Archive for April 29th, 2010

Angus Maddison, 1926-2010

April 29, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; No Comments.

OECD’s Gurría mourns death of economist Angus Maddison. I highly recommend his books such as Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD. I would concede that the data would sometimes be sketchy or fragmentary, but when it comes to historical models there’s a lot more jabber than legwork. It is notable how much the jabberers [...]

Experiments in cultural transmission and human cultural evolution

, filed under Uncategorized; 5 Comments.

For those of you familiar with the formal mathematical models of cultural evolution (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Boyd & Richerson, 1985), you’ll know there is a substantive body of literature behind the process of cultural transmission. In this respect, we have a great deal of theoretical knowledge regarding the three vectors of transmission: vertical, oblique [...]