#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/10/25

I had a great late afternoon at the Wharton People Analytics conference (not pictured!), and on the train down I was able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a fascinating talk by Greg Hargreaves on the many businesses the DuPont's failed at before landing on gunpowder at the Hagley Museum and Library. Yet another example of how having a lot of money makes it much easier to be successful! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eIS9wo0C4

Next was a great talk by J.D. Zamfirescu on designing interfaces that include generative AI at UW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-h2syrv4n8&pp=0gcJCX4JAYcqIYzv

Next was "Adam Smith's America" by Glory Liu. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was undeniably an extremely important work in his era, but arguably its legacy as a philosophical touchstone in the centuries since is even more profound. After all, anyone today with a BA in accounting or economics knows much more about economics than Adam Smith did. Rather the use of Adam Smith as a quasi-religious figure for different purposes - from justifying US industrial policy in the 18th and 19th century to neoliberal principles in the 20th shows the contradictory readings of his work. Liu traces and examines all of these issues methodically, revealing not only much more about Smith himself but also why it's important to critically engage with any invocation of his work. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691203812/adam-smiths-america

Last was "Narrative Economics" by Robert Shiller. This book is a high level introduction to work on virality that includes a number of cases that illustrate the potential of narratives to build and gain their own momentum, causing real changes in the economy. Many of these connections are anecdotal, and while I loved the engagement with the literary theory literature there was surprisingly little with natural language processing and complex contagion research. This makes for a good read if you're completely unfamiliar with these fields, but otherwise it'll mostly feel like a rehash of basic concepts https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182292/narrative-economics