Not too novel

While the evolution-based narrative supporting the FEB's existence may or may not be true (more on that below), it would not be hard to attach a similar or even identical tale to, for example, Caplan's four biases (Caplan Reference Caplan2007). Had Caplan been more specific in discussing the evolutionary roots of folk economics instead of merely asserting it (p. 178), it would be hard to tell his account apart from B&P's. He did not do so, which is why B&P deserve credit, but for going deeper or being complementary rather than going further. This applies to even simpler FEBs' explanations which B&P do not refer to. For example, all of the folk-economic beliefs that B&P discuss (including their lack of influence on individual-level decision-making) can also be explained by people's tendency to consider the more immediate and salient features of a phenomenon and ignore the ones that are more distant and subtle (Arkes Reference Arkes1991; Houdek Reference Houdek2016; Pennycook & Rand Reference Pennycook and Rand2017). This is the long-established “seen versus unseen” in economics (Bastiat Reference Bastiat, Cain and de Huszar1850/1995) or more recent WYSIATI (what-you-see-is-all-there-is) in psychology (Kahneman Reference Kahneman2011). This tendency may have its evolutionary origins as indeed both Bastiat (Reference Bastiat, Cain and de Huszar1850/1995, para. 1.5) and Kahneman (Reference Kahneman2011, p. 90) explicitly suggest, but their failure to be as elaborate as B&P in this regard does not render B&P's account more “ultimate.”

Proving too much

Although bias-oriented explanations are admittedly ad hoc, as B&P implicitly hint at in section 2.5, their own model is in the end equally malleable to ad hockery. At first, it appears impressive to see any of the FEBs explained away by a meticulously blended cocktail of intuitions (products of inference systems). But on second thought, these ingredients are so powerful in their combination and so flexible in their interpretation that mixing them in a particular way can explain much more than that, including FEBs that are antithetical to the ones actually held by people, or indeed ones that do not exist. For example, by taking the free-rider detection topped up with the ownership intuition while keeping the coalitional psychology sidelined, one could beautifully prove why laypeople (unlike economists) fanatically oppose trade protectionism or the welfare state (which they of course do not).

Incomplete

B&P portray the whole of folk-economics as ultimately an outcome of evolutionarily determined cognitive processes (they do allow for some cultural input to explain subtle variations between different societies). Although the idea that evolution matters (or, at least, may matter) seems absolutely undisputed, we find B&P's account over-rates the role of evolution at the cost of discounting cultural aspects such as education, values (Caplan Reference Caplan2002; Edwards Reference Edwards2006, Houdek et al. Reference Houdek, Novakova and Stastny2016), or media (Ribstein Reference Ribstein2012). In reality, non-evolutionary factors may mitigate all of the evolutionary influences so eloquently described by B&P, but they may be deliberately produced by particular interest groups within society. If evolution were all there is, it would be hard to square with observed FEBs incidence that varies with:

1. 1. Time: Some FEBs are more widely believed now than they used to be. For example, what McCloskey calls “bourgeois era” was marked by a recession of the many anti-market biases (or by even positive endorsement of alertness to business opportunity, entrepreneurship, and “innovationism”), to which McCloskey attributes the triggering of industrial revolution and the great enrichment (McCloskey Reference McCloskey2006; Reference McCloskey2010).

2. 2. Geographic space: Populations in different countries succumb to different FEBs to different degrees (see, e.g., O'Rourke et al. Reference O'Rourke, Sinnott, Richardson, Rodrik, Collins and Rodrik2001; Neher Reference Neher2011; Davidov et al. Reference Davidov, Meuleman, Billiet and Schmidt2008, also see opinion surveys such as International Social Survey Programme [ISSP] 2006 or World Values Survey [WVS] 2014). In fact, this is true about opinions of economists as well, which vary in important ways across countries (for an overview, see Stastny Reference Stastny2010, pp. 6–23);

3. 3. Socioeconomic space: People of different education levels show different degrees of susceptibility to FEBs (e.g., Caplan & Miller Reference Caplan and Miller2010).

Insights of many sciences – not only economics – might run against some evolutionary intuitions, but in economics they seem to survive and stick around much more. For example, over the course of evolution, people's folk-physics minds have had every reason to think the Earth was flat, or their folk-biology minds have had every reason to think the world (including humans) was created by divine design (see, e.g., Evans Reference Evans2001). Yet, natural scientists were able to convince (almost) all of mankind that the Earth is round and was not created within 6 days. However, it may well be that people do find international trade objectionable for evolutionary reasons – but how is it that this is still a predominant belief despite some 250-plus years of economists' trying to enlighten populations in that regard? We are afraid that B&P's model is of limited assistance here, and is actually outperformed by long-existing models that include cultural factors as interacting with cognitive biases without necessarily worrying much about their precise roots (evolutionary or not).