our society, have the emotional flatness in common with the psychopath and the world conqueror / criminal mastermind. What differentiates them? Less ambitious and activist than the world-conqueror, better impulse control than the psychopath and, on top of that, some kind of general good will which is not emotional in origin. But in fact, pure philosophers can be heartless and effectively cruel at times, so maybe it's just that they are less activist.

The DSM-IV is a most peculiar book. I've just glanced at it but it seems to be an incredibly elaborate, Byzantine set of pigeonholes more oriented toward bureaucratic procedure and insurance schedules than to an actual understanding of the diseases or their treatment.

To develop the "overpopulation" angle. What the Vikings, Goths, Mongols, et al were overpopulated with was leaders or elites. Their societies were too small and unproductive to be able to maintain many positions of wealth and authority, but (in part because of their loose political structure) they had a large number of aspirants for high positions. One thing this led to was a high level of internal violence. Another was a high level of external aggression. (Many empires were founded and/or expanded by exiles, or by refugees fleeing their victorious enemies back home.) The other factor that has to be explained is why these people won. One answer is that they often didn't. Many barbarian peoples just disintegrated after unsuccessful attacks and have been simply forgotten. But for them to win as often as they did, they needed to have a considerable surplus of big strong men, which means that at least the top segment of the population had to have been well fed. (I have no idea whether the lower orders in these societies suffered stunting from malnutirtion. In Mongol society I doubt it, all Mongols between 15 and 50 were in the army.) And again, maybe thinning by violence prevented Malthusian stunting. Another equation to consider: militarized peoples minimize the down side of war and emphasize the glory, but everyone knows deep down that being hacked to death is a very bad thing. The combination of the promise of wealth and power and the absence of any alternative to war creates men dedicated to warfare, but there have to be some kind of equation where the lowered realistic hope of plunder, and the increased possibility of a tolerable non-military alternative leads peoples to abandon aggression.

Similar mountain antistate patterns can be found in the Atlas mountains of N. Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, probably Afghanistan and parts of SE Asia. Tibet as a whole used to fit that pattern; probably it was a non-state society up until the very recent Chinese takeover. The steppe nomad antistate pattern is different, and steppe nomads could also be state-formers. Basically the steppe was organized on a large scale only for military attack or defense. I always recommend Black-Michaud's "Cohesive Force" when this stuff comes up. He describes the organization of violence and the structuring of society by feud and vendetta in various parts of the world. Iceland during the saga era was another non-state society. Even in the 19th century South China was only loosely under state control, and it wasn't just the Taipings.

German dominated Jastrow and post-Jastrow societies practiced an extensive form of low productivity (per unit of land) agriculture which made their conquest economically a losing proposition for the Roman Empire. That's a pretty general rule. "Barbarian" areas are areas which are more expensive to conquer and control than the taxes collected on the area can pay for. In the case of the steppe, it's pretty fundamental, since the steppe is just not productive of anything except horses which in turn were primarily military in use at that time, so steppe dwellers balanced the profit of horse sales to e.g. the Chinese military against the profits of plunder, conquest, and tribute extortion. . In Germany there had to be another factor though, since Germany was not inherently unproductive the way the steppe was. Perhaps it was just that Rome was too overextended to be able to conquer and exploit Germany, which would have required a military expenditure plus startup investment for more productive agriculture plus farm personnel to develop the agriculture. I've also thought that in some cases warfare in the barbarian areas, which tended to be lacking a central power enforcing order, had the effect of keeping population down and avoiding Malthusian stunting as found in genuinely overpopulated areas. This might coexist with your theory that only the well-fed elite migrated, or it might not. In any case, the explanation of invasions by "overpopulation" is wrongheaded, because invador have to be well fed and tend to come from thinly-populated areas.

