The Mixtape with Scott

Philosophy of the Podcast

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to hearing the stories of living economists and a non-randomly selected oral history of the economics profession of the last 50 years. Before I introduce this week’s guest, I wanted to start off with a quote from a book I’m reading that explains the philosophy of the podcast.

“For the large m majority of people, hearing others’ stories enables them to see their own experiences in a new, truthful light. They realize — usually instantaneously — that a story another has told is their own story, only with different details. This realization seems to sneak past their defenses. There is something almost irresistible about another person’s facing and honoring the truth, without fanfare of any kind, but with courage and clarity and assurance. The other participants feel invited, even emboldened, to stand unflinching before the truth themselves. By opening ourselves even a little to the remarkable spectacle of other people reconsidering their lives, we begin to reconsider our own.” — Terry Warner, Bonds That Make Us Free

The purpose of the podcast is not to tell the story of living economists. The purpose of the podcast is to hear the stories of living economists as they themselves tell it. It is to make an effort to without judgment just pay attention to the life lived of another person and not make them some non-playable character in the video game of our life. To immature people, others are not real, and the purpose of the podcast is, if for no one else, to listen to people so that they become real, and in that process of listening, for me to be changed.

They may sound heavy or it may sound even a little silly. After all, isn’t this first and foremost a conversation between two economists? But economists are people first, and the thing I just said is for people. And let’s be frank — aren’t man of us feeling, at least some of the time, alone in our work? And isn’t, at least some of the time, the case that our work is all consuming? I think there are people in my family who still don’t understand what my job is as a professor at a university, let alone what my actual research is about. There are colleagues like that too. Many of us are in departments where we may be the only ones in our field, and many of us are studying topics where our networks are thin. And so loneliness is very common. It is common for professors, it is common for students, it is common for people in industry, it is common for people non-profits and it is common for people in government. It is common for people in between jobs. And while the purpose of the podcast is not to alleviate loneliness, as that most likely is only something a person can do for themselves, the purpose is to share in the stories of other people on the hypothesis that that is a gift we give those whose stories we listen to, but it’s also maybe moreso the gift we give the deepest part of ourselves.

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Carlos Cinelli, PhD Statistics, University of Washington’s Statistics Department

So, with that said, let me introduce this week’s guest. Carlos Cinelli may seem like a guest who does not quite fit, but his is the story of the economics profession in a couple of ways. First, he is someone who left economics. Carlos was an undergraduate major in economics who then did a masters in economics and after doing so left economics (and econometrics) to become a statistician. The leaving of economics is not the road less traveled. By talking to Carlos, and hearing his story, the hope is that the survivor bias of the podcast guests might be weakened if only a tad bit.

But Carlos also fits into one of the broader themes of the podcast which is causal inference. Carlos studied at UCLA under two notable figures in the history of econometrics and causal inference: Ed Leamer in the economics department and Judea Pearl in the computer science department. And Carlos is now an assistant professor at University of Washington in the statistics department whose work consistently moved into domains of relevance in economics, such as his work in the linear of econometric theory and practice by Chris Taber, Emily Oster and others. That work is important and concerns sensitivity analysis with omitted variable bias. And he has also written an excellent paper with Judea Pearl and Andrew Forney detailing precisely the kinds of covariates we should be contemplating when trying to address the claims of unconfoundedness.

So without further ado, I will turn it over to Carlos. Thank you again for your support of the podcast. Please like, share and follow!

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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.

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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.!

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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.

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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a blast. I’m talking this week Dr. Marianne Wanamaker, professor of economics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the new dean at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. Marianne has had a spectacular run since graduating from Northwestern in 2009: NBER, IZA, a stint in the White House (former chief domestic economist at Council of Economic Advisors and senior labor economist), a ton of other stuff. She’s an economic historian by training, a specialist in American economic history specifically and demography, and won the 2019 Kenneth J. Arrow award (with Marcella Alsan) for a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on the lasting impacts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on trust in the healthcare system among African-Americans. She is a brilliant and creative young economist, an excellent instructor, and a mix of entrepreneur and civil servant. I had a great time in this interview getting to know her better, and hope you are inspired to hear her story like I was. And as always, thank you for your support of the show!

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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.

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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!

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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! I’m the host, Scott Cunningham. This week I decided to do a rerun from season one to give people a little time to catch their breath as I know at one interviewee a week can be like drinking from a firehose. This is an interview I did with Guido Imbens, the co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. I am hard pressed to say I have a favorite interview, as I have loved all of them, but I have a deep love and appreciation for Guido and thought if I was to give everyone a break and suggest a rerun, this interview with Guido would probably be one. I wanted to do this also because yesterday I reread Guido’s biographical piece he submitted. LinkedIn’s Nobel Prize account had said it was a “newer” biography, so I read it eagerly, but I think maybe it was the same one. Nevertheless, it reads so well and I recommend you read it too. As longtime listeners know, I am deeply affectionate about the connections between Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section in the 70s and 80s, Harvard’s stats department from the 1970s to 1990s (or at least a few people there), and Guido there in the economics Dept in the early to mid 1990s linking them with Josh Angrist. Maybe all stories are wonderful, and all I am doing by saying how much I love this particular story is revealing my biases. That’s fine. But I do love it. I think maybe some of you having been on this long journey of around 75 interviews over two years will also enjoy this old one again, as it has aged very well. Thanks again everyone for supporting the podcast these last two years. I hope you enjoy this rerun with Guido Imbens!

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Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week we have an outstanding guest named Avi Goldfarb of the University of Toronto. Avi is a PhD economist who graduated from Northwestern in the early 2000s specializing in the economics of the internet. He is now at the University of Toronto where he is a professor in the marketing department as well as chief data scientist with a very interesting lab called the Creative Destruction lab that among other things specializes in the economics of artificial intelligence. He is the author of two very popular and probably both best selling books aimed at a general audience on the economics of artificial intelligence: Power and Prediction and Prediction Machines (both with Joshua Gans and Ajay Agrawal). Given the popularity of AI, as well as the recent turn of events with AI giant, OpenAI, I think there couldn’t be a better time to to have him on the show. I loved this interview and accidentally went over, but Avi graciously hung in there with me. I hope you love it too. Don’t forget to like, share and comment! Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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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!

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