Who You Are

by David Brooks

New York Times
October 20, 2011

Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend’s house, past the 6 p.m. curfew.

He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater.

Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science.

Kahneman doesn’t actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. Thinking, Fast and Slow is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman’s research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it.

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Are Children Selfish?

Wall Street Journal
October 11, 2011

To determine the altruistic tendencies of 3-year-olds, scientists gave each of 150 of them six packets of stickers and said they could give some of their stickers to a kid in a room next door. Kevin Helliker has details on Lunch Break.

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'It's Mine!' The Selfish Gene

Wall Street Journal
October 11, 2011

A 3-year-old is handed six sets of colorful stickers.

"You can keep all of them," he is told. "Or you can give some to a child you don't know. He doesn't have any stickers. Do you want to keep all of your stickers? Or do you want to give some to a child you don't know?"

That was the basic script for a study that took place recently in an Israeli playroom which doubled as a social-science laboratory. A child-care-professional-turned-researcher asked 136 children, aged 3 and 4 years old, to step one at a time into the playroom to shed light unwittingly on a hot topic in behavioral science: Are children altruistic?

It seems they are, and part of the explanation may be genetic, according to the study, published last month in the online scientific journal PLoS One. About two-thirds of the children chose to give one or more sets of stickers to an unknown recipient, described to them only as a child who had no stickers. There were no significant differences in generosity between boys and girls.

Among those who declined to share, many had something in common: a variation in a gene, known as AVPR1A, that regulates a hormone in the brain associated with social behaviors. Researchers found that this genetic variant was associated with a significant decrease in willingness to share.

Until recently, only limited research existed on altruism in children, and what it showed was younger children acting less generously. "Younger children appear to weigh costs to the self more than do older children when deciding whether to assist others and are less attuned to the benefits," says a professional guide called the Handbook of Child Psychology.

But young children all along have displayed greater levels of altruism than what most adults might expect. "If parents think that generosity isn't possible at age 2, they won't try to encourage it," says Nancy Eisenberg, an editor of the handbook and an Arizona State University psychology professor.

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How the Dismal Science Stopped Being Dismal

by Justin Fox

New York Times
October 7, 2011

Listen to the economic debates of the past couple of years, and it’s tempting to conclude that no progress has been made in the field in over half a century. There’s John Maynard Keynes on the one side, arguing for deficit spending to offset the aftereffects of a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. On the other side there’s Ludwig von Mises (his fellow Austrians Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek seem too moderate for the role), thundering that all govern­ment intervention in the economy is doomed to failure.

Keynes and Mises are of course both long dead. But it is the resilience of their ideas that makes studying the history of economics so rewarding for non­economists. As a rule, economists don’t know much about history. So at times like these, anyone with a bit of familiarity with the giants of the past can weigh in on big economic issues with about as much authority and credibility as the credentialed experts.

Alfred Marshall, in 1892

This is one explanation for the continuing popularity of Robert L. Heilbroner’s book The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. Another is that once a book makes its way onto undergraduate required-­reading lists, as Heilbroner’s did, it doesn’t easily fall off. Heilbroner wrote his irreverent group portrait of Keynes, Schumpeter, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and others in the early 1950s while studying for a doctorate at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. (Mises was so marginalized at the time he didn’t rate a mention.) He died in 2005, but his book lives on, with more than four million copies sold.

That kind of success makes a tempting target for imitators, and over the past decade, word spread among economics writers that Sylvia Nasar was at work on a new Worldly Philosophers — something to update and possibly supplant Heil­broner. Nasar is no knockoff artist; a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former economics correspondent for The New York Times, she wrote what is perhaps the best economics-­related book of the past quarter-­century, A Beautiful Mind, a near-perfect biography of the game theorist John Nash.

Now Nasar’s new book, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, is here. As it turns out, it isn’t really a Heilbroner update. For one, it doesn’t make much chronological headway: the postwar giants Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman get a few pages, as does the philosopher and development economist Amartya Sen, who is still alive and writing books. But the major developments of post-1950 economics are for the most part ignored. So, for that matter, are the major developments of pre-1850 economics. Heilbroner was out to provide an easy-to-digest survey of economic thought through the ages. Nasar has set herself a task at once narrower and more ambitious. She has a story to tell, a story of tragedy, triumph and, as the subtitle says, economic genius.

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