It was positively balmy (26°F, -3°C) in Boston today, which made for good conditions to go for a run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an engaging conversation with Sean Vanatta on the history of bank supervision in the US on the Business Scholarship Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hWjCfSuvVY

Next was a great discussion with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland on the topics covered in his new book on cultural evolution in the age of AI at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59FXL_Pqj2I

Last was "Good Economics for Hard Times" by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The best way to summarize this book is that it represents the median American economist consensus circa 2010. Rarely does the actual research of Duflo and Banerjee poke through - this book could have been written by nearly anyone with an economics degree, and demonstrates a shocking deference to long discredited physics based models of the economy. It's also laughably naive on a wide variety of topics - carbon taxes, the nature of and importance of racism, etc. Much of the book has aged terribly, especially given that the authors have fled the US https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/abhijit-v-banerjee/good-economics-for-hard-times/9781541788947/