#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/27/24

Apparently wild asparagus looks amazing in the fall, and while taking in the fall sights I was able to catch some great books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "The Evolution of Technical Analysis" by Andrew Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic. While many modern economists push back against the idea that one can make money from projecting forward past market trends (which Lo and Hasanhodzic push back against in later chapters), given market frictions in the past this was much more plausible. Commodity prices could take weeks or months to propagate to other regions, making prediction profitable and immensely challenging. This book charts the mystical roots of these predictions in early history, moving towards more data-driven and accurate approaches developed in Japan and a few other areas in more recent centuries.

The tight coupling of technological changes with new methods of technical analysis is generally instructive, having implications for many other industries and practices that rely on arbitrage, market power, or gut instinct to drive decisions. Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Technical-Analysis-Prediction-Babylonian/dp/1576603490

Next was "Accounting for Slavery" by Caitlin Rosenthal. Most management textbooks start with a review of "scientific management," but Rosenthal demonstrates why scholars should look back farther to the slave plantations of the 18th and 19th century for the genesis of modern approaches to accounting and management. Using volumes of historical records, this book shows how the slave plantation industry developed sophisticated methods to control and measure every aspect of their plantation, including their slaves. There are direct lines from these practices to the development of org charts and time and motion studies - Henry Gantt of Gantt chart fame, for example, grew up in a family that had grown rich from owning slaves and almost certainly used these same management methods.

All of this cries out for a reckoning with different management practices that have become commonplace - individual work measurement, the myopic focus on easy to measure quantitative metrics, etc. If you're in management or people analytics even peripherally, this is a must read https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674241657

Last was "The Power of Creative Destruction" by Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel. The importance of innovation in driving economic growth and better societal outcomes is often overlooked, but not here - this book brings Schumpeterian theory back into its rightful place as a critical economic process. Reviewing a wide range of economic research on the correlates and causes of positive outcomes, the authors show that innovation is often at the root of them all. Further, they demonstrate that when governments target phenomena that hamper innovation, they tend to get better results.

This book does have an Achilles heel, however - it's far too bought into long-discredited notions of Western exceptionalism and the primacy of Western-style institutions of causing economic success. The work of Pistor and others has since taken these notions out to the woodshed, and perhaps unsurprisingly these are the book sections notably free of citations. If you skip those sections it's an excellent book on an important topic https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674292093