The Mixtape with Scott

The Mixtape with Scott is a weekly podcast devoted to building out a selected part of the collective story of the last 50 years of the economics profession by listening to the personal stories of living economists. And this week's guest is a the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College in Vermont, Caitlin Myers who I am fortunate to count as both a coauthor and friend, as well as an professional admirer. Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Texas's economics department and is one of those young economists who hit the ground running and has only gotten faster. A senior economist told me recently she is *the* abortion researcher at this moment in time having made major contributions to both the scientific record and the policy discussion regarding abortion policy, its causes and its consequences. She is as far as economists go meticulous, thoughtful, passionate, principled and creative, and while she is not directly a student of Gary Becker, or Claudia Goldin for that matter, she is very clearly part of their influence on labor economics and on Caitlin in turn. Thank you again for tuning in to the podcast. If you like it, please share, follow and all that.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 season 3 of The Mixtape with Scott! A podcast about the personal stories of economists and the collective story of economics of the last 50 years. We are kicking off season 3 with a bang: an interview with the distinguished labor economist, Richard Freeman, from Harvard University. Dr. Freeman holds is the Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and serves as the Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. As you’ll learn, his educational journey started with a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1964 and went into a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University which he competed in 1969.Freeman's work has been pivotal in reshaping perspectives on labor economics and industrial relations. His book "What Do Unions Do?" co-authored with James Medoff in 1984, challenged prevailing economic views by suggesting that unionism could enhance social efficiency. This groundbreaking work has been supported by subsequent studies, highlighting the positive impact of unions on productivity in various fields. Freeman has also made significant contributions to understanding the internationalization of science, the dynamics of the scientific workforce, and the implications of an overeducated American labor market.This was a super fun and at times funny interview, and I hope you like listening to it as much as I had being in it. Thanks again for tuning in! Don’t forget to like, share, follow, etc.! 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

And with that, season 2 of the Mixtape with Scott is complete! What a journey! Our final guest this year is an econometrician named Christine Pinto. Christine is an econometrician at INSPER Institute of Education and Research in São Paolo Brazil. And I know of Christine because of her work on synthetic control making her fit with my larger interest in causal inference. But ironically, Christine also was briefly a Guido Imbens student at Berkeley before he left, which makes her also part of the story of how causal inference spread through labor markets and not merely textbooks. It was a delight getting to talk to Christine and I hope you find this interview as enjoyable as I did. Thank you again for all your support these last two years. I have thoroughly enjoyed this journey throughout the world, hearing the stories of living economists, and helping broadcast them for whoever else out there that needs and wants to hear them. I hope all of you can leave behind the things that are no longer needed from 2023 and take only with you those things into 2024 that are essential. Best of luck to all you of you. 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

In this episode, Scott interviews Marianne Wanamaker, an economic historian and dean at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. They discuss her journey and accomplishments, including her work on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the scarcity of women in economics, and her career path beyond academia.

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape, I’m Scott Cunningham, the host. We are in the final stretch! Season two is almost over. When it’s all said and done, there’ll be 45 episodes in season two, and 34 from season which is [does math on a piece paper, scratches it out, starts over, then announces] 79 episodes. Man, what a fun this has been. Today’s interview is with Dr. Jinyong Hahn, the chair of the economics department at University of California Los Angeles and a prominent econometrical. I knew of Dr. Hahn mainly from his 2001 paper in Econometrica with Petra Todd and Wilbert Van der Klauuw on identification and estimation in regression discontinuity designs though he’s been extremely prolific just that one. I learned a lot of new things, and you’ll hear my surprise as a bunch of things click in place. I just wanted to say again thank you for all your support. I hope you have a great week as we head into the holidays. 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’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