Fri, 20 July 2018
My guest today is Roman Yampolskiy, computer scientist and AI safety researcher. He is the author of multiple books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, featuring contributions from many leading AI safety researchers. We discuss the nature of AI risk, the state of the current research on the topic, and some of the more and less promising lines of research. |
Mon, 9 July 2018
Could cultural attitudes about gender reflect economic conditions hundreds of years ago? My guest today says they do! Melanie Meng Xue of Northwestern University has shown that China's cotton revolution had far-reaching consequences extending even to the modern day: The cotton revolution (1300-1840 AD) in imperial China constituted a substantial shock to the value of women's work. Using historical gazetteers, I exploit variation in cotton textile production across 1,489 counties and establish a robust negative relationship between high-value work opportunities for women in the past and sex ratio at birth in 2000. To overcome potential endogeneity in location, I use an instrument pertaining to suitability for cotton weaving. I find evidence that premodern cotton textile production permanently changed cultural beliefs about women's worth, and that its effects have persisted beyond 1840 and endured under various political and economic regimes.
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Sat, 30 June 2018
Today's episode of Economics Detective Radio features a conversation with Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation. Robert is the author of Rethinking America's Highways: A 21st-Century Vision for Better Infrastructure, a book on how to fix America's infrastructure woes by changing the way roadways are funded: Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, their exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America provides its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. We discuss this book, as well as Robert's recent controversial piece in Reason, "Stop Trying to Get Workers Out of Their Cars." I challenge him on the issue of upzoning and we discuss the some of the necessary conditions for a successful implementation of mass transit. Robert argues that mass transit works best in cities with a high concentration of jobs in a central business district. Without a single concentrated area that many thousands of people want to commute to and from, a mass transit system often can't get the necessary ridership to justify its cost.
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Sat, 23 June 2018
Today's guest is Thibault Schrepel of the University of Utrecht. We discuss his work on the relationship between blockchain technology, which allows for the decentralization of firms and organizations, and anti-trust law. Here's a quote from his article on the topic: But in the end, one question arises as follows: is blockchain the death of antitrust law? Should it be? Answering them today is not easy as blockchain is still prone to drastic evolution, but some initial answers are to be provided nonetheless. In order to do so, this paper proceeds in three parts. The first details how unilateral practices can be implemented on blockchain and further establish a risk map. The second part focuses on the challenges for enforcers and presents a new theory entitled “regulatory infiltration." The last part questions the legitimacy of competition law in the face of this technology - the "blockchain antitrust paradox" - and the need to decentralize competition authorities.
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Sat, 16 June 2018
Fabio Rojas returns to the podcast to discuss his work researching social media. He has three main papers on the subject. The first is "More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior," which shows how Twitter activity predicted the outcomes of the 2010 and 2012 US congressional elections. The second is "The social media response to Black Lives Matter: how Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use" which tracks the spread of the #BlackLivesMatter movement through social media. The third is "Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility" which shows how Twitter users treat each other differently based on how they perceive each other's gender. We discuss these three papers and more on this episode of Economics Detective Radio.
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Sun, 27 May 2018
Today's episode features Zachary Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. We discuss freedom of speech, FIRE's work to protect it on college campuses, and its importance for maintaining a liberal society.
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Sat, 19 May 2018
Phil Magness returns to the podcast to discuss the life and work of James Buchanan and to defend him against some of the more bizarre criticisms levied against him. James Buchanan was a Chicago-school economist who created the field of public choice economics along with Gordon Tullock. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1986. Buchanan has received criticism recently from Duke historian Nancy MacLean, whose book Democracy in Chains places Buchanan at the center of a grand right-wing conspiracy to maintain segregation and undermine democratic institutions. Phil shows that the theory of Buchanan as a segregationist falls apart under scrutiny. It all stems from a typo in a footnote that erroneously placed Buchanan's article on school choice in a segregationist newspaper (the Richmond News-Leader) when in fact the article was published in the competing (and not segregationist) Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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Fri, 4 May 2018
This week's episode is a little different. There's an ongoing controversy related to a two-time guest of this show, Robin Hanson. I talk through the scandal, giving a whole decade of background so you can understand where this scandal comes from. There are many links for this episode. Here they are in the order they are discussed: Robin Hanson's books, The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain. "Unequal Beauty Silence" October 19, 2009 "Pretty Smart Healthy Privilege" September 26, 2014 "Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing" August 7, 2013 "Two Types of Envy" April 26, 2018
"Why Economics Is, And Should Be, Creepy" May 2, 2018 |
Fri, 27 April 2018
Andrea Matranga of the New Economics School in Moscow joins the podcast with a fascinating question: Why did humans adopt agriculture in the times and places they did? His research paper, The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture, offers a potential solution. Here's the abstract: During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. Hunter-gatherers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the resulting predictions against a global panel dataset of climate conditions and Neolithic adoption dates. I find that invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions. Figure 2 in the paper illustrates the locations and times of the adoption of agriculture: Andrea looks at both these adoption dates and the rapidity of the spread of agriculture from these locations and compares them to the climatic seasonality of those locations, finding a strong connection between seasonality and adoption of agriculture. He argues that the need to store food caused people to become sedentary as opposed to nomadic, and once they were sedentary the opportunity cost of farming was greatly reduced.
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Sat, 21 April 2018
My guest today is Ryan Muldoon of the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance. We discuss the role of perspective diversity in political philosophy, with reference to both Ryan's book and his article, Diversity and Disagreement are the Solution, Not the Problem. We relate the philosophy to political divides in the real world, such as the rise of nationalist movements in Europe.
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