#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/5/24

It was time for some summer cleaning today, but I was still able to get out a bit and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Natalya Naqvi on the role of the financial sector and formal markets in economic growth at the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism (CSEP) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EZLvQXE7sk

Next was a fantastic talk by Dimitri Zenghelis (with discussion by Cristián Ducoing Ruiz) on cities as nodes of physical and human capital at INET Oxford. Zenghelis masterfully reviews the importance of agglomeration effects, long term trends in urbanization, and even points out the potential of pandemics to emerge from rapidly urbanizing cities in developing countries due to the proximity of livestock to people - this is in 2016 (😬). Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrTChdRELnc

Next was a wide-ranging talk by José Miguel Ahumada on capitalism as creative destruction and Schumpeter's theories more broadly at CSEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztkHtmvKwR8

Next was an interesting talk by Markus Klar on simulating interaction movements with feedback control and deep reinforcement learning at UCL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcgflsQrmbw

Next was an intriguing talk by Morten Jerven on why economists get African growth wrong at CSEP. Jerven takes economists to task for considering the entire continent as a single entity, looking for problems rather than also considering successes, and failing to interrogate issues and biases built into historical and contemporary data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwGg4c09pyA

Next was an amazing talk by Brent Mittelstadt on errors in LLMs and legal obligations for their output to be truthful at Toronto Metropolitan University. Mittelstadt illustrates how output errors are fundamentally built into LLMs, approaches for understanding the nature of these errors, and how some legal precedent (e.g. Google being found liable by German courts for defamation due to their autocomplete algorithms) might be applied to LLMs. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFMlr6FWBSM

Next was an eye-opening talk by Jack Wright on the political nature of economics at CSEP. Wright details the political nature of economic scholarship assessment in the UK, the extremely hierarchical and exclusionary nature of the field, and other fundamental issues. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og0EuIVgSQM

Next was a timely conversation with Alan Rozenshtein, David Rubenstein, and Dean Ball on California's pending AI bill, SB 1047, and regulatory federalism more generally on the Lawfare Institute podcast. If you skip past the far too serious consideration of AI doomerism (although it is mercifully called out a bit), the meat of the discussion on the bill itself and the implications for AI regulation more broadly is insightful. I particularly liked the sectoral approach advocated here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0VnMYLhyo

Next was a nice talk by Isabel Estevez on economic interpretations of the globalization of value chains at CSEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFnapSTVEKg

Next was an all-star panel on intangible wealth, TFP, and economic growth at INET Oxford with Mariana Mazzucato, Rick van der Ploeg, and Diane Coyle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vWFuDqW1HA

Last was an excellent talk by Nicholas Crafts on the importance of economists understanding economic history at CSEP. Crafts reviews deep misunderstandings of past failures, the implications of those misunderstandings, and how to correct these issues. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTXnkxLKv7w