#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/23/25

Shanah Tovah! As promised, here are the hen of the woods (maitake) mushrooms I found on my run and then promptly scooped up, weighing in at approximately 40 pounds (18 kg) in total. After divvying them up to folks at Rosh Hashanah dinner I listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a compelling talk by Seyed Mahdi Hosseini Maasoum and Guy Lichtinger on using US resume and job posting data to quantify the seniority-biased hiring effects of generative AI adoption at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. While I think this is a very temporary effect driven not by the technology but by its overhyped narrative and the inherent complex nature of organizational output, it's still important to know about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igo3VOBlUgA

Next was an important talk by Leopoldo Fergusson on the economic implications of accents at CEPR. Through a set of experiments, Fergusson convincingly shows that biases favoring high socioeconomic class accents accelerates unfair class disparities. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWic-HeHWBU

Next was "The Myth That Made Us" by Jeffrey Fuhrer. This is an urgent book on an unfortunately evergreen topic - the myth of meritocracy. Fuhrer combines meticulous economic analysis with historical context to demonstrate how not only has "meritocracy" always been an unattainable myth due to the compounding of centuries of unfair benefits being doled out to white people, but that the egalitarian progress that the US did make thanks to the New Deal, unions, and Great Society programs has been steadily unwound. He lays the blame squarely at the feet of Milton Friedman, Reagan and other neoliberal politicians, and everyone who bought into the meritocracy myth and gave political cover to gutting programs that had made progress. While some of the policy suggestions at the end are fairly standard, Fuhrer puts in the extra effort to estimate the economic effects and costs of different policies. Highly recommend https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048392/the-myth-that-made-us/

Last was "The Science of Racism" by Keon West. This is very much a popular introduction to the scientific literature around racism in the US and UK - it's different instantiations, why anecdotes tell you nothing, and how to differentiate scientific claims from bunk. If you're already familiar with the literature there's not going to be a lot new here, but West does a great job synthesizing different strands of research in a single, accessible volume (albeit one with a psychological lens). I didn't like that you have to get 2/3 through the book before West brings up, briefly, that race is a social construct. I also think some historical context for these biases would be helpful. When he does bring in history it's often revelatory - especially relevant today is how the UK's skills based immigration system was explicitly designed to exclude non-white people. Overall, this is an incisive rejoinder to people who claim that racism is in the past and provides many jumping off points for further reading. Highly recommend https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/keon-west/the-science-of-racism/9781035030651