Two Think Minimum

Adam Gamoran is president of the William T. Grant Foundation. Before that he was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Disclaimer: TPI received a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation that allowed us to explore ways in which the 2019 Evidence Act could be administered more effectively.

Today, we're delighted to have as our guest, Michael McConnell. If you've been following the news at all lately, you probably know Michael is co-chair of the Facebook Oversight Board, which last week published its decision in the case involving President Trump's access to Facebook following the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Michael is also the Richard and Francis Mallory Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at the Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Michael has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law theory, has argued 15 cases in the US Supreme Court and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and DC Circuit Court Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been in an Assistant General Counsel of the OMD, where I had the pleasure of working with him on regulatory reform issues, and a member of the president's Intelligence Oversight Board.

Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration and Co-Chair of the HBS Digital Initiative. He also co-directs the Program on the Economics of Digitization at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and because HBS provides such modest bios, we thought we would embellish it a little bit with just some numbers from his CV. Shane has written nine books and edited volumes. 71 articles in peer review journals, 47 chapters in books, 15 published proceedings and reports, 52 invited publications, 150 articles for IEEE, which means that we could probably calculate the opportunity cost of your being with us today in terms of lost articles.

It's been a big year for antitrust with possible major implications for the future structure of the economy. There's no sign that this action will slow anytime soon. Given all that, we're delighted to have crack Politico antitrust reporter and Leah Nylen with us today to hash it all out. Leah has recently finished her first year at Politico after eight years before that at MLex, and she's also worked for Bloomberg and Congressional Quarterly.

Jon Baron. Jon is Vice-President of Evidence-Based Policy at Arnold Ventures. Before that, he founded the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which worked with federal policy officials to advance evidence-based reform, and I feel particularly honored to have Jon here because he's on the front lines of the evidence-based policy initiative

Dr. Mary Shirley is President of the Ronald Coase Institute, a nonprofit organization working to improve knowledge of institutions and to build the capacity of young scholars to analyze and overcome institutional problems in their own countries. Mary has a PhD in economics and has worked for over 30 years in development, including over 20 years as a research manager in the World Bank. She's author of numerous scholarly articles and books on institutional issues and economic development. She's also written on reform of state owned enterprises, including telecom, water, and more.

On our first completely internal podcast! Today, we're just going to take stock of the tech policy landscape. We'll talk mostly about the $1.9 trillion stimulus and a little bit of antitrust, and we'll figure out what we know and don't know. Hopefully, we'll have more of the know than don't know, but I don't know what the over-under is on those odds.

Jeff Prince is Professor and Chair of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. He's also the Harold A. Poling Chair in Strategic Management and Co-Director of the Institute for Business Analytics at Kelley. He recently served as Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission. His primary research focus is on technology markets and telecommunications, having published works on dynamic demand for computers, internet adoption and usage, the inception of online-offline product competition, and much, much more.

Paul Barrett is Deputy Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at the NYU Stern School of Business. He joined the center in September of 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist and author, focusing on the intersection of business law and society. Most recently, he worked for 12 years for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and prior to that from 1986 to 2005, he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. He is the co-author of a recent publication from the Center for Business and Human Rights titled “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,” obviously a very timely subject.

Today, we are delighted to have Professor Tom Hazlett. Tom was one of our very first guests back when we launched the podcast, and we're delighted to have him back for an encore performance. He holds the H.H. McCaulay Endowed Chair in Economics at Clemson and also serves as the Director of Clemson's Information Economy Project. He studies law and economics specializing in the information economy. He served as Chief Economist at the FCC and has held faculty positions at UC Davis, Columbia, Wharton, and George Mason. His research has appeared in countless peer-review journals and law reviews. That's countless by me, because I haven't counted, but it's a large number. He also writes in the popular press with articles in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the New Republic, the Economist, Slate, and the Financial Times, where he was a columnist on tech policy from 2002 to 2011. His latest book, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, was published in 2017. Tom is on TPI's Board of Academic Advisors. We are very grateful for that, and Tom is also one of Sarah's advisors and a former boss.