Journal of Bioeconomics

Trong bài báo của mình, Janet Landa lập luận rằng chìa khóa cho thành công của nhóm trung gian đồng tộc người Hoa (EHMG) là sự hợp tác nội bộ phát triển cao. Bà đặt hiện tượng EHMG trong khuôn khổ sinh học tiến hóa bằng cách gọi nó là "một đơn vị truyền thông văn hóa" chịu ảnh hưởng của cả gen và văn hóa. Landa đề xuất rằng các thành viên cá nhân của EHMG cấu thành các đơn vị lựa chọn cho các nhóm EHMG, tương tự như các gen cấu thành các đơn vị lựa chọn cho các sinh vật cá thể. Tuy nhiên, sự tiến hóa diễn ra thông qua sự sống sót và sinh sản khác nhau của các sinh vật cá thể. Để đáp ứng các tiêu chí của lựa chọn nhóm sinh học, sẽ cần phải chứng minh rằng các nhóm cạnh tranh với EHMG đã bị tuyệt chủng. Thực tế là các EHMG chỉ đang hoạt động tốt hơn so với các đối thủ của họ không phải là bằng chứng cho lựa chọn nhóm. Lý do khác khiến lựa chọn nhóm sinh học không thực sự áp dụng cho EHMG là không có rào cản vật lý/sinh học đối với việc giao phối ngoại lai, và các rào cản văn hóa vốn dĩ không ổn định.

This Journal of Bioeconomics Special Issue celebrates the life and accomplishments of Gordon Tullock (February 13, 1922–November 3, 2014), who was instrumental in establishing the Journal of Bioeconomics and was one of the founders of the discipline. He also deserves much of the credit for public choice theory and the theory of rent-seeking. We present ten tribute papers and three bioeconomics papers—from scholars in Canada,China, Norway, Singapore, and the US—in his honor.

This article draws upon social networking, primatology, and psychological concepts to explain the formation of leadership. Leaders draw upon deeply embedded evolutionary and cultural routines and knowledge to gain power and explain failure. Thus seemingly irrational decision-making makes perfect sense. Examples can be found in Latin American leadership styles. The implications are broad and suggest a reframing of our approach to economic policy decision-making.

A laboratory experiment where human subjects play a repeated public goods game with high-powered punishment technology (50:1). Results on three attributes are similar to lower-powered punishment settings (e.g., 3:1): Subjects contribute almost 100 % to the public good, punishment rates are low (under 10 % of maximum), and punishment is directed more toward low contributors. In contrast to lower-powered punishment settings, however, subjects earn less money than they would have in the same setting without punishment. These results contribute to the debate about the origins and maintenance of cooperation.

This is a rather impressionist report of my recollections of the history of the bioeconomics field.

This paper presents a critique of the neoclassical view of the optimal use of renewable resources and offers an alternative view based on the method of classical thermodynamics. The presentation is forwarded via the issue of harvesting to extinction. Based on simple models, the traditional theory suggests that society would benefit from wiping out any renewable resource whose intrinsic growth rate, though positive, is smaller than the social rate of time preference. The latter is the rate society is using to discount its future benefits and costs. To bypass this ecologically implausible outcome, the simplistic assumptions have been modified in various ways. For example, either the costs or the benefits of harvesting have been made to depend on the stock of the resource as well as on the yield. The modifications offered make society less prone to wipe out resources intentionally, but they still disregard a more fundamental difficulty: The traditional theory is not consistent with the second law of thermodynamics; it describes a process that defies the second law, which no known system is able to be undergoing. No doubt, the theory should be challenged first and foremost on this ground, but none of the offered modifications is capable of annulling this inconsistency. A deeper change is needed because the social values of the resource as perceived by a society that behaves in manners consistent with the second law and as defined by the traditional theory necessarily differ. The paper identifies the socially consistent value and shows that harvesting to extinction is never optimal socially. Were society to follow the socially inconsistent value, it would always underestimate the importance of self-sustained resources. However, the unlikely refutability of the second law turns this possibility and the socially favored extinctions into arguable outcomes of an untenable theory rather than undesirable outcomes of a sound theory. Potentially growing renewable resources are wiped out in real life for various reasons, but when they are preyed to extinction, their unfortunate fate is an outcome of the dynamics of a socially unregulated system rather than a social objective coming to fruition.