Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can facilitate socialization and learning; and it provides psychological motivation. We discuss each of these features in turn, and develop formal economic models of two of them. Face-to-face is particularly important in environments where information is imperfect, rapidly changing, and not easily codified, key features of many creative activities.Agglomeration, clustering, urban economics, face-to-face

Aspects of Sex Differences: Social Intelligence vs. Creative Intelligence

In this article, we argue that there is an essential difference between social intelligence and creative intelligence, and that they have their foundation in human sexuality. For sex differences, we refer to the vast psychological, neurological, and cognitive science research where problem-solving, verbal skills, logical reasoning, and other topics are dealt with. Intelligence tests suggest that, on average, neither sex has more general intelligence than the other. Though people are equals in general intelligence, they are different in special forms of intelligence such as social intelligence and creative intelligence, the former dominant in women, the latter dominant in men. The dominance of creative intelligence in men needs to be explained. The focus of our research is on the strictly anthropological aspects, and consequently our explanation for this fact is based on the male-female polarity in the mating systems. Sexual dimorphism does not only regard bodily differences but implies different forms of sex life. Sex researchers distinguish between two levels of sexual intercourse: procreative sex and recreational sex, and to these we would add “creative sex.” On all three levels, there is a behavioral difference between men and women, including the subjective experience. These differences are as well attributed to culture as genetically founded in nature. Sexual reproduction is only possible if females cooperate. Their biological inheritance makes females play a decisive role in mate choice. Recreational sex for the purpose of pleasure rather than reproduction results from female extended sexual activity. Creative sex, on the contrary, is a specifically male performance of sexuality. We identify creative sex with eroticism. Eroticism evolved through the transformation of the sexual drive into a mental state of expectation and fantasizing. Hence, sex differences (that nowadays are covered up by cultural egalitarianism) continue to be the evolutionary origin of the difference between social and creative intelligence

Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can facilitate socialization and learning; and it provides psychological motivation. We discuss each of these features in turn, and develop formal economic models of two of them. Face-to-face is particularly important in environments where information is imperfect, rapidly changing, and not easily codified, key features of many creative activities.Agglomeration, clustering, urban economics, face-to-face

Human kin detection

Natural selection has favored the evolution of behaviors that benefit not only one's genes, but also their copies in genetically related individuals. These behaviors include optimal outbreeding (choosing a mate that is neither too closely related, nor too distant), nepotism (helping kin), and spite (hurting non-kin at a personal cost), and all require some form of kin detection or kin recognition. Yet, kinship cannot be assessed directly; human kin detection relies on heuristic cues that take into account individuals' context (whether they were reared by our mother, or grew up in our home, or were given birth by our spouse), appearance (whether they smell or look like us), and ability to arouse certain feelings (whether we feel emotionally close to them). The uncertainties of kin detection, along with its dependence on social information, create ample opportunities for the evolution of deception and self-deception. For example, babies carry no unequivocal stamp of their biological father, but across cultures they are passionately claimed to resemble their mother's spouse; to the same effect, neutral' observers are greatly influenced by belief in relatedness when judging resemblance between strangers. Still, paternity uncertainty profoundly shapes human relationships, reducing not only the investment contributed by paternal versus maternal kin, but also prosocial behavior between individuals who are related through one or more males rather than females alone. Because of its relevance to racial discrimination and political preferences, the evolutionary pressure to prefer kin to non-kin has a manifold influence on society at large

Did social cognition evolve by cultural group selection?

Abstract Cognitive gadgets puts forward an ambitious claim: language, mindreading, and imitation evolved by cultural group selection. Defending this claim requires more than Heyes' spirited and effective critique of nativist claims. The latest human “cognitive gadgets,” such as literacy, did not spread through cultural group selection. Why should social cognition be different? The book leaves this question pending. It also makes strong assumptions regarding cultural evolution: it is moved by selection rather than transformation; it relies on high-fidelity imitation; it requires specific cognitive adaptations to cultural learning. Each of these assumptions raises crucial yet unaddressed difficulties

Tax Advisors and Conflicted Citizens

Thousands of lawyers are involved every day in advising clients outside of litigation. These lawyers counsel clients on how they can benefit from or avoid violating statutes, regulations, and other sources of law. How should we think about the obligations of the lawyer in this setting? This article argues that we should eschew a single prescriptive model of the advisor in favor of a pluralistic conception that bases responsibilities on the salient factors of the context in which the advisor operates. The model of the advocate that suggests that the lawyer take a relatively aggressive approach to interpreting the legal provisions applicable to a client in order to maximize the client’s freedom of action. While an advisor who acts as an advocate may focus on either the letter or the spirit of the law in order to serve the client’s purposes, advisors who act as advocates in the regulatory context often focus on the literal terms of the law to help the client engage in what they is called “creative compliance.” This involves structuring transactions, relationships or entities according to the letter of the law in a way that allows the client to avoid as much of the substantive impact of regulation as possible. An alternate conception of the advisor is as a trustee of the legal system who assumes some responsibility for ensuring its integrity as a mechanism for ordering social life. The trustee is inclined to go beyond creative compliance in counselling clients. She therefore is generally more likely than the advocate to see herself as having an obligation to ensure that the client complies with not only the letter of the law but its spirit. The models of the advocate and the trustee each speak to important features of the relationship between government and citizens in the regulatory setting. Different regulatory regimes may possess different features that impose different obligations on lawyers who advise on them. I analyze the provision of tax advice as an example of a particular regulatory regime that acknowledges the claims of both the advocate and the trustee. Tax advice is an especially notable advisory practice setting because tax advice is a practice setting in which there are powerful strains of argument for an advisor to assume the roles of both advocate and trustee. This reflects the potentially conflicting roles of the taxpayer as a private and a public citizen. The private citizen jealously protects her property and is suspicious of government’s claims on it. The public citizen appreciates that the state cannot function to protect property or liberty unless all taxpayers contribute their fair share of revenues. A tax advisor who assumes an adversarial posture toward the state advances a citizen’s private interest but may do so at the expense of her public identity. An advisor who embraces the model of the trustee may provide assurance that the needs of the public citizen will be met, but may risk providing insufficient protection for the private citizen against state power by resolving all close questions in favor of the government. As the article discusses, this ambivalence about taxation is reflected in the regulation of taxpayer and advisor conduct

Crafting Firm Competencies to Improve Innovative Performance.

Recent interdisciplinary research suggests that customer and technological competencies have a direct, unconditional effect on firms' innovative performance. This study extends this stream of literature by considering the effect of organizational competencies. Results from a survey-research executed in the fast moving consumer goods industry suggest that firms that craft organizational competencies - such as improving team cohesiveness and providing slack time to foster creativity - do not directly improve their innovative performance. However, those firms that successfully combine customer, technological and organizational competencies will create more innovations that are new to the market.Innovation, Research and Development, Consumer Goods, Product Innovation, Production Management, Personnel Management, Capability Building