The Mixtape with Scott scott cunningham

This week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott" features an insightful conversation with E. Glen Weyl, a distinguished economist whose career has spanned academia and industry. Glen earned his PhD from Princeton, spent three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and served as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he made significant contributions to micro theory applications to industrial organization. However, Glen’s journey took a transformative turn when he left academia to join Microsoft, where he currently leads the Plural Technology Collaboratory, focusing on technological solutions for societal cooperation.
Many listeners might recognize Glen from his influential book "Radical Markets," co-authored with Eric Posner. This work introduced the innovative voting mechanism known as quadratic voting, reflecting Glen's deepening interest in democratic processes and governance. His latest book, "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy,” (Amazon link) co-authored with Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang, serves as a manifesto for harnessing digital technology to foster social unity and diversity. The book presents bold ideas, from digitally empowered communication to transforming global trade, aiming to enrich relationships and ensure inclusivity.
In addition to his writing, Glen has also ventured into film as an executive producer of the documentary "Good Enough Ancestor," which highlights Audrey Tang's work in digital democracy. That trailer can be found here; Glen was executive producer on it.
Throughout our interview, Glen shares his experiences and insights from his varied projects, illustrating his renaissance man persona. From his academic roots to his pioneering efforts at Microsoft and beyond, Glen’s story is a testament to his innovative spirit and dedication to leveraging technology for societal good. This episode promises to be an engaging exploration of his remarkable career and visionary ideas.
So thank you for once again for tuning into the podcast! I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Don’t forget to subscribe, follow, all that and tell people about it!
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This week on the podcast, Matthew Jackson from Stanford University is the guest and it was such a delight for me to talk to him and get to know his story a little better. I’d met him before, but only briefly, but I’d read a lot of his work because I once developed and taught a class on networks for our masters of economics students. His textbook on the economic and social networks is excellent but he also has a general interest book on networks if you’re wanting something more accessible.
As the podcast is technically both listening to the stories of living economists and an oral history project, maybe it is worth noting this (though I think it’s obvious to most listeners) that Matt is a micro theorist whose work has empirical content. Not all micro theory does and not all empirical work is necessarily theoretically driven, which is why I make that technical distinction. Networks are also, I think, so clearly an important part of human existence. We make friends, we catch diseases, we learn about opportunities (and maybe as importantly, don’t learn about opportunities) because of networks. And so in a very real sense, even the classical definition of economics proposed by Lionel Robbins, that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources by people with unlimited desires, can alone justify the study of networks if networks, as opposed to merely markets and market prices, are actually an important part of that resource allocation process itself. It’s so interesting — as someone nearly 50 to consider all the ways economics evolved over the last 50 years and continues to evolve while still remaining at its core connected to core questions like “how do humans manage to survive on this planet given they have so little time and so little resources?”
Anyway, one last thing. At the end of the podcast, I ask Matt about his new work on artificial intelligence. The paper is at PNAS and is currently unlocked. It’s entitled “A Turing Test of Whether AI Chatbots are Behaviorally Similar to Humans” and it’s by Matt, Qiaozhu Mei, Yutong Xie, and Walter Yuan. They had ChatGPT-4 play a variety of classic games, like dictator games, prisoner’s dilemma, and so on. And they mapped the way the chatbot played to the way humans have planed these games in the lab. The one thing that I found really interesting in what they found was that ChatGPT-4 is altruistic. “It” appears to play the game altruistically in the sense that it attempts to maximize a weighted average of both its payouts and its opponent’s payouts. What then should we expect if we in the long run end up with a network of chatbots? Hard to say what the general equilibrium will be as game theoretic equilibria are often surprising and not immediately intuitive and usually depend on institutions and incentives, but still it’s quite fascinating to me. I hope you liked this interview!
