The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! I’m your host - Scott Cunningham, a professor at Baylor in their economics department. This week's guest is with none other than Amy Finkelstein, the John Bates Clark award and MacArthur Genius grant winner, and professor of economics at MIT. This was a fun interview — super generous, giving guest who shared a lot of her life, how she grew up in New York and then through her own windy road found her way to economics. She has a new book out “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care” (with Liran Einav).I loved this interview. We talked about the Oregon Medicaid Experiment, which I talk about in my book in the instrumental variables chapter when discussing lotteries. She shares where that idea came from, and it was super exciting to hear about that. I hope you like the interview as much as me.Remember if you like the interview, consider supporting it by subscribing, liking, sharing or even becoming a paying subscriber. Enjoy!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 podcast! That feels strange typing since by now, I shouldn’t have to write it that way, but you never know — maybe someone is coming today for the first time and will be coming upon the second part of a two part interview with Nick Cox, a geographer at Durham in the UK, and longtime contributor to public and club goods around Stata, the software used by many economists at least. This is as I said Part 2 in a two part interview. The point of interviewing Nick as I said last time is that this podcast is an oral history of the economics profession of the last 50 years told through the personal stories of economists, and others that I think otherwise fit into that story. And the software we use to do our work, particularly when it allowed many of us to do empirical work for most of our careers, is a big part of that story. And Stata is a big part of that story, and Nick is a big part of Stata’s story, so I did a two part interview with him. Apologies that I have been slow updating the substack. I’ve had what feels like a lot more grading and administrative work than usual. I’ve also got a tad bit of some personal things coming to a head right now, and I’m hoping that will end soon. Tomorrow I will post some information about a few upcoming workshops at Mixtape Sessions, but while I have your attention, one of them is on shift-share IV with Peter Hull which starts next week September 25 and 27 in the evening from 6-9PM. Details here at this link. Should be great. You’ll learn be essentially brought to the frontier of this material and there’s going to be a lot of coding so that should be fun. So check it out! In the meantime, thanks for supporting the podcast, which as you’ve probably figured out by now is my labor of love, my passion project. I have found that personal grief in my own life has been made more meaningful for some reason through this style of documentary biography of others in our profession. I hope you find it useful and interesting too. If you like this podcast, please consider supporting it. But share it with someone who you think will find it useful too. As I tell myself and others — all of us belong. All of our stories matter. Yours and mine too, as well as the people I talk to. So have a great day.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

Apologies I double posted a podcast this morning. I will finish the Nick Cox interview next week. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott — where we listen to the personal stories of economists and hope that what bubbles up in the long run is a curated collective story of the economics profession of the last 50 years. This week’s interview guest is part of my “Becker’s Students” series which highlights the students of the late economist, Gary Becker, a legendary giant of microeconomics from both Columbia University as well as the University of Chicago, and who I also personally have admired so much that when I first read his Nobel Prize, I decided I also wanted to be an economist. This week’s interview is with someone I’ve come to count as a friend as well as being a long-time admirer — John Cawley, professor of economics at Cornell University. John has been a force of nature within health economics for several generations contribution to major topics in health like obesity and risky behaviors, as well as labor economics. Friendly and supportive to everyone, to a fault even, it was such a nice opportunity to get to talk to him in this interview. We discussed many things in this interview that I think it is probably just better left for John to share. But I am excited to get to share it with you now. Thank you again for supporting the podcast. I hope if you like it you will share it with others and enjoy the rest of your week too!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

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!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

Good morning! Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a lot of fun. I got to interview none other than William Greene, Professor Emeritus at NYU and author of 8 editions of a great textbook on Econometrics, as well as a software developer from an econometrics software called LimDep. What a fun trip through the past — through growing up in Long Island, his family moving to Ohio when a recession cost his dad his job, and moving into grad school where Bill began to realize his skills in computing and econometrics were complements. It was a fascinating story about early computing and applied econometrics software, and his career as an econometrician. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Please share! Like! Put it on your phone! Give it to your kids for Christmas!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 engaging podcast, host Scott interviews Ariel Pakes, a renowned economist and professor at Harvard University. They discuss Pakes' background, his contributions to econometrics and theory of the firm, and his popular method for estimating demand. They also explore topics such as Pakes' memorable vacations, his journey into studying economics, the concept of knowledge depreciation and obsolescence of patents, and the surprising influence of his BLP paper.

