A Program for At-Risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science

Improving the academic performance of at-risk high school students has proven difficult, often calling for an extended day, extended school year, and other expensive measures. Here we report the results of a program for at-risk 9th and 10th graders in Binghamton, New York, called the Regents Academy that takes place during the normal school day and year. The design of the program is informed by the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and learning, in general and for our species as a unique product of biocultural evolution. Not only did the Regents Academy students outperform their comparison group in a randomized control design, but they performed on a par with the average high school student in Binghamton on state-mandated exams. All students can benefit from the social environment provided for at-risk students at the Regents Academy, which is within the reach of most public school districts

From Harm to Robustness: A Principled Approach to Vice Regulation

John Stuart Mill’s harm principle maintains that adult behavior cannot justifiably be subject to social coercion unless the behavior involves harm or a significant risk of harm to non-consenting others. The absence of harms to others, however, is one of the distinguishing features of many manifestations of “vices” such as the consumption of alcohol, nicotine, recreational drugs, prostitution, pornography, and gambling. It is with respect to vice policy, then, that the harm principle tends to be most constraining, and some current vice controls, such as prohibitions on drug possession and prostitution, violate Mill’s precept. In the vice arena, we seem to be willing to accept social interference with what Mill termed “self-regarding” behavior. But does that willingness then imply that any social intervention into private affairs is justifiable, that the government has just as much right to outlaw Protestantism, or shag carpets, or spicy foods, as it does to outlaw drugs? In this paper I argue that advances in neuroscience and behavioral economics offer strong evidence that vices and other potentially addictive goods or activities frequently involve less-than-rational choices, and hence are exempt from the full force of the harm principle. As an alternative guide to vice policy, and following some guidance from Mill, I propose the “robustness principle”: public policy towards addictive or vicious activities engaged in by adults should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. That is, policies should work pretty well if everyone is completely rational, and policies should work pretty well even if many people are occasionally (or frequently) irrational in their vice-related choices. The harm and robustness principles cohere in many ways, but the robustness principle offers more scope for policies that try to direct people “for their own good,” without opening the door to tyrannical inroads upon self-regarding behavior

Melioration: A Theory of Distributed Choice

In this paper, we develop a theory of individual choice called melioration, which implies that choices distributed over a period of time may be reliably and predictably suboptimal, in terms of the person's own preferences. Consider some typical examples of distributed choices: the expenditure rate on various non-durables; frequency of athletic exercise; rate of work in free-lance type occupations; allocation of leisure time; rate of savings (or dissavings); expenditures on lottery tickets, and other forms of gambling. When people express dissatisfaction about their choices, their discontent seems clustered around these sorts of distributed choices. For example, complaints that one is working too hard (or not hard enough), exercising too little (or too much), wasting time, overeating, overspending, and so on are commonplace. The next two sections of the paper spell out the basic theory we are proposing. The following section then applies the theory to "pathological" consumption patterns, and shows that one should find a general underinvestment in those activities that exhibit increasing average returns to rate of consumption, and an overinvestment in activities that have an addiction-like interaction between value and rate. The final section compares the theory with other approaches to suboptimal choice.