The Mixtape with Scott

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.

Welcome back to the Mixtape with Scott. I took a little break to let listeners breathe a little, but I’m back with my regular weekly uploads of new interviews with economists as part of my ongoing project (if that’s the right word) to listen to and relay the personal stories of economists and then let those stories then mount up and tell a collective story of the profession. Not “the story”, as there is no such thing as “the story”. Just a curated, selected story. But my hope is that some of you hearing it will have more lights along the path. And today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Ariel Pakes, the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

This was a fun interview. People either know Dr. Pakes very very well, or they only know him by the letter “P”. He is a structural econometrician and theoretical economist in the industrial organization tradition who has made major contributions to econometrics and theory of the firm as well as applied practices in both. He is also the coauthor with Berry and Levihnson on an extremely popular method for estimating demand called “Berry-Levihnson-Pakes model” or BLP for short. When I asked the chief economist at Spotify, Kyle Kretschman, just as the interview was concluding, what paper in economics continues to have had the most lasting impression on him even all these years after grad school, he just smiled and said “BLP”. And that is hardly a minority position. The 1995 Econometrica by those three economists, “Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium” has had a major effect within economics and outside.

Dr. Pakes has made seminal contributions to areas of lasting relevance to our understanding not just of econometrics but also advanced economies like the United States as he has brought great attention to issues around technological innovation, patents and market competition. And we talked about some of this, particularly towards the end, but we talked about it in a way that I think you’ll find interesting because we talked into it, we talked through and towards it.

You see one of the things that I’ve been trying to do in these interviews is to get over the “selection on the dependent variable” inherent in our understanding of the published impactful work of others, and the lasting careers others have had. As we look at these people, and we study their works, and we use them even psychologically and existentially in complex barely discernible ways to navigate our own lives, I think we don’t always notice that we are usually engaged in a form of extreme selection bias called “conditioning on the outcome variable”. That is, we are only observing these people after the work was done. The failures, the false starts, the experimentations, the experiences they had on that road, how they met their collaborators, how they worked together, how they didn’t work so well together, all the trillions of decisions — it isn’t that those things are somehow free of endogeneities either. All of life is endogenous, after all. But if we are wanting to better understand how to get from point A to point B in our own lives, I don’t think it’s all that helpful to just look at people at point C and try to therefore guess where it is we need to reach next. If nothing else, it’s at least also helpful to just listen to their story, watch them as they describe the movement as they remember it. And so I loved this interview with Dr. Pakes. Hearing about his love of NBA basketball, the outdoors with his family, and growing up in a radical socialist youth group. His soft spoken, thoughtful discussions of his life as he shared his love for philosophy as a young man and how his first year at Harvard he was straddling economics and philosophy was fascinating, and just learning that his own approach to live — getting himself way over his head on a problem in economics and having to dig a way out — managed to not just get him out, but maybe get the rest of us out too. It was wonderful and this was a really nice interview. I hope you love it as much as me.

Thanks again for tuning in. Good luck to all of you as the new semester starts up. My mom got Wordle on the first try this morning. After having played every single morning since day one, this is the first time she actually got it right on the first try. I have decided that not only is this a good omen for the fall, and not only is it good luck for me, but I have decided to share this good luck with all of you. So consider this as my effort to share the blessing with you all no matter where you are. Have a great new semester learning about our awesome, sometimes hard and tragic but always beautiful world full of amazing people.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

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 ins…

This week’s interview is with a professor at Brigham Young University named Joseph Price, or Joe. Joe is a professor who graduated from Cornell around the same time that I graduated from the University of Georgia (i.e., 2007 cohort). He’s a labor economist, Fellow at the Wheatley Institution, NBER research associate, Director of BYU’s Linking Lab, co-editor at Economics of Education Review and the author of something like 45 peer reviewed articles in top economics journals like the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Management Science, as well as countless interdisciplinary journals on numerous topics in sports, the family and more.