This week of the Mixtape with Scott, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Gábor Békés, an associate professor at Central European University in Austria and author of an exciting new textbook in data science and causal inference entitled Data Analysis for Business, Economics and Policy (Cambridge Press 2021). I wanted to talk to Gábor for many reasons — one because I am interested in talking with people whose roles in the scientific production function is to create platforms of knowledge sharing. These include editors of journals, department chairs, organizers of conferences, and authors of textbooks. I interviewed Jeff Wooldridge at the start of this year, I’m interviewing Bill Greene later this year, and I’m interviewing Gábor today. And on that point, I also wanted to talk to him about how his book, written with the late Gábor Kézdi who passed away around the time of the book’s publication, came about, what it was about, and who he sees his ideal audience to be. The book is a nearly perfect, flawless piece of writing. Not just in its pedagogy and what feels like an effortless precision, but also in what they cover and how they cover it. Someone who has never really worked with data before could take this book and move from the most fundamental issues around exploring data, from data collection and ensuring data quality, to data visualization, to learning canonical regression models, then moving into more advanced and contemporary areas like machine learning based predictive analytics and causal inference. The care and precision of the book is reflected in its aesthetic too. It’s simply one of the most beautiful books to the touch I’ve seen — the purple and green colors, its width, the glossiness of the pages, and the rich opportunities to learn R coding — are just a wonderful delight. I highly recommend everyone own a copy, and consider assigning it this fall for your statistics courses. It’s the perfect companion, if not the actual textbook.But I also just wanted to learn Gábor’s story, and I got to learn at least some of it. I learned about him growing up in Hungary during the throes communism in his formative years and how witnessing first hand a regime transition shaped his desire to learn economics which ultimately led him into study economic geography and international economics. Thank you again for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this week’s interview as much as I did!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