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Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott where I get to interview Bruce Sacerdote, the Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics at Dartmouth. Bruce is a prolific labor economist whose work spans the range of crime, education and peer effects. Some of his papers have been some of my favorite, even. His early work on crime with Ed Glaeser used to really interest me. But it was his work on peer effects that I found really fascinating. This old paper in the QJE about how friendships form I must have read almost 20 years and it still sticks in my head.
I think Bruce, though, was one of the first people that I ever encountered after graduating that was very clearly part of this credibility revolution. His papers, if it used instruments, typically would use lotteries as instruments. Or if he was studying peer effects, it was lotteries. Well, not surprisingly, Bruce was there at Harvard as a PhD student in the first class that Imbens co-taught with Don Rubin on causal inference. His classmates in that class were Rajeev Dehejia and Sadek Wahba, authors of classic applied papers on the propensity score. In fact, Bruce’s own project for that class was also published — a paper estimating the causal effect of winning lottery prizes on labor market outcomes (published in the 2001 AER). So this was fun, and I hope you enjoy it too. Apologies I ramble for so long at the start. Not sure what got into me.
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This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is someone I’ve admired for a very long time, even before I entered graduate school in 2002. Peter J. Boettke is the Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It’s hard to summarize just how important Peter has been to the story of Austrian economics, but in my mind, he’s been one of the most influential people in that long tradition, both for his scholarly work on political economy, public choice and institutions, his leadership at George Mason, where the Austrian tradition has continued to thrive, and as a mentor to young people.
I can only speak to myself, but I have looked up to Peter for a very long time as it was always very clear that he was a humble and serious scholar who also gave an incredible amount of time and mentorship to his students. All of those are to me examples of what I find to characterize some of the best of the profession’s larger story, and so it was a real pleasure for him to sit down with me to talk about his career. I found it so interesting to hear his story in his own words, the economists he looked up to as a young person, his genuine love of economics, as a field, and how much he holds up his students and colleagues. Thank you, as always, for taking the to tune in. I hope you enjoy this time with Peter as much as I did.
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This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Jesse Rothstein, the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy at UC-Berkeley and the Faculty Director of the California Policy Lab. Jesse has a long list of things to which he’s made meaningful contributions, ranging from labor economics, to discrimination, to education, to causal inference and more. He’s also one of the “students of David Card” guests that I wanted to have on the podcast, as Card was his adviser way back in the day. For those curious about the paper we are talking about towards the end (“augmented synthetic control”), it’s one of my favorites in the synthetic control literature. The link to it is here. Good luck everyone this week and thanks for tuning is as always!
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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! We are getting closer to the hundredth episode! This is our 91st interview if I include Adam Smith (played by ChatGPT-4), which I absolutely will be counting. And the guest is someone I have admired for a long time — Martin Gaynor, or “Marty”. Marty is the J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon both in the economics department and their policy school, Heinz College. But he is also special adviser to Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the federal Department of Justice, and it is not the first time that Marty has served in government as a public servant. He is also a former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You can read some about his new position in the Department of Justice here.
Marty works on the supply side of health, you might say, as opposed to the demand side. He studies markets and concentration, hospitals, firm competition, pricing — not just our health behaviors, but also the supply of healthcare through a mixture of market and non-market processes. If you go through his vita, you can see he’s racked up a lot of awards and publications over the years.
There are many things you can say about Marty, and after this interview, two came to mind — resilient and kind. It was actually almost not the case that he would become as successful as an economist as he became, as he will share in this interview. He struggled initially to get a tenure track job, and even left academia briefly as a result. He is remarkably upbeat and realistic about the good fortune that he has had, though. And as you will see in this interview, it is very clear that he is a genuinely kind and warm hearted person.
Marty also is a survivor in a more literal sense. He was nearly murdered in the antisemitic terrorist attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That is his story to tell in this interview, not mine, but I will leave it at that.
All of our stories matter. No matter who is listening or reading this, their personal story matters, and I hope that this interview is interesting and that you enjoy getting to know Marty a bit better. Thank you for all your support!
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