In response to the question in the title, Does Altruism Exist?, David Sloan Wilson argues forcefully that altruism exists and that the biological mechanism of group selection is responsible. He argues that group selection should be taken especially seriously for humans, since cultural evolution is especially important for us. Economists' view of basic human motivations should then include altruism. Wilson promotes a strong form of pervasive altruism, which seems bound to be inconsistent with many economic phenomena. Although a moderate version of the position he advocates is not easily dismissed, it is unclear what such an extended theory would look like.

T HIS BOOK is a big, ambitious undertaking, organized in 31 long chapters covering subjects which range from religion and civilization in economic life to money, banking, wages, and incentives. But, as the title suggests, it is essentially a research tool. It is meant not so much to be and reviewed as to be The test is whether people end up coming back to it more and more or less and less as time goes on. Judging from those areas of economics and sociology in which I have worked, I would predict people will return to The Handbook of Economic Sociology more and more. The chapter by Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly on labor market structures, the area I know best, is the most comprehensive review of the subject; it handles with rare sophistication, material drawn from across the social sciences. The essay by Alejandro Portes on the informal sector and that by Ivan Light and Stavros Karageorgis on the ethnic economy also consolidate areas of study dispersed over the literature of a variety of different disciplines. But I doubt that any single person is in a well-informed position to pass judgment on all of the essays in the volume. Nonetheless, the publication of a book like this provides an occasion to reflect upon the field of scholarly endeavor, to consider what it represents as a complement to conventional economics and, possibly, as an alternative. For this, it seems reasonable to the text, or at least peruse it, chapter by chapter. The first thing to be said about approaching The Handbook of Economic Sociology in that way is that it is a true handbook: The editors, Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, provide very little guidance on how it might be read as opposed to referred to. It has no real introduction. It invites readers to pick out chapters at random, following their own inclinations. This, moreover, turns out to be a very frustrating experience. It leaves one wondering what economic sociology is, or even, what economics is that economic sociology is not. Absent some other guide, one seems forced back to basic definitions. In introductory economics-at least when I teach it-we offer two of these. One defines economics broadly as the study of how people employ scarce resources and distribute them over time and among competing demands (Paul Samuelson 1961). The other is much narrower and more focused:

This paper compares the structural approach to economic policy analysis with the program evaluation approach. It offers a third way to do policy analysis that combines the best features of both approaches. We illustrate the value of this alternative approach by making the implicit economics of LATE explicit, thereby extending the interpretability and range of policy questions that LATE can answer.

This is a review article of Interests and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy (Princeton University Press 2003) by Michael Woodford.

Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes, of which this is the third, gives us Keynes, entire. The meat of the biography lies in the well-constructed narrative and in the magnificent portraits of Keynes and his age. Robert Skidelsky has given us a superb intellectual biography.

This paper first considers the implications of biological evolution for economic preferences. It analyzes why utility functions evolved, considers evidence that utility is both hedonic and adaptive, and suggests why such adaptation might have evolved. Time preference and attitudes to risk are treated—in particular, whether the former is exponential and the latter are selfish. Arguments for another form of interdependence—a concern with status—are treated. The paper then considers the evolution of rationality. One hypothesis examined is that human intelligence and longevity were forged by hunter-gatherer economies; another is that intelligence was spurred by competitive social interactions.