Do genes matter more under capitalism?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week.

US Food Aid and Civil Conflict. Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian examine the impact of US food aid on conflict in receiving countries. Exploiting over-time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in US wheat production, they find that such shipments increase the frequency and duration of civil conflicts but do not affect inter-state conflicts. Armed factions steal and sell aid shipments or use them to feed their fighters.

When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media. Leonardo Bursztyn and colleagues examine how much American college students would have to be paid to deactivate their accounts. In experiments, they find that students are willing to pay to deactivate their account so long as most others do the same. This suggests that social media has large negative externalities.

An endless cycle of ignorance is the consequence of not offering classes on IQ and human intelligence. Louis Matzel reports findings from an open-ended survey about human intelligence that he gave to 230 psychology students at Rutgers University. Respondents knew very little about human intelligence: they believed that IQ tests are biased, don’t measure intelligence and are designed to support preconceptions about group differences.