#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/7/24

Another day, another chicken of the woods discovery (although this one is old and I still have tons left from my last find)! Also I was able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an engaging conversation with Arvind Narayanan on AI agents and AI snake oil on the TWIML podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HScABWB98Kw

Last was "Law and Capitalism" by Curtis Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor. This is a masterful, carefully researched book that thoroughly refutes the notion of the law as an exogenous, neutral factor in economic models, definitively showing that there is a rolling relation between law and markets that involves local constituencies (management, investors, the public, employees, politicians, etc.) mediating their relationship. Mercifully Pistor and Milhaupt go well beyond the standard US and Western Europe lens, bringing in Japan, Korea, China, and Singapore (among others) in fantastic detail.

The case study method is employed throughout this book, which in addition to providing insight into recent corporate scandals vividly illustrates the limits of some of the existing structures that underlie corporate governance in different jurisdictions. They also show that the common vs. civil law dichotomy, as well as the various benchmarks that are based on particular items of law, offers very little in terms of understanding why certain economies are successful. Instead they argue for viewing legal systems along the centralized-decentralized and coordinative-protective axes, which dovetails nicely with their case analyses. Overall, they show how varied the legal and regulatory regimes are around the world that have all led to economic success, expanding the lens of what good corporate governance legal regimes can look like. Highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo5756603.html