#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/22/24

It was another unseasonably warm day in Boston, but at least it made for a lovely walk along with talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Max Simchowitz on robotic behavior cloning in continuous state/action spaces (contrasted with discrete token-based methods) at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPeuwFpdX-w

Last was "The Code of Capital" by Katharina Pistor. Most people, including some of the world's most prominent economists, believe that capital is some natural phenomena. That land ownership is simply a given, that inventions are your property, and that company shareholders have no liability for the company's failings or misdeeds. Pistor takes those assumptions to the woodshed in this tour de force, winding through the historical choices of rulers, lawyers, and merchants to encode assets as legal entities. These forces, far from being natural, are shaped by societal choices, and can be unmade or modified in similar ways.

This book vividly illustrates how those with power have used old legal instruments and new legal innovations to protect their wealth and the implications of these protections on perpetuating and accelerating inequality. The historical developments of the enclosure of the commons are particularly vivid, as is the opening example of the Belize government's appropriation of Mayan land. The centrality of private attorneys in driving asset encoding is also illuminating, particularly in light of many recent legal changes in the US to privilege that kind of law creation. While there is a slight detour into blockchain that is best sped through (the book was published in 2020, after all), overall this book gives a fantastic overview of legal mechanisms of capital creation and protection and provides a new lens through which to view the modern economy. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178974/the-code-of-capital?srsltid=AfmBOorhXtBsy_HXtj3-Nr-yViAnZhk6mKsJXgbp9-GmO6X7WwdKPUSH