Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child's quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child's quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists' empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition.

"This essay...examines the abortion option [using] two standard economic welfare criteria, efficiency and equity, to evaluate different distributions of property rights." The author critically examines a 1971 article by Judith Jarvis Thomson concerning fetal personhood and the maternal right to privacy. He asserts that "the efficiency of different output allocations and even output and wealth as such are neither ethically neutral nor ordinally invariant but depend on the range of property rights and distributions, wealth-constrained valuations, and populations considered. The results suggest that, insofar as claims of efficiency and equity are met or accepted as appropriate, economic criteria may affect the constitution of justice and behavior as legal and normative constraints."

If Neuroscience is to contribute to Economics, it will do so by the way of Psychology. Neural data can and do lead to better psychological theories, and psychological insights can and do lead to better economic models. Hence, Neuroscience can in principle contribute to Economics. Whether it actually will do so is an empirical question and the jury is still out. Economics currently faces theoretical and empirical challenges analogous to those faced by Physics at the turn of the 20(th) century and ultimately addressed by quantum theory. If "quantum Economics" will emerge in the coming decades, it may well be founded on such concepts as cognitive processes and brain activity.