Update before introducing the podcast episode.Things have been light on the substack and I apologize for that. I spent two weeks traveling, seeing the country with my two high school aged daughters on a road trip from Waco, to Big Bend, to Marfa Texas, to the Grand Canyon. There at the Grand Canyon, I realized I was old and tired and it was hot and the girls gave it their best shot but sadly, they weren’t being blown away by the scenery, so we decided to then pull the plug a day early and go to Las Vegas. The Vegas trip was always meant to just be a way for me to find an airport for me to fly my youngest back to Waco in time for her camp, but then it turned into three days and two nights on the Strip where I learned you can pay $100 for a hamburger, two cheese steaks, a coke and two water bottles. At which point I told the girls we are going to try a new trick called “intermittent fasting” where none of us eats for the next 48 hours. Psyche! They ate but I did wish I could’ve lugged the Coleman stove and dehydrated beans up from the car at a few points as I had no idea Vegas was that expensive. We did Cirque de Soleil (we saw O which was beautiful). To be honest, the girls hadn’t really ever been out of Texas. I mean they had been on vacations but we usually vacation in Texas — the Hill Country is our special spot, on the rivers. But my heart is for the open road — ever since I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac when I was 16, everything changed for me. I developed a habit of stream of consciousness writing, which I perfected as the years went by on social media, but which made writing the carefully disciplined academic articles much more difficult. And I fell in love with America, and seeing America from behind a steering wheel. And getting to share that with my girls meant the world to me. They’ve beautiful young ladies, 11th and 12th grade, and they wore outfits and we did a lot of pictures in front of the choreographed water fountains, we saw the new massive LED dome, and then the next morning, my daughter flew back, and me and my oldest daughter drove straight to San Francisco, which had always been the destiny. San Francisco. My favorite city in the United States, and one of my favorite in the world. I’d found us a really nice airbnb in the Mission District. My daughter really had no idea what was waiting for her, but I knew that if I could just get us there, and if we could just walk the streets together, moving between neighborhoods and commercial areas, that it would affect her. And it did. She was like me deeply moved by the beauty of the city. Another book that had a major impact on my development was Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and all I really wanted was my daughter to feel a great American city with her feet and eyes, moving down the streets, navigating the BART. I gave her the job of getting us everywhere we needed to go so that she could master the public transportation system; I sensed that that was all that she needed to really feel her self esteem lift. Navigating public transportation involves going to depots, putting money on a card, going through turn styles, watching the people, getting on the train, reading maps, sit in a seat as a train moves through the dark — all experiences someone who has never had has conjured up feelings that really are new. And we don’t have that in Waco. I doubt my daughter have ever taken a bus in Waco, as Texas is an automobile centered place. So she did, and it was empowering just like I thought it would be. She said all she wanted to do was go to thrift stores, so we did. We went to Haight and for an entire day, all we did was go from thrift and vintage stores, one after another. I got some great Sam Smith Adidas for only $10. Couldn’t believe they fit. And I got a bunch of other things that looked great until I brought them home and then they didn’t, but she found the most beautiful sweater and pants. And I saw my daughter as this young woman and just thought how fortunate I am to be here with her. And so we had four days and three nights there. We even did touristy things — took a ferry to the Golden Gate Bridge and to Alcatraz where I didn’t wear a hat and so my bald head turned red as a beet. But then we drove back. I really did not have a plan for the return trip at all. I had a plan to get there, but not so much to get back. So I decided — okay, where have I never been? And I’d never really been to the northern part of Nevada, or Utah, or even much of Colorado. So that’s what we did. We drove Northern Nevada, through Reno, and then to Utah. I don’t know what I was expecting Utah to be like. Growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee, our lives were either in those states or on vacation to Florida. The middle part of the country, anywhere where there were mountains— I’d never seen. I’d seen the Smoky mountains in college, because I went to UT-Knoxville, but I’d never seen the mountains of the rest of the country. And so as a kid, I just thought Utah, Idaho and Iowa were probably all basically the same state. I thought maybe they were all just the scenery from Hoosiers, or possibly they looked like what I imagined Notre Dame looked like from watching Rudy. I had absolutely no idea that the country up there was like that as I’d never gone. So when I drove through Salt Lake City with her, and I saw the mountains towering over the city, it was just stunning. And it remained stunning — we drove for days, through Utah, down through Colorado, through this thick never-ending national park. I was listening to The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and we were just talking and looking at things that we’d never seen before. I saw things in that national park that I didn’t even know could look that way. I didn’t know we’d cut roads through mountains that way, or that there were roads overlooking valleys like that — endless roads through endless mountains through endless valleys, all covered with endless trees, forests laid out like a blanket over the mountain. They’re getting older. Next year, my oldest will graduate. Then the year after, my youngest will graduate. I’ve begun transitioning my life into a level of building into the next phase of my career. Writing, the workshops, more ambitious research projects that seem to take forever, consulting. I’ve gotten off social media, because it is such a negative place for me mentally. I suspect that things that happened on social media both last year but even really in the years leading up to it, left some scars. I noticed as much when recently I had something like a “flashback” when a new paper about online harassment of economists came out. I carry inside my body this feeling like the top layer of my skin is somehow slightly pulled away from the bone. It’s hard to explain. I’m going to see someone about it hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Decided I wanted to kick the tires, see what’s going on. Maybe try to get a better handle on why I am having a little trouble moving on, or why some things really get to me that to others looking in don’t make a lot of sense. I wish I was on the other side of my story where I’m a wise old man who says many wise things and floats along the ground, his feet never touching, having evolved. But I’m instead a man with his feet firmly on the ground, sometimes feeling planted into the ground, stuck. I make progress, and think it’s all done, all in the past, but then an event happens, and I wake up and think where am I? What happened? Am I really back at square one again? So, that’s why things have been quiet on here. I had some things I was going to write, papers I was hoping to read closely and write up, but I just have been slow to really feel confident I understand why the papers had been written. There is a guy at Brandeis name Tymon Sloczynski, a young econometrician, whose work I have grown to admire immensely. It’s full of insights, and it’s probably things he’s written that forced me to start looking more closely at covariates in regressions. He’s got an Restat where he shows that the regression model with additive covariates ends up putting weights on groups that are more or less the opposite of what you’d think it would do — weighting up the smallest groups in the data, and weighting down the largest ones, causing the OLS estimates of aggregate causal parameters in certain specifications to not be as easily interpretable. I just was struck by how much I don’t understand about OLS, and so I was hoping to do a series through several of his papers because I really think Tymon is an amazing writer and thinker. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.PodcastSo, with that all out of the way, I’d like to introduce you to this week’s podcast guest, Jonathan Meer, a professor at Texas A&M in the economics department. Waco Texas is they say “centrally located”. They say that because you can get to Dallas in 100 minutes, Austin in 90 minutes and College Station in 90 minutes. And if you’re willing to go a little further, Houston isn’t much further. It’s not pretty driving the way driving through Northern Nevada or Utah is, unfortunately, but waiting for you when you get there is Jonathan Meer, one of the funniest and thought provoking friends in my community of economist-friends. So there’s always consumer surplus associated with making the drive.I reached out to Jonathan because Jonathan isn’t really one of the “applied microeconomists” crowd that popped up at some point over the last couple of decades as much as he is a traditional microeconomist. The applied microeconomists were people like me who sort of took Becker as their inspiration to look at all of human behavior through an economic lens on the one hand, and then took Angrist and the credibility revolution to be the tools through which they’d do it. Meer was different. Meer was what I sometimes call on here “real economist” because he studied classic topics in labor and public finance, as well as ventured out on his own into areas around charitable giving. He moved between quasi-experimental and experimental work, but his overall grasp of economic theory was deep. He is considered one of the best instructors at all at A&M from what I can gather (I think the long name he has on his title is associated with his teaching skills). He teaches one of those massive micro economics classes with more students enrolled than populated some of the towns I drove through in Colorado. And he, from what I can gather, when he holds court, they all are on the edge of their seat, loving the lessons.Meer knew what he wanted to be from a young age — an economist. He wasn’t one of these Johnny-come-lately types, like me, who learned about economics super late. He learned about economics early, way earlier in fact than anyone I spoke to so far. He went to Princeton then Stanford. If you get to know him, he’s basically the classic “work hard play hard” guy. He loves people, and is constantly having big parties at his house in College Station where he invites people from diverse walks of life to come and watch him make these ridiculous cocktails and tell jokes. He reminds me of characters from Walker Percy novels. I have grown to appreciate our friendship as the years have passed. And I was grateful to have this chance to talk to him and hear more of his story. I hope you find it interesting too.Thanks as always for tuning in. Thanks for supporting this effort to run a podcast of personal stories aggregating into an oral history of the profession. All stories matter. Each of our stories matter. Your story matters. It is important that we believe that and not cheapen the experience of others by forcing their realities into our two dimensional caricatures of who they are or what this life is about. I do these podcasts to remember that people are good and valuable, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. And I do them as part of my own effort to remain whole and sane and get better and just not let go of the thread of yarn that links me back to thing I hold dear — economics. So sit back and enjoy this interview with Jonathan!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

