The weather was nearly perfect today, and luckily in the early evening I was able to go for a nice run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Anat Alon-Beck on the changing landscape of state corporate charters (including a great callout to one of Ann Lipton's zingers about why companies go to Nevada, iykyk) at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgGVSO5btgY

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Olivier Sylvain on the history of internet platform law in the US and approaches for improving the broken state of affairs at Yale ISP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnATdqn5URU

Next was a fantastic talk by Pierfrancesco Urbani on using dynamical mean field theory to understand feature learning and overfitting in large neural networks at the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications. Urbani deftly spans the empirical and theoretical here, helping to further untangle the factors that underlie one of the most surprising aspects of large model performance. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHehT-sR20A

Next was an engaging session on modeling Caribbean economies at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies with DeLisle Worrell, Temisan Agbeyegbe, Dillon Alleyne, Patrice Borda, Collin Constantine, Vanus James, and Winston Moore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEwpflwPlqc

Next was "Labor's Love Lost" by Andrew Cherlin. This is a very broad, fairly standard sociological review of social and economic changes in "working families" in the US since the early 1900s. While there is some quantitative data here, much of the analysis is extremely subjective, general, and contains little supporting evidence. That combination is frustrating since when it comes time to analyze the underlying causes for some of the measurable changes surfaced here, one is mostly left with the platitude that both cultural changes and economic conditions probably matter. Given the robust support for the economic and policy reasons for these changes, it was disappointing to see that not paired with similarly strong sociological data https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/labors-love-lost

Last was "The Economic Case for LGBT Equality" by M.V. Lee Badgett. It's unfortunate that a book like this is necessary, given the strong moral imperative for LGBTQ+ equality, but clearly the moral case has not been sufficient to move society forward. Given that background, Badgett provides the best possible accounting of how LGBT equality economically positively impacts all stakeholders, combining individual, company, and macro analyses throughout the chapters. She also doesn't neglect health and education, although by viewing them through an economic lens she connects these areas to other chapters. I do think you need to pair this book with a text that focuses solely on the moral dimension of this issue, though, since while Badgett understandably only treats it in passing here the lack of appeals to justice and decency was a bit frustrating. Overall, this book is an excellent crash course on the economic imperative of LGBTQ+ equality, even in our current era of backsliding. Highly recommend https://www.leebadgett.com/theeconomiccase