A species’ behavioral, developmental, and reproductive life history will influence how quickly it can recover after a population crash. Some species can recover very quickly, while others, such as the North Atlantic right whale, cannot recover quickly, because even under ideal conditions they develop slowly and have very low reproductive rates. Ecologists have described various life history classification schemes that identify important tradeoffs in resource allocation, and focus attention on interesting life history questions. The quantitative relationship between metabolic rate and body size can help ecologists understand some life history tradeoffs, such as the relationship between number and size of offspring. There is a fundamental tradeoff between parental investment in any one reproductive event and the number of lifetime reproductive events, which in some cases can lead to a semelparous reproductive life history. Variable environments can select for phenotypic plasticity, which can lead to organisms with similar genotypes expressing alternative behavioral, developmental or reproductive life history traits. In some cases, phenotypic plasticity may help species adjust to rapidly changing environmental conditions, including climate change.

Among the diversity of perspectives for studying the nexus of evolution and human behavior, human behavioral ecology (HBE) emerged as the study of the adaptive nature of behavior as a function of socioecological context. This volume explores the history and diversification of HBE, a field which has grown considerably in the decades since its emergence in the 1970s. At its core, the principles of HBE have remained a clear and cogent way to derive predictions about the adaptive function of behavior, even as the questions and methods of the discipline have evolved to be more interdisciplinary and more synergistic with other fields in the evolutionary social sciences. This introductory chapter covers core concepts, including methodological individualism, conditional strategies, and optimization. The chapter then provides an overview of the state of the field, including a summary of current research topics, areas, and methods. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the integral role that human behavioral ecology continues to play in deepening scholarly understandings of human behavior.

In Chapter 4, we continue our explanation of tradeoffs between expenditure categories by focusing on how domestic and international contextual factors can constrain or facilitate government budgetary behavior. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. For each of these contextual factors, we develop a set of expectations about the spending tradeoffs between policy areas if left and right governments remain ideologically consistent to their preferences versus if context overwhelms those ideological concerns. Our results and conclusions are mixed across the domestic contexts. We find almost no tradeoffs and none that are consistent with either type of expectations for election timing. For an increasing unemployment, we find a mixture of ideological and strategic tradeoff decisions, while, for positive economic growth, we find substantial evidence that governments take advantage of the circumstances to go beyond their ideological priorities. Results for international contexts are also mixed with government spending allocations lacking ideological differences in the face of increased globalization. But, for increased conflict, right and left governments reallocate expenditures in similar ways – highlighting how contexts can overwhelm governments.

Government budgets can be complex and contentious. Chapter 1 explains the importance of understanding government budgetary behavior and argues for taking a more realistic view of the process. If governments change part of the budget, then they may need to jostle other budgetary pieces as well. We introduce the broad brushstrokes of our theoretical argument that explains when governments have the desire and power to alter budgets, given both their ideological preferences and contextual factors. We acknowledge that spending increases or decreases in some policy areas may require shifts in budgets for other areas, so we use a compositional methodological approach to investigate those changes. In addition, we foreshadow how our theoretical argument also helps to explain the linkages between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility. To test theories about these linkages we use panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) models. In order to make our findings from the complex models that we use to test our theoretical propositions accessible, we will use a series of graphical interpretation strategies and present technical details of our models and graphs in appendices. Overall, Chapter 1 sets the stage for a book that unravels the brainteaser of government budgetary behavior across countries and years.

In Chapter 3, we focus on explaining the tradeoffs between expenditure categories in government budgets. Rather than explain total expenditures or expenditures in specific policy areas, we argue that the competition for expenditures is in the spending allocations. Governments of varying ideological stances prefer increasing or decreasing spending for different policy areas, but we argue that their ability to do this is hindered by their government status. Governments with a majority of the seats in the lower house of parliament are better able to push through their preferred changes to spending budgets. Using a compositional methodological approach on data for 33 developed democracies across 35 years (1975–2010), we find that government ideology does influence budgetary allocations for majority governments, with left and right governments altering budgets in different, but expected, ways. For minority governments, our results suggest they too are strategic in making relative budgetary changes, but it is less about ideology and more about appeasing the necessary political parties in order to stay in power. This focus on budgetary compositions highlights the political competition for resources between policy areas that previous work has overlooked.

It seems so obvious that good decisions on innovations in medical and hospital management – or on anything – should be based on good evidence. Decision-makers are advised by business school professors (and their mothers) that decisions should be based on the best available evidence – and who could argue against that? However, despite the general reverence for evidence in medical practice and drug approval, there is a consensus (discussed later in this chapter) that decision-making on medical delivery or insurance innovations – which also can have effects on health, life, death, and spending – is often not evidence-based, sometimes contradictory to evidence, and surely not as evidence-based as it could be. In this introductory chapter we explore two related questions: (1) what is the value of evidence for these decisions, and (2) where in health care management is evidence not being generated or used as it should be? This chapter will in a sense discuss “evidence on evidence,” and ask when and what kind of evidence is needed to improve not only decision-making, but also final outcomes in terms of spending and quality.

What are the normative implications of political regulation waves? Based on quantitative counterfactual estimation and qualitative case description, this chapter assesses the hard tradeoffs imposed by political regulation waves – between social stability, employment, economic growth, and health and longevity among local populations. Local leaders face incentives to signal competence by promoting laxer environmental regulation to benefit jobs and the economy, imposing a measurable human cost due to dirtier air. Conversely, when local leaders seek to move up the political ladder by strengthening the implementation of regulations in pursuit of blue skies, air quality improves, but firms suffer profit losses, and many people lose their jobs and are forced to spend brutal winters without heating. One form of the political regulation wave is not inherently better than another. These are difficult tradeoffs.

Privacy in public is a form of informational privacy. Informational privacy consists in the ability to control what others do with your information. You lack that control if you cannot give free and informed consent to how others process your information. How does one ensure free and informed consent across a sufficient range of cases? Our answer is that informational norms ensure that. That is not, however, the dominant legislative and regulatory answer, which is Notice and Choice. The Notice is a presentation of the terms governing the use of information. The Choice is an action signifying acceptance or rejection of the terms. Chapter 5 argues that Notice and Choice is clearly fails to ensure free and informed consent, and concludes that maintaining and creating norms is the most reasonable alternative.