I will just list two studies that I have for many years found very interesting. One of them with Justin Wolfers made a major splash both in economics on the topic of discrimination as well as the broader public, including the National Basketball Association (NYT link here). who has written on a variety of topics like discrimination in the NBA. “Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees” with Justin Wolfers appeared in one of the 2010 issues of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and claimed to find evidence of racial discrimination, mostly likely caused by unconscious bias than animus, among NBA referees in calling fouls against players. What impressed me at the time is the same thing that always impresses me: an interesting question, the discovery of some randomness that allows one to plausibly provide some evidence relevant to that question, and the collection of interesting data. Joe and Justin hand collected box scores of every NBA game with specific fouls among other statistics of the players combined with the names (and races) of the officiating referees at each game. While they could not link a referee to a foul called, they used a measure of the percentage of the officiating staff that was White and non-White as a proxy. With random variation in the racial composition, supported by both institutional details and a series of regression analyses, they looked at whether a higher share of White referees “caused” a Black or White player to have a foul called against them more or less often conditional on player fixed effects. You can read the abstract to learn what they find, but given the controversy and antagonism it generated within the NBA, I suppose you can also guess.

But it is another paper of his, a solo authored one, at the Journal of Human Resources, that I have always found to be a truly beautiful piece of economics. “Parent-Child Quality Time: Does Birth Order Matter?” was for a long time my favorite empirical paper I’d ever read. It was a simple idea really. Lower birth order, particularly the first born, typically had better academic and labor market outcomes, despite coming from the same family. Sandy Black and coauthors had written about this in a 2005 QJE using Scandinavian registry data, but the mechanisms were largely speculative. Joe’s paper was not so much conclusive as it was a clever descriptive paper showing that lower birth order children received more high quality time from their parents using the American Time Use Survey, which is a time diary and in my opinion one of America’s more interesting repeated cross sections. The patterns he found fit a rule that was well intentioned but likely led to inequities within the family — first borns received all their parents’ time; second borns received half their parents’ time, third borns received a third of their parents time, and on and on. In other words, equity rules with each stage over quality time, or simply budget constraints themselves, leads to American families to spend less time overall in early years with each new child simply because quality time is a scarce resource. Becker might say that instead of equity, we should aim for optimized time spent with children — spent quality time up to the point where marginal benefit equals marginal cost across all children. But such rules, while sensible economists, are likely unethical because of ironically strong bonds of kinship where parents love their children the same.

These kinds of questions over deviations from optimizing behavior where emotion and quick thinking drives decision making, as opposed to pure economic calculation, was a hallmark of Joe’s work, but more recently he transitioned into a very ambitious project of using Machine Learning and large genealogical databases to link people with other large datasets like the Census, to track them over time and create a large family tree of what he calls the Human Family. This is the Joe Price I have come to know — a deeply curious man, a man with deep endowments in the skills of our professions, a hard worker (you will not find him on social media), a mentor and a man of vision. To say that I hold him in the highest esteem is an understatement. And because of his character, the lack of guile and a positive and egalitarian spirit, he was for a long time an economist my age whose productivity did not cause me insecurity. I was simply honored and amazed by what a good economist he was and tried, as I often have, to see if I could crack the algorithm that made him so successful.

So, it is my pleasure to introduce you to one of my friends who I consider to be a special member of economics of larger story. Special in many ways, but one way being he would likely tell me that we are all special. Thank you again for supporting the podcast. If you like it, consider supporting it by subscribing below. I am Scott Cunningham the host of the Mixtape with Scott!

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is from 2019. It is an interview with the late Dr. William Spriggs, an economist who died in June 2023. He was a longtime professor of economics at Howard University and Chief Economist for the AFL-CIO. It was from an old series I wanted to do called “What Economists Do” — the premise being more or less what evolved into my current podcast: tell the stories of living economists and in aggregate hope that the collective story of economics is told. And Dr. Spriggs was the first I reached out to. This was filmed at a conference for mentors and mentees hosted by the American Economics Association and we were both there, so I asked him if he’d be willing to let me interview him and he graciously said yes.

For two hours, we talked about Dr. Spriggs’ life — all of which was new to me, as he didn’t know me and I only knew of him by reputation, but not about his personal life. If you aren’t familiar with him, he was a man with a resume. Professor of Economics at Howard University for many years, chief economist to the AFL-CIO, and Assistant Secretary for the Department of Labor in the Obama administration. His scholarly focus was labor economics and public policy, both with an eye towards inequality and persistent structural racism. He was vocal about these things in the world, but also the profession, and he spoke with real courage and so much moral force that it made a real impression on me every time I’d been in his vicinity.  Every now and then it seems there is someone like that in America, and Dr. Spriggs was definitely one of those “someones”, at least within our profession.

