#AcademicRunPlaylist - 2/12/25

It wasn't the nicest weather today, but before I head off to Japan tomorrow I still enjoyed getting out for a bit and listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an informative panel on foreign direct investment and development with Stefania Garetto, Nina Pavcnik, and Natalia Ramondo at VoxDev https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUiyVX4JsM8

Next was an excellent conversation between Ann Lipton and Michael Levin on why companies are staying private longer and why it can be rational for investors to note vote their shares on the Shareholder Primacy podcast. It's particularly notable how corporate law changes have helped accelerate this trend, as well as the examination here of how this is likely subverting many investor protection and societal economic goals. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ELc0ibcwBM

Next was a great/depressing discussion with Eyal Frank on how nature and economies interact, using the shocks of massive species die offs to interrogate these relationships 😬 on the VoxDev podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F_qjGGe-4

Next was a fantastic talk by Mark Zhao on how massive machine learning pipelines work and building systems for more scalable pipelines at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. BTW this talk isn't 4.5 hours long, they just forgot to stop the recording 😂 Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FVz1ORU5f8

Next was a thought-provoking conversation with Martin Kilduff on analyzing workplace rivalries from a social network perspective on Sekou Bermiss's Lit Review podcast https://thelitreview.podbean.com/e/the-lit-review-an-amj-podcast-martin-kilduff-s5e1/

Last was "Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation" by Amanda Ciapone. This book is less a history of the Coca-Cola company and more a history of its marketing efforts and a philosophical criticism of the concept of multinational organizations. There is coverage of the fascinating WW2 history of the company and how it deftly navigated around sugar quotas and secured huge contracts from the government that underwrote its international expansion along with the fighting. The rest of the book recounts different marketing campaigns and then subjects them to a Marxist critique. If that's your bag, you'll like this book. If not, you can stop reading after the early chapters https://www.ucpress.edu/books/counter-cola/paper