The defeated usually overestimated the numbers in the Mongol armies, partly as an excuse and partly because Mongols had systematic ways of making their armies seem bigger. Mongols bodies were specialized to archery and horseback riding, not necessarily genetically but certainly by lifelong exercise patterns. They didn't walk if they could help it but had very powerful upper bodies, according to report.

I've become totally contrarian about this stuff. A lot of it is vanity, looking good in clothes and being noticed when you walk in the room. Some of it is obsession with food. Some of it might be boredom. People should have better things to do than just eat and diet. Even the health part bugs me, because a lot of it is just fine tuning. The substantial health risks are pretty well known, tobacco, alcohol, obesity, and a few more obscure one (methamphetamine, gang fighting, etc.) Once you've done the big ones you're 90% there. getting reasonably close to the ideal weight shouldn't be that hard if that's what you've decided to do. (I'm not and it isn't). And then, if you're healthy you live to be 85 or 90, which people do in my family. But no one wants to be 85 or 90. A lot of people can't stand the idea of being 40. I don't get it.

Suddenly everyone I know is doing diet and health stuff. That's what I hated about the 70s. I have never intentionally bought organic food either. If it's on the shelves, I might buy it, but I don't look for it. there's really a diminishing marginal return on that kind of thing. And like I said, no one is really looking forward to the years between 80 and 90 anyway. They're not bad, but not worth organizing your life around.

The fact of being smarter has allowed economists to get away with misrepresenting their results as better grounded than they are. Not only are few non-economists able to refute economists' errors, when a refutation is made (for example, of general equilibrium) economists are able to brush it off, since few in the general public are able to understand the refutation either. By and large I'd say that the science of economics is an argument against IQ worship; a lot of economists are failed physicists who dropped down into what they thought of as an easier field and tried to model it on physics. They failed, but they were able to fool people. (to say nothing of the fact that even physics is looking at non-equilibrium now). Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber thinks that economics is a fake science with a real science trapped inside it. There's a lot of valuable stuff in econ, it's just mixed in with the crap.

Something I read recently says that the oxcart and horsecart diffused so rapidly once invented that it may never be possible to know where exactly it was invented. As means of mobility, of course, they were designed for diffusion, as it were. And they were useful in a variety of contexts, and many times superior to the next best method. (Very crude oxcarts were used in the American-Canadian West well into the 19th century, and probably are still used today in some places. Oxcarts are like trucks in low gear, very slow but very powerful and usable on bad or no roads.)

Around 1960 there was a book (Chester Bowles, "The Coming Political Breakthrough") predicting continued Democratic domination forever based on the extrapolation of demographic trends of traditionally Democratic and traditionally Republican groups. We all know how well that worked out. Some Democrats are doing exactly the same thing today. I think that this is a systematic problem for Democrats. Social scientists tend strongly Democratic, and in the end they're biased toward the normal, the average, the predictable, the long-term trend, etc., and blind to the contingent, the unexpected, the transient windows of opportunity, the exceptions, the turning points, and so on.* It's becoming more and more evident that this is bad social science (fat tails, founder effects, fractals, chaos, etc., etc.), but old habits die hard, and most social scientists are both incurious and theoretically unsophisticated. Once the have their paradigm and their tenure they just grind ahead. There have been people all along saying that this is bad social science, but they've been ignored. This is because normality and predictability are the goal and product of bureaucratic administration, and not only do most social sciences have bureaucratic applications and lead to bureaucratic careers, the teaching of social science and social science research themselves have been bureaucratized, so that the various paradigms of the social sciences have been established as bureaucratic procedures to be followed and enforced. And administrators, in theory, aren't politicians. They just decide what should be done and what the ideal end point should be, and they move directly toward that without thinking much about persuading people or overcoming opposition. Democratic leaders seem to decide first what would be best for everybody, and then afterwards hand everything off to non-policy people and say "Here! Convince the morons of this!" Scientists (and administrators, and professionals, and experts) do not dialogue with non-scientists. Populism is the Other of social science. The whole premise of social science is that people cannot understand themselves, but social scientists can. Republicans by contrast are opportunists from business, advertising, etc., and they're always looking for the weak spot, the exception, the tipping point, etc.. This is why Rove with one year of college has repeatedly been able to whip the asses of whole buildings full of Harvard PhDs. No Democrat I've talked to about this has ever shown any interest in this idea, so I imagine they'll continue to retreat and to lose. Obama won as an Eisenhower Democrat and he's governing as one. It took him a full year to figure out that the Republicans would unanimously refuse bipartisanship and do whatever they could to sabotage his administration.Social science apparently doesn't tell you that if you put a "Kick Me" sign on your ass people will kick you, and that's what Obama did by getting on his knees
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Clark, are you sure it was the same guy? In any case, during that decade two major Democratic groups left the New deal coalition. White Southerners were a total loss, and so-called "urban ethnics" became much less reliably Democratic. The Demographics was really irrelevant, because he parties changed, the issues changed, and demographic groups switched. (There was a contrary move of old Republican stronghold like New England and Iowa toward the Democrats). In general, if a party is too weak it will figure out a way to wedge voters away from the other party, and if a party is too strong it will not be able to satisfy all of its supporters. That's the dynamic of the two party system.

