I am a big fan of US economist and academic Glenn Loury. He is smart, honest and well-articulated. He is also not afraid of an intellectual scrap if he stumbles upon one. He is an indispensable public commentator and intellectual whose ideas and influence go far beyond the confines of race, and associated social issues, in the US where he has staked his claim to fame and authority most comprehensively. Glenn has an impressive back-catalogue of writing and citations, but the best way to get a sense of him is by listening to his podcast the Glenn Show, which can be found on all the usual platforms. I am also a big fan of his co-conspirator, John McWorter, a US linguist and public intellectual, with whom Glenn runs a bi-weekly conversation on his podcast, and Q&A for paying subscribers. It is a must-listen. On this occasion, however, I want to recommend Glenn’s recent discussion with Larry Kotlikoff, a US academic economist, in which they discuss the economic policy ideas of the two candidates in the upcoming US presidential election ideas, and the US economy more generally. As the title of the podcast goes; if only we had an economist in the White House!
Read MoreWhether you’re an evolutionary biologist, cultural sociologist or a neoclassical economist, the study of human fertility behaviour can be boiled down to an interplay between two immovable forces: the quantum and tempo effect. The first treats the fundamental question of reproduction; how many children to have, and how much resources to invest in each of them. In its simplest form, the quantum effect is the study of how much, if at all, women exert control over the quantity of offspring they produce. The extent to which they do—and almost all disciplines agree that they do in most social contexts—the analysis focuses on the conditions that determine the number of children, and how much resources that are devoted to each of them. It is an analysis of trade-offs, concentrated on the trade-off between the quantity and quality of offspring. How this balance is achieved represents one of the most crucial processes in the study of reproduction, aggregate fertility, and the demographic transition.
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