the logic of life

As you may imagine, I enjoy reading the popular press books and articles describing new economic research. Some are better than others. Most recently, I finished Tim Hartford's The Logic of Life, which is amongst the best popular press economics books (also amongst the best are Freakonomics and Super Crunchers). Some of the topics include game theory and poker, the market for marriage and divorce, the job market (and why your lazy boss is paid so much), rational racism (rational not good), and why subsidizing city living would be good for the environment. It's worth a read.

Read some reviews here. Buy it here.

mystery of monogamy

Thus far, all of the papers that I've included on this blog have been empirical papers, in which the authors have used data to answer their questions. Not all papers consider data. Many papers develop mathematical models of behavior to predict how people/institutions behave. This is the field of economics that I specialize in. Admittedly, however, these "theory" papers are usually more interesting to economists than to the general population.

"The Mystery of Monogamy" -- which appeared in the American Economic Review earlier this year -- is one theory paper that may appeal to the general population. Eric Gould, Omer Moav , and Avi Simhon (all three at Hebrew University, Jerusalem) attempt to understand "why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny." They suggest that in traditional societies, what mattered was the number not the quality of children. In developed societies the opposite is true: quality matters. Therefore, in developed societies women are valued more for the quality (not quantity) of their children. This causes men to prefer attracting one high-quality women, rather than multiple average women.

The Mystery of Monogamy