After I did this interview in the summer of 2019, I forgot about it. I guess I wasn’t quite ready to do the series which back then was going to be called “What Economists Do”. I put it in a dropbox folder, but then after a computer switch, had selected to sync it to the cloud rather than locally and so out of sight out of mind. So when he passed away, I searched for it, thinking it must be somewhere, then last week remembered the cloud and there it was. So, join me on this journey back to 2019, to my fascinating conversation with Dr. William Spriggs.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Three people were awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics: Josh Angrist, Guido Imbens and David (“Dave”) Card. I have interviewed the first two, and today I have the pleasure of posting the last interview with Dr. Card himself.

To most economists, Dr. Card needs no introduction and to be honest I’m really not even sure what to say. I will just say that one time I was having dinner with a well known labor economist who had been on the market the same year as Card, and this economist over dinner without any hint of exaggeration said simply that Card was the greatest labor economist of his generation, bar none.

Other than that, I will just say some of the things about his work that has meant a lot to me. Card is “real economist”. Even more than that, he is “real labor economist”, which is the highest praise I know to give people. His knowledge of labor economic theory is deep and expansive. It rolls off his tongue effortlessly. You poke him, he bleeds income elasticities and a myriad of models that he holds to with a light grip.

But he was one of the booster rockets on the “credibility revolution”, too, that launched the social sciences into a new level of empirical work. When he began working, labor was in the throes of a fairly deep empirical crisis, and we discussed that in this interview. I learned many things I didn’t know, and he also corrected things I took for granted to be fact, like how I interpreted Bob Lalonde’s job market paper and what it meant. Many of his studies seemed to be lightning rods on multiple levels — both because they were unexpected null results of prevailing neoclassical wisdom, but also because the studies forced the profession to have deeper conversations about epistemology. What is a model? What is evidence? What does it mean to believe something? When are beliefs justified? What makes them warranted? These were not topics that I think Dr. Card himself seemed particularly interested in, but it’s very hard not to see in the anger that surrounded him and those studies people in the throes of being unable, unwilling or incapable of changing their mind even a small bit.

This is in fact the story of the practical empirical work of data workers, though — marshaling convincing evidence, going up against a strong scientific blockade, and successful persuasion looking one way at the time that looks very different later. We saw a complete rejection of the facts with Semmelweis’s hand washing hypothesis, and John Snow’s germ theory, for instance. Both men published work that looking back is so obviously correct but at the time seemed to not move the needle on policymaker and scientist’s opinion. I’m not saying that Dr. Card had that experience with his classic works on the minimum wage or immigration — he did after all win the John Bates Clark award and the Nobel Prize. But listening to his story about what he and his colleague and coauthor Alan Krueger experienced at the time when it was published, I can only say that I think sometimes we forget how intense these academic fights can be. We talk a little at different times about this speech he did in 2012 at Michigan about “design vs model based identification”, also, and if you want to read that, it’s here.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed being a part of it. It’s around 90 minutes long, but it felt like 30 minutes. At the 60 min mark, I told him well I guess we need to stop and he graciously gave me another half hour. He also makes an announcement in the interview that I think wasn’t public knowledge, making me feel a little like Matt Drudge with breaking news. But no spoilers — you’ll have to listen for yourself. Thank you again for tuning in. If you like these interviews, please share them! And if you really like them, consider supporting them with a subscription. But no worries if you don’t want to. Have a great rest of your week! And remember — clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Marina Della Guista is a pioneer in the economics of Sex Work who started her career at the University of Reading and is now a professor at the University of Turin. And when I first started studying sex work, I went looking for what papers economists had written. There weren’t many, but the ones that had been written were fascinating. Many, though not all, were applied theory papers. I remember with great fondness studying new models gaining rich insight into how other economists thought this niche subject in labor economics.

One of the studies that left an incredible mark on my orientation in studying sex work was “Who is Watching” by Marina della Giusta, Maria di Tommasso and Steiner Strøm. It was a paper of supply and demand for sex work in which stigma was part of the cost structure but interestingly stigma was also endogenous and determined jointly in equilibrium with the size of the work force and clientele as well as wages paid and received. As the market grew, as the more people engaged in this illicit activity expanded, the stigma penalty itself declined suggesting to me in my own work that if the internet was expanded sex work, or if it was legalized, the stigma under prohibition and clandestine markets might lift some. The degree to which it did would depend on the elasticities in the world.

