The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! I’m the host - Scott Cunningham. As some of you have probably seen, I’ve been studying a paper on OLS entitled “Interpreting OLS Estimands When Treatment Effects Are Heterogeneous: Smaller Groups Get Larger Weights” by Tymon Słocyński at Brandeis University. It’s been an interesting paper because of what it taught me about a model I thought was done teaching me. Well this week I am interviewing Tymon, who is a young econometrician who does really interesting work. Tymon is an assistant professor at Brandeis and econometrician and I think one of my favorite young ones to boot. He’s a very deep, thorough econometrician, working on projects in a family of projects stemming from early applied work he did on the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, including this R&R of his at Restud on IV and LATE. I’ve learned so much from him and I hope you enjoy this! Don’t forget to like, share and maybe even review the podcast!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Interview with Guido Imbens, co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. Topics include local average treatment effect, instrumental variables, collaborations with Josh Angrist, and personal anecdotes. They discuss the importance of fostering community in the economics profession, the speaker's journey into econometrics, influences in the econometrics community, the potential outcomes model, career setbacks, collaborations, and the impact of machine learning on their thinking.

Avi Goldfarb, an economist specializing in the economics of the internet, discusses topics such as the history of AI in Toronto, creating lasting memories through vacations, the influence of family on interest in social science, challenges of obtaining data, luck and collaboration in research, methods in econometrics, analyzing the impact of ambulance chaser laws on online advertising, interdisciplinary research, the commercial potential of AI, and the downward sloping demand curve.

This week on the Mixtape with Scott, I have a very special guest. Adam Smith, the so-called founder of economics, and author of two best selling books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759 and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (buy it now for $2800 here at eBay!) published in 1776. I know what you’re thinking. “But Scott, that would make Adam Smith very old, even probably dead, wouldn’t it?” And you’re right on both counts! Adam Smith was a moral philosopher born in 1723 in Scotland so it literally makes him 300 years old, and yes, very dead. But I decided to push through that anyway and a few months ago asked ChatGPT-4 to essentially pretend to be Adam Smith for my podcast without any awareness or surprise. This podcast is somewhere between a seance and a play. It is the ghost in the machine — literally. I did a one hour interview with ChatGPT-4 who played the part of Adam Smith using the same style of interviewing I do with all the economists on the show — personal stories. This was all done in the ChatGPT-4 browser, and it was then recorded using Amazon AWS Polly “text to voice” using a British male’s voice named “Arthur”. This is part of a class assignment I have been doing this semester at Baylor University in my History of Economic Thought class. I got the idea to do this earlier this summer when I saw that the economist, Tyler Cowen, had interviewed Jonathan Swift using ChatGPT-4. So I decided to build into my classes an assignment where the students had to do it too. My students had to interview four 18th to early 20th century economists, with the final project being a recorded interview much like I did, and to show them it could be done, I interviewed Adam Smith. And boy was it fun. It was fun because of how novel it was, but it was also fun because of how thought provoking it was for me to learn about Smith’s first book Theory of Moral Sentiments, and listening to ChatGPT-4 speculate about the book’s connections to other ideas. I was mesmerized by the entire experience and really didn’t know what to make of it. After all, language models hallucinate; I already knew this. But then it dawned on me — this entire interview is a hallucination. What does it mean for a large language model to “be” Adam Smith when in fact Adam Smith never said any of these words? It means for ChatGPT-4 to hallucinate. Question is, though: is this a good hallucination or is it a bad one, and how to we judge that and should we even care? I wonder if hallucinating is a feature, not a bug, of ChatGPT-4. Is this any good? Is it something useful? I think so. Students seemed to have gotten a lot out of it. It requires the suspension of disbelief but then so does watching fantasy, or ready science fiction. Your mileage may vary on how much you enjoy it, and maybe the things we discuss aren’t so profound but I didn’t know a lot about him before doing this. So it was just nice to listen and learn more about the man, though a Smith scholar will need to tell me what’s accurate and what isn’t (as I said, technically it’s inaccurate from start to finish by definition).My PhD student, Jared Black, is in my history of economic thought class and has enjoyed being able to interrogate these old economists and their ideas. He decided to create his own GPT chatbot using OpenAI’s builder environment and said I could share it. https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GJeexE26G-ask-an-economist Ask to talk to Bentham or Nassau or Senior or Say or Marx. Just remember to be polite. A recent RCT found that if you’re nice to ChatGPT-4, it tends to perform tasks better. I swear I saw that study, but now I can’t find it, but it seems true so I’m going to cite it. Thanks again for tolerating me on this podcast. Even though this may seem gimmicky, in a way it is fully consistent with the shows premise. The show is about the personal stories of economists and the hope that by simply listening to economists’ stories, we can better understand our own story. The hope, too, is that in the long run, we hear a story of the profession itself. After all, we use stories to navigate our lives, and though stories like models are in some sense “wrong”, sometimes they are useful. This story is wrong, too, but maybe it’ll be useful. Peace!