#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/13/25

I had a nice morning in Philly before taking the train back to Boston, and on the way I was able to listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting panel on the role of capital markets in emerging market growth at the Peterson Institute for International Economics with Cesaire Meh, Sergio Schmukler, Monica De Bolle, Arvind Subramanian, Susan Lund, Stijn Claessens, and Matt Robinson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kjLVQSc8FA

Next was a fantastic panel on ethics and the law and regulation of medical AI with I. Glenn Cohen, Claudia Haupt, and Mason Marks at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. This goes far beyond most non-bioethics panels on this topic, considering the wide range of current ethical concerns, how current processes apply, and what's needed moving forward. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-FcTtchwJQ

Last was "The Corporation and the Twentieth Century" by Richard Langlois. There are some good nuggets here on how organizational management and strategy changed through the 20th century, but this is not the focus of a very market, technology, and policy-focused history. The economics and politics are also extremely neoliberal, unscientific, and ahistorical, with invectives against unions, welfare and housing programs, etc. Notably absent are any criticisms or examination of segregation (despite that being more than 2/3 of the century and having obvious economic and corporate implications), the failures of neoliberal policies, etc.

I also dislike how Langlois doesn't show his work, with broad statements and essentially no numbers/citations to back them up. Much of his economic arguments are also woefully out of date - for example, arguments about Walmart's positive local effects or the effects of New Deal programs are refuted by dozens of papers published in the last few years.

Lastly, there are tons of extremely contradictory arguments. Langlois regularly decries government funding of research, insisting that it never leads to good outcomes. Sometimes on the next page (in the case of the internet, for example), he then explicitly talks about how the government funded that fundamental research that led to huge industries. If you breeze through those sections though there is still some interesting history here https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691246987/the-corporation-and-the-twentieth-century