On How Religions Could Accidentally Incite Lies and Violence: Folktales As a Cultural Transmitter

Pay for Performance: A Reflection on How a Global Perspective Could Enhance Policy and Research

Pay-for-performance (P4P) is the provision of financial incentives to healthcare providers based on pre-specified performance targets. P4P has been used as a policy tool to improve healthcare provision globally. However, researchers tend to cluster into those working on high or low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), with still limited knowledge exchange, potentially ...

The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10-12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explai...

Orality, Folktales and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Narrative

How School Science Lies

School science lies. It lies about Mendelian genetics, the peppered moth, male and female, the motion of a pendulum, the Bohr atom, the fluid model of electricity and many other basic concepts, all due to simplification. Real science relies on domain-specific models and so always lies at some level. Teachers thus need to help students appreciate how science interprets complexity and how to mana...

How the WTO Could Be Improved

AbstractThis paper examines the impasse in the current Doha Development Round negotiations andasks how the rules of the WTO could be changed to facilitate multilateral negotiations andto increase the welfare of the Member countries. It considers possible changes to the methodof negotiation. As examples of rules which are outdated, it considers the rules relating toregional trade agreements and ...