#AcademicRunPlaylist - 11/26/24

My little guy was tuckered out after a stressful day of people coming and going from the house, but at least we were able to relax together while i listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an important panel on indigenous data sovereignty at the Monash Information Technology with Christopher Lawrence, Kirsten Thorpe, and Maggie Walter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-S8WmTBYy4

Next was an engaging conversation with Tomaso Duso on EU competition policy, its relationship with industrial policy, and the state of play with the Digital Markets Act on the Digital Markets Research Hub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39DoIthicmM

Next was a great panel on bias and equity in AI at the Institute for Diversity Science with Kalinda Ukanwa, Corey Jackson, and Shamya Karumbaiah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tToNnZE55SA

Next was an interesting talk by Thomas Monnier on modeling wages and rural-urban migration in South Africa at the Economics of Migration Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32hTh85_R4

Next was an intriguing talk by Sainyam Galhotra on methods for choosing which datasets will help with model training at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkBFLO3q1aw

Last was "Chokepoint Capitalism" by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, who weave together research from economics and antitrust law with insights from case studies on a variety of creative industries to paint a stark picture of the failings of the Chicago School of antitrust and illustrate how modern platforms have significantly increased their power at the expense of worker earnings and innovation. The stats they bring to bear on these topics are powerful, and some of the cases are simply shocking at the extent to which they embody the raw power grabs and anticompetitive tendencies of the neoliberal marketplace.

The second portion of this book is focused on suggested fixes, which feels somewhat wanting. Many of these chapters consist of spitballing ideas with little attempt to validate these approaches in the literature, with some of the proposed solutions already having been shown to not be effective. That coupled with some concerning factual errors (the point about private equity returns being equal to the general market is demonstrably false) made me wonder about the veracity of the other points in the book. Overall I still highly recommend the book, but I would also recommend reading some of the more grounded academic literature before taking the points in the book as "the truth." https://chokepointcapitalism.com/