#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/4/24

Happy 4th of July to the US for hopefully working hard to preserve democracy and rule of law in the coming months, with the UK ironically showing us how it's done today! To help celebrate, during a long drive today out of Boston I was able to listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

Next was an interesting talk by Rasheed Saleuddin on looking at the historical record to interrogate the successes and failures of industrial policy at the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism (CSEP) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSZHfDFKoCI

Next was a great talk by Daniela Scur, with commentary from Tera Allas CBE, on the results from the World Management Survey, a 20 year survey of management practices in 20K firms in 38 countries, at the Centre for Economic Performance. Rather than viewing firms as "better managed" with these qualitative metrics, I view these results as representing the degree to which firms are increasingly hiring MBAs and consultants. The differential trends across companies and firm size is particularly noteworthy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--cuB6WSDUA

Next was an engaging symposium on the degree to which economics is predictable and if that should even be the goal of the field with Tony Lawson (the relationship between economics and prediction) and Jochen Runde (challenges with assessing probability given uncertainty about what scenarios one should consider) at CSEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D4Jk8TUnvQ

Next was a fantastic conversation with Leah Boustan on data and myths around immigration in America at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. This is a re-air, but I found it so rich last time that I still immensely enjoyed listening, especially on July 4th! Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRi9OFR69a8

Next was an excellent talk by Alice Krozer on the perceptions of elites and how it reproduces and expands economic inequality at CSEP. The examples Krozer brings from Mexico are extremely powerful and eye-opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxnszQfe1pg

Next was an extremely informative talk by Kristina McElheran on examining AI adoption and productivity effects at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Working with the US census, McElheran and co. provide probably the most comprehensive look yet at what this looks like on the ground. While I don't think classifying "AI" as a single technology makes sense, these results are still fascinating - company size is a huge factor for adoption, and controlling for a number of factors the productivity impact is significantly negative over multiple years. Crucially, adoption of analytics was related to higher productivity. For the use cases they're looking at I agree with their hypothesis that the negative AI effect is likely due to reworking process costs, but as I wrote with Nathanael Fast in HBR I'm betting that this won't apply for LLMs and that the effect will be persistently negative, growing over time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYmjaTL5Ek

Next was a compelling talk by Nina Rismal on how the dominance of neoclassical economics was due in large part to political moves rather than due to the quality of its ideas at CSEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAuwcjNPcTM

Next was a thought-provoking panel on considering social capital, trust, and well-being in the evaluation of wealth at INET Oxford with Michael Woolcock, Kirk Hamilton, and Alexander Teytelboym https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-5jnNAUaow

Last was an intriguing talk by Matthew Fright on the obstacles to effective economic observation and how that colors analysis and public debate at CSEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxgpboXR5yg