Polygamist churches produce a lot of involuntary apostates because they dump their boys on the greater society so that the elders can have the girls. I can't see them increasing a lot. Mennonites have a normal rate of outmarriage and falling-away, I think. There are a lot of different groups of that description, and they don't have a communal lifestyle. I have found out that people were of a Mennonite background a number of times after I'd known them awhile. (Same for Adventists and JWs, not mentioned.) I also think that a lot of Chasidim leave and either secularize or follow some other kind of Judaism. The Amish, the Hutterites, and the Mormons are a different story, but only the Mormons seem to be much of a factor, and they're a missionary religion.

First, Obama isn't left, he's center. Look at the healthcare bill. Obama ignored the left almost completely. The left wanted single-payer, medicare buyin, public option in about that order. and Obama fought them the whole way. He spent months catering to Grassley and Snowe, even though Grassley announced in the middle of the negotiations that he was voting no. He kissed Olympia's fat ass for another couple of months and got nothing. Obama made several mistakes. First, he told the Republicans right at the beginning that he wanted a bipartisan bill very badly. Second, his initial offer was alrady a compromise; he cut the majority of the Democratic Party out of the negotiations at the beginning. Even though h initial offer was an enormous compromise (people compare it to Remnetcare in Massachusetts) the Republicans had to fight against it, since taking Obama's initial offer wouldn't seem tough. But in my opinion, Obama's big mistake was trying to be bipartisan at all. He had hefty majorities, since the Republicans shit the bed last time they were in power, and he should have used his majorities. The Republican Party was not in good faith, and the tiny handful of sane ones (Snowe, Collins, Voinovich, Lugar, Grassley) were afraid to deal, probably because of the fear of the teapartiers and Grover Norquist.

Each gender has its own woo. Pop Social Darwinism is mostly male, and it's plenty woo.

Surprisingly, pro-social behavior is not used by subordinates to obtain benefits from dominants, but by dominants to emphasize their dominance position. This is the largesse model characteristic of many early societies -- patron-client, warrior bands, big man societies, potlatch rituals, etc. By giving you incur obligations which are repaid with submission and support. The submissive are called "dependents", "retainers", "clients", etc. A very small amount of reading in political anthropology would have improved that paper: Marcel Mauss, Morton Fried, Marshall Sahlins, or any of a large number of many others. An ev-psych explanation of this is not to be dismissed, but a game-theoretical look at how large groups can be organized out of independent units would be illuminating too.

You were probably talking to Razib, but Fried: "The evolution of Political Society", Sahlins: "Stone Age Economics", Mauss: "The Gift", and Black-Michaud: "Cohesive Force" are all good.

When the comfy chair comes out people laugh -- they laugh themselves to death!