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott episode 38 of season 2! By my calculations, there have been 72 total episodes in the Mixtape with Scott podcast — 34 episodes in season 1, 38 this year. What better way to celebrate episode 72 (38) than with Dr. Andreu Mas-Colell from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain! If you’re an economist, then you know Dr. Mas-Colell if for no other reason than that his book with Greene and Whinston taught you microeconomics in grad school. If you’re looking for a replacement copy of the textbook to put on your shelf, click here. I wanted to interview Dr. Mas-Colell for a lot of reasons. First, because his book probably unites us all because we all had to take the micro preliminary exam, we all had to use that book for our classes, and many of us depended on it for our livelihoods so we could pass those classes. So in a way, that’s not Mas-Colell’s book — that’s our book too. So I thought that given the podcast is about both the personal stories of economists but also an effort to tell “our story” as economists of the last 50 years, just like I interviewed Bill Greene, the author of a popular textbook in econometrics a few months ago, I wanted to also interview Dr. Mas-Colell. But Dr. Mas-Colell is also an important figure in the history of microeconomic theory and I also wanted those of you whose heroes are theorists to hear his journey, as I know oftentimes the podcast is nearly exclusively conversations with empiricists of various stripes with some exceptions.Dr. Mas-Colell is also, I think, an inspiration to someone who has lived a life defined by his own personal integrity. I think many economists, young and old, but also non-economists too, will be inspired to hear his story of being someone who cared deeply about democracy in the shadow of a dictatorship and the willingness to continue to incur real personal costs for the sake of the body politic. Any day now, we will hear the conclusion to a case dating back to June 2021 when Spain's Court of Auditors found that he was among those responsible for government expenditure on the unconstitutional 2017 Catalan independence referendum. Spain’s courts announced its intention to fine Dr. Mas-Colell millions of euros. This led to a public outcry from the international community of economists two summers ago. The final verdict will be announced, Dr. Mas-Colell says in this interview, probably in the middle of this month. It’s another long interview, and I want to give you a little warning ahead of time. I am not a micro theorist, which you probably guessed. I was surprised, nonetheless, by how little I remembered about the names of economists and departments and how the full history of micro theory fit together. As such, I know I left a ton of opportunities unrealized on the table. But I knew going into it that I was really not going to be able to have more than superficial understandings of the sociological history of micro theory as it had been too long. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I left some money on the ground I’m sure. But it was a huge life lived, and I really just was wanting to hear as much as I could in what amounted to still a two hour interview. So I hope you enjoy and find this podcast interview inspiring and interesting and helpful as you continue to try and navigate your own life, and your own place in the story of economics. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Recently, the University of Chicago Press published a book entitled The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. It was written obviously by Gary Becker who died almost 10 years ago at the age of 83 after an extremely long and fruitful career as an economist. Dr. Becker had many students — some like me were students from afar, but some, like our guest today, were his actual students. And today’s guest is Casey Mulligan, one of the editors of that aforementioned book, and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. This was a fun interview to do. Casey walked us through his time at Harvard as an undergrad to his unusually rapid progression through Chicago’s economics PhD program where he stayed on and is now a professor. We discussed his own career but we also spent just a lot of time discussing what it was like with Becker, as well as his own later time at the Council of Economic Advisers. I hope you enjoy it!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Sascha Becker, an economist and historian at Monash University, discusses his research on religion's impact on literacy and human capital, as well as his work on the spread of causal inference in economics. Topics covered include the Protestant work ethic, the relationship between the church and national socialism, and how Luther's influence spread geographically during the Reformation. Sascha also reflects on his career, including his regrets and the importance of collaboration.

