Yesterday Andrew Sul­li­van linked to a post by Jonah Lehrer on why neu­ro­science is impor­tant, which includes this paragraph:

The best answer, I think, is that learn­ing about the brain can help con­strain our the­o­ries. We haven’t decoded the cortex or solved human nature - we’re not even close - but we can begin to narrow the space of pos­si­ble the­o­ries. We know, for instance, that the ratio­nal agent model of Homo Eco­nom­i­cus isn’t par­tic­u­larly accu­rate, at least from the per­spec­tive of the brain, and that the delib­er­a­tive pre­frontal cortex is often out-​shouted by emo­tional brain areas like the nucleus accum­bens, insula, etc. This sup­ports, of course, lots of obser­va­tional stud­ies that demon­strate that people rarely rely on explicit cal­cu­la­tions of util­ity (or explicit cal­cu­la­tions of any­thing, really) when making deci­sions. The anatom­i­cal details, in other words, can help settle the argument.

Lehrer’s com­plaint against the ratio­nal agent model is one I hear all the time, though usu­ally in less sci­en­tific, more joc­u­lar terms. How ridicu­lous for econ­o­mists to think humans are ratio­nal agents, the com­plaint goes, when all we have to do is look around to see that people, our­selves most def­i­nitely included, are not ratio­nal. Both com­plaints sig­nif­i­cantly mis­rep­re­sent what the rational-​agent model is all about, but inter­est­ingly, it’s the joc­u­lar com­plaint that is actu­ally more cor­rect than Lehrer’s sci­en­tific complaint.

Buried under a head­line that rivals one in yesterday’s NYT for incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity is an arti­cle by Nicholas Wade that struck me as inter­est­ing for all the wrong reasons.

Wade presents the work of Gre­gory Clark, an econ­o­mist whose research focuses on the changes that occurred in human pop­u­la­tions before, during, and after the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is that genetic, and not merely cul­tural, changes are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the increase in pro­duc­tion that allowed Euro­pean soci­eties to escape the so-​called “Malthusian trap.”

Clark’s book isn’t out yet, but Wade’s long arti­cle gives one good rea­sons to sus­pect that Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is at least untestable, if not wrong. (Most of the econ­o­mists quoted in Wade’s arti­cle praise Clark’s data gath­er­ing but are skep­ti­cal of his genetic claims.) But as a new episode in the long flir­ta­tion eco­nom­ics has kept up with biol­ogy, it’s worth paying atten­tion to.