#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/10/24

A sick kid at home meant I wasn't able to get out today, but at least while replacing empty tissue boxes I was able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Andrew Gordon Wilson on why machine learning is linear algebra (🔥) at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nplao1_t8ig&t=2s

Next was an excellent talk by Edward Davenport on how developing country vendors find high quality foreign suppliers at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. This is an incredibly rigorous study, combining a variety of data sources (including secret shoppers) with Senegalese retailers and Turkish clothing suppliers to show that digital connections reduce search frictions. Also Sinan Aral got a slide proving that Turkey has a 34% quality premium over China 😁. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q0WrCIRNl8

Last was "A Brief History of Equality" by Thomas Piketty. As usual Piketty provides a thoroughly researched, rigorous tour through the history of economic growth and the distribution of that growth. Along the way he spends a good amount of time examining the choices and social causes of these developments, demonstrating the degree to which current inequalities are strongly rooted in the past.

This book is essentially a condensed version of his previous book, Capital and Ideology, and if you've read that book you can probably pass on this one. If you're more interested in the policy implications of inequalities and want a briefer review of the historical causes of them, you're better off with this book. If instead you want to dig more into the statistics and analyses of these inequalities, the previous book will be better (as long as you're willing to devote ~50 hours to it). Still highly recommend https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674273559