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week's episode has a guest that some of you have come to know and appreciate, and some of you hopefully will after this episode — Andrew Goodman-Bacon (“Bacon”). In addition to having a great nickname, he also has a great job, a great personality and several great papers, one of which after only two years since publication has won an award at the Journal of Econometrics, and already has over 4,000 cites. I really wish I knew how to pull things from google scholar and I could see what other papers in the history of econometrics have had such a meteoric rise in terms of impact and influence. It’s been unusually impactful, though, let’s just say. I have a hunch Bacon wasn’t given the “Most Likely to Actually Use Math After High School” award in high school. But as it turns out, he has, and has become a really great applied economist who works on topics both in econometrics, but also public policy and economic history. The trifecta. But a few years ago, he left academia to go work for the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis at the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. This interview was a real delight; it even involves Dungeons & Dragons and throwing knives. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Bacon has done a lot for helping a lot of us better understand difference-in-differences — a technique that many of us thought (much to our chagrin) we probably understood better than we did (I know I didn’t). But now some of us better understand it and while Bacon isn’t the only one who helped advance that knowledge, he was one of them. So I hope you enjoy this interview, and if you’re interested in learning more about difference-in-differences, don’t forget to check out Brant Callaway’s workshop on Mixtape Sessions tonight! You can sign up here! Don’t forget also to share the workshop to everybody you’ve ever met in your entire life, as well as post to your online dating profile!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott podcast! This week is a special one for the economics community as we celebrate Claudia Goldin's well-deserved Nobel Prize win for her pioneering work on women in the labor market. It's serendipitous, then, that today's guest is Melanie Guldi, associate professor of economics at University of Central Florida, who has spent over 15 years since graduating in 2006 from the University of California — Davis doctoral program in economics carving out a unique path in related terrain focused on the economics of fertility. Melanie’s 2008 job market paper and subsequent publication in Demography examined in greater detail a question that Goldin had earlier suggested — did early access to oral contraception and abortion cause birth rates to decline? Melanie found some evidence it did, at least for some groups. But, while Melanie's work has some thematic intersections with that of Dr. Goldin, Melanie has become an authority in her own right on the complex landscape of health economics and demography. Her expertise touches on a wide range of critical issues, from maternal labor supply to the impact of intensive care on infant survival, and she has developed novel hypotheses that have further enriched our understanding of these topics. So, without further ado, let's dive into this rich tapestry of research and insights with someone who has dedicated a decade and a half to becoming an expert in the field. Melanie, welcome to the show.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott. I guess I could say “And I am your host Scott Cunningham” but after over 50 of these, I guess you already know I’m the host. When I first became interested in economics, it was through an old working paper series called the John M. Olin working paper series, which was then affiliated with the University of Chicago’s law school. That was where I found Becker’s Nobel Prize speech which caused an immediate 180 on my career and led me into economics myself. But the thing that really stood out to me was that economics was about more than just banking and money; apparently it was also connected to law, and more specifically, there was a field called “law and economics” even. As I read more of the working papers at the working paper series, I became more and more interested with everything there, including law and economics. Which my way of creating a segue into this week’s guest.I first met Jonah Gelbach, the Herman Selvin professor of law at UC Berkeley, at a conference in Paris on crime. He probably doesn’t even remember it. All I really remember of Jonah in that conference was two things. First, he pulled me aside and said a lot of nice things about my paper and told me thought it would publish really well. So that was encouraging and I made a note to myself, “Note to self, this guy said it would publish well. Hold him to it.” Second, I remember him passionately responding to his discussant that the paper he’d written had something called “a surface”. And I made a second note to myself, “Note to self, learn what a surface is.” It was something very clearly related to original, very technical, econometrics, and I made a third note to myself after that. “Note to self, this this guy’s name is Jonah Gelbach, and he apparently is a very good econometrician who also works on applied matters.”Jonah’s an economist and a lawyer. He’s written several very influential articles in both econometrics but also applied economics. He did a PhD at MIT under Josh Angrist, if I remember correctly, during that heady time when causal inference was blossoming in Cambridge in the 1990s (he graduated in 1998). He then took a job at Maryland where he was eventually tenured, then to Arizona where he stayed until 2010. He then took the road less traveled: he quit a tenured job as an economics professor, went to Yale and got a JD in 2013, then went to Penn and is now at Berkeley where he writes in all the areas that he apparently loves — law, economics and econometrics. I asked Jonah to be on the show for a few reasons. First, I made a note to myself to remember this guy for a reason. He’s very talented and very approachable, kind and thoughtful and funny. But two, as I said, he took the road less traveled. Quitting a tenured job in academia, giving up the golden handcuffs as they say, to go to law school to start over — it’s not the most common way to get a JD, arguably. And I guess I just wanted to learn that story a little better as I didn’t know it. But third, law and economics — now circling back where I started — is part of the story of economics of the last 50 years, and the podcast is ultimately about two things: the personal stories of economists building out the collective story of economics. We are a diverse tribe. Law and economics is part of that tribe’s story. And economists sitting inside law schools has also become part of that tribe’s story. And so I asked Jonah, and he graciously accepted, to be on the podcast so here he is! Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe