#AcademicRunPlaylist - 1/16/25

A selfie of me in front of a brook winding through a snow-dusted swamp towards the Charles River on a cloudy day. I'm a middle-aged white man with a red beard flecked with white. I'm wearing a black headband, black sunglasses, and a black running jacket over a light blue hooded running sweatshirt.

It was extremely cold but at least it wasn't windy, so I was able to stay warm while listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent conversation with John Kay on the nature of firms and evaluating/compensating managers at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. Kay provides some extremely intriguing ideas here on how businesses have evolved over the decades and the implications for how they're evaluated. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go6_2AGFBwU

Next was a fantastic talk by Mungo Wilson on why, despite everything, in aggregate humans are arguably in the best position we've ever been at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Wilson charts the improvements in a variety of metrics over the last ~150 years and also proposes some compelling hypotheses for some of the causes of current economic unhappiness. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWMAGlzEY1g

Next was an amazing panel on the implications of private equity acquisition of audit firms at the Peterson Institute for International Economics with Maria Nykyforovych Borysoff and Liza McAndrew Moberg. The talks and discussion give a clear picture of the state of the industry, some of the effects of PE ownership, and lingering questions. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUIrwj-pzs

Next was an interesting talk by Diego Garaialde on dual-process theories of cognition in HCI at UCL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UL6MtpT18o

Next was a great talk by Alba Ribera Martínez on the applicability of the DMA to generative AI at PLAMADISO – Platforms, Markets, and the Digital Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTKytfflnA

Next was "Medical Apartheid" by Harriet A. Washington. This is an essential book, covering hundreds of years of extremely unethical experiments on Black people in the US and abroad and the implication of that history for medical science and bioethics today. Washington goes into a lot of detail about some of these cases, which make for extremely troubling reading - I had to take a break multiple times. Highly recommend

Last was "Unwelcome Guests" by Harold Wechsler and Steven Diner. This book methodically runs through the historical arc of discrimination against different ethnic groups in US higher education until the end of segregation. The experience of different groups are considered in turn, and then different types of institutions that sprang up to provide higher education to some of these underserved populations are also considered