It was the sort of Becker style reasoning that I found so attractive — the idea that things we think of as exogenous and unchanging may be endogenous, governed by formal processes and that technology may shape those norms, for good or bad.

Since then, I have become friends with all three authors, and one of them very close. I met all three last November when I visited Turin to do a workshop and serve on a committee. But Marina and I have been friends even before then. She was active on Twitter when I had been too, so we’d deepened our friendship there, but even beyond that I think we just had made regular communication a part of our life.

Marina is an excellent labor economist with both sides of the applied skill set — empiricism and applied theory. She has continued to steadfastly worked on stigma in sex work as well as studying the so-called Nordic model, a leading contender in augmenting standard prohibition by lifting the bands on supply but maintaining the prohibition on demand. Traditional tax theory say the impact on wages and the distribution of burden is the same whether you target supply or demand though being the dutiful empiricist she along with Maria have attempted to determine to what degree the end demand approach changes risk attitudes and any evidence of behavioral change using survey data in UK.

In this podcast she shares her journey through labor and gender, and not being an American, it reminds I hope everyone that the United States economics community is rich and spreads around the globe. If you find these podcast interviews interesting and valuable, please share it with colleagues and students, and consider following and subscribing and supporting it. These interviews are an oral history of the profession as told through the personal stories of economists.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott is an interview with an old professor of mine from when I was at the University of Georgia, Dr. George Selgin. George was one of several really interesting professors I was fortunate enough to get to know while a PhD student there. One anecdote of the impression he made on me was that he was a handful of people who ever read my dissertation. He gave back to me a massive marked up document full of suggestions and a lot of red underlines — not just to the job market paper, but all three chapters. Which was remarkable for two reasons: he was not an applied microeconomist and he wasn’t even on my dissertation committee. He also came to my defense and was perhaps the single most vocal one there. Being able to answer his questions was one of my happier moments of that late end of that period, as it felt like George took me very seriously and treated me as a peer. He did that with everyone. And that could be a bit intimidating since being George’s peer usually meant some pretty serious conversations.

But George was like that — he was extremely engaged in my education, but also to many others as well. I never took any courses from him, because I early on sorted into labor and econometrics, but I watched George closely all the time and interacted with him a lot. He gave each person his full attention, read their papers very closely no matter the field, and in seminars was always on top of everything. It was a lesson in areas I found to be valuable like individuality as an economist and taking ideas serious enough to battle with them.

George is a monetary economist and economic historian. He was one of a handful of reasons I decided to go to Georgia at all. He had written a short pamphlet I’d somehow found in college on something obscure (to many anyway) called “praxeology”. That’s something from Austrian economics, and originally I really thought economics was Austrian economics. Coming from a literature background, I’d never had any economics classes, so what I knew, I knew from reading classical liberals like Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman and a couple others. I was spent a lot of time reading people from the Austrian tradition and the Chicago tradition, from the early to mid 20th century. I knew about George because of that praxeology pamphlet which I read backwards and forwards, over and over, trying to understand everything I could. Imagine my surprise when first year coursework did not involve any praxeology! “I was told there would be no math” I often thought to myself.

So George is a hero of sorts of mine. He is an excellent writer, a very careful thinker, a wonderful economist and an inspiring professor. And he’s going to be part of a longer series I’d like to do on what I’ll just be calling “the two wings of the profession: Austrian economics and the heterodox traditions”. Although that’s a mouthful. I am hoping to do interviews with places like George Mason University, as well as U Mass Amherst, the economists from the old Notre Dame economics department (now defunct), Riverside and more. These are important parts of our profession’s history, with many interesting stories, and I don’t think many people know them. But I’m hoping you will find them interesting. They’ll be trickling in as I continue making progress towards them, but expect them to be scattered across season 2 and 3.

If you like the podcast, consider liking, following, sharing, and subscribing! The podcast is a labor of love. I love the stories of our profession and the people in our profession a lot. I know others do too and I hope these stories speak to you as you continue navigating your own journey, wherever you are and whoever you are. Peace!

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.