S2E29: Dr. Nick Cox, Durham, Geographer, Stata (Part 1)

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is with a professor at Durham in England in the geography department, Dr. Nick Cox. Many economists will only know of Nick because of his presence on the Stata listserv where he was one of its most prolific contributors and moderators. As economics as a field gradually shifted from theory to empirical work, at least as a share of the total papers written and total people employed, people like Nick and others became more relevant people in our lives as empiricists. We would go to the Stata listserv with questions, and more times than not, it would be Nick answering them.

I wanted to interview Nick because as I told him, the purpose of the podcast is to tell the story of the last 50 years of the economics profession by listening to the personal stories of real people. Mostly, that has been economists, but sometimes not. And Nick is one of those sometimes not. He’s a geographer at Durham who, like Bill Greene the econometrician I interviewed a week ago, first began to see his love and aptitude for statistics mature along with a desire to help his colleagues with their own programming problems. That particular kind of worker for whom the latent understanding of statistics and econometrics also selects on skills with computing has and will likely remain a powerful complement, and for Nick it was indeed.

We go through his early life, growing up in England, and moving into geography and statistics in college, as well as over two separate interviews travel into his early time finding and becoming more a part of the Stata community. I tell Nick that I saw in him things I wanted for myself — someone who in his own way was part of community development within academia in the odd spaces of work, and had hoped we could talk to discuss more of what that journey was for him. And he graciously agreed. Apologies that my opener is longer than normal; I didn’t have a script so rambled (always a mistake). Thanks again for tuning in; like, share, follow, and consider maybe even becoming a subscriber!

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