Is geography destiny?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Lay economic reasoning: An integrative review and call to action. Amit Bhattacharjee and Jason Dana review the literature on lay economic reasoning. They note that lay people tend to believe sellers are more likely to benefit from transactions than buyers. This tendency appears to be rooted in “mercantilism” – the assumption that receiving money in an exchange is better than receiving goods and services.

Twitter thread by Alex. Using data from the NWEA (a non-profit that tests children’s reading and math ability), Alex examines how scores change with age. He finds that both the mean and the variance of scores increase at higher grades. He also finds that students’ overall progress varies substantially by ability. Those at the first percentile don’t meaningful improve their scores after the fifth grade.

Both the average and spread of math scores increase at higher grades.

Genetic traces of ancient demography. In a classic article from 1998, Henry Harpending and colleagues argue that genetic evidence is inconsistent with the multiregional model of modern human origins. They note that the amount variation at certain neutral loci implies that humans had an effective population size during the Pleistocene (which ended 11,700 years ago) of around 10,000.