Joe Price, labor economist and professor at Brigham Young University, discusses topics such as racial discrimination in the NBA, his childhood and aspirations, the influence of graduate school, the unique aspects of BYU's economics department, genealogy research using automation, and various research papers on social connections, immigration, prejudice, and longevity.

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is with a man I have gotten to become friends somewhat unexpectedly: Miles Kimball (Wikipedia). Miles is currently the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. professor in the economics department University of Colorado Boulder. And we got to know each other through a mutual friend, and discovered that we had many of the same somewhat eccentric interests around mental health, self improvement and a desire to serve the profession in our own personal ways. This is a long interview, but I found it fascinating. I wanted to talk to Miles about his growing up because he grew up in a famous family — his grandfather was named Spencer Kimball, the twelfth President of the Church of Latter Days Saints. Not being Mormon myself, it took me some research to understand the significance, but here’s a wikipedia article about who the President is in the Church of Latter Day Saints. It was an office originally held by the Church’s founder, Joseph Smith, and is their highest governing body. Members of the church consider the President to be also a revelatory person — a prophet and seer — and so I was fascinated both by that background, but also Miles’s own personal story as he left the Mormon church over 20 years ago, an act that I had to imagine was consequential for his life, and very difficult to summarize what it meant for him.Miles research productivity and interests are diverse. It ranges from the furthest parts of our tradition with topics in macroeconomics, the zero lower bound, theoretical elements of human decision making, subjective measures of well being and happiness, measurement, and more. But this is exactly the kind of person I have come to associate with Miles — his passions (and they are passions) range a very broad topic area. He is one of these renaissance types who goes broad and deep — not either/or; rather both/and. He is also, like me under what can only be described as a sense of calling to something bigger than himself to help economists with improving mental health by providing free life coaching “pods” — small groups who meet regularly over zoom going through life coaching curriculum, led by trained life coaches. Given the high rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness documented among our students, I am grateful for him. So let me now introduce you to Miles on this journey through his life. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again for all your support of the podcast and me. Remember to like, share, follow — all that stuff — if you find these interviews about our economists and the profession interesting. 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