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The Mixtape with Scott

The Mixtape with Scott

scott cunningham

The Mixtape with Scott is a podcast in which economist and professor, Scott Cunningham, interviews economists, scientists and authors about their lives and careers, as well as the some of their work. He tries to travel back in time with his guests to listen and hear their stories before then talking with them about topics they care about now.
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Top 10 The Mixtape with Scott Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Mixtape with Scott episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Mixtape with Scott for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Mixtape with Scott episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

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
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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E42: Interview with Jinyong Hahn, Econometrician, UCLA
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12/12/23 • 61 min

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.

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


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Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Recently, the University of Chicago Press published a book entitled The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. It was written obviously by Gary Becker who died almost 10 years ago at the age of 83 after an extremely long and fruitful career as an economist. Dr. Becker had many students — some like me were students from afar, but some, like our guest today, were his actual students. And today’s guest is Casey Mulligan, one of the editors of that aforementioned book, and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. This was a fun interview to do. Casey walked us through his time at Harvard as an undergrad to his unusually rapid progression through Chicago’s economics PhD program where he stayed on and is now a professor. We discussed his own career but we also spent just a lot of time discussing what it was like with Becker, as well as his own later time at the Council of Economic Advisers. I hope you enjoy it!

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
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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!

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
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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E40: Avi Goldfarb, Economist, University of Toronto
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11/21/23 • 86 min

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!

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
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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E39: Adam Smith, Economist, Glasgow University
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11/14/23 • 62 min

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 te...

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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E41: Tymon Słocyński, Econometrician, Brandeis University
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12/05/23 • 82 min

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!

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
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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E36: Sascha Becker, Economic Historian, Monash University
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10/24/23 • 77 min

This week’s guest on The Mixtape with Scott is the Xiaokai Yang Chair of Business and Economics at Monash University, Sascha Becker. Sascha is an economist who is hard to pin down into just one field. He’s probably most widely known, across the most general set of economists, as a contemporary economic historian. One of his specializations within economic history has been religion, most notably the Protestantism in Europe and its relationship to long term literacy (particularly among women) and human capital more generally. But even within history, he writes on topics that go far beyond traditional economic questions — like, for instance, his work reexamining Max Weber’s the Protestant work ethic hypothesis, for instance, or his more recent work examining the relationship between the church and national socialism. Sascha studies a topic in religion that overlaps with my own religious tradition (Protestantism and the Reformation churches more specifically), and so it’s drawn me into enjoying a lot of and benefiting from his extensive ongoing research on the topics.

But I also have been interested in Sascha because of his role in the spread of causal inference throughout economics, particularly within Europe. As Sascha will share in the podcast, his advisor in graduate school, Andrea Ichino, came to Sascha’s program after graduating from MIT. When Andrea taught, then, a microeconometrics course in the late 1990s, he did not use a book — he used his lecture notes belonging to the class he’d taken in his own PhD program taught by Josh Angrist. Sascha implied, as I have long suspected, that the passing on of causal inference was coming, not through econometrics textbooks, but through the placements of students that could be directly tied back to original proponents, which is why (or rather I have conjectured) the spread of causal inference within economics spread through applied microeconomics fields, like labor, public and development, early on, as opposed to econometricians. Early on, Sascha wrote a package in Stata with Andrea on implementing matching with the propensity score that has almost 4000 citations to this day. And Sascha himself probably did dozens of workshops all across Europe in the early 00’s teaching matching to students and faculty who otherwise didn’t have the red phone direct access to Angrist. As he said, matching was huge back then (no doubt made even moreso by Dehejia and Wahba’s publications), but while he was teaching matching, it now seems more likely he was teaching all over Europe what we consider to be causal inference methodologies based on the Rubin causal model, including matching, IV and the LATE theorem.

I continue to remain fascinated by the spread of causal inference in its earliest days throughout economics, and the role that the applied fields, like labor economics, played. But this podcast touches on many topics, including that but much more than that too, and I hope you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed talking to and learning more about Sascha’s own life and journey. Thanks again for tuning in. If you like the podcast, consider sharing it with others, or leaving a rating on Spotify and Apple.

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
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The Mixtape with Scott - S2E35: Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve
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10/17/23 • 90 min

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week's episode has a guest that some of you have come to know and appreciate, and some of you hopefully will after this episode — Andrew Goodman-Bacon (“Bacon”). In addition to having a great nickname, he also has a great job, a great personality and several great papers, one of which after only two years since publication has won an award at the Journal of Econometrics, and already has over 4,000 cites. I really wish I knew how to pull things from google scholar and I could see what other papers in the history of econometrics have had such a meteoric rise in terms of impact and influence. It’s been unusually impactful, though, let’s just say.

I have a hunch Bacon wasn’t given the “Most Likely to Actually Use Math After High School” award in high school. But as it turns out, he has, and has become a really great applied economist who works on topics both in econometrics, but also public policy and economic history. The trifecta. But a few years ago, he left academia to go work for the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis at the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. This interview was a real delight; it even involves Dungeons & Dragons and throwing knives.

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

Bacon has done a lot for helping a lot of us better understand difference-in-differences — a technique that many of us thought (much to our chagrin) we probably understood better than we did (I know I didn’t). But now some of us better understand it and while Bacon isn’t the only one who helped advance that knowledge, he was one of them.

So I hope you enjoy this interview, and if you’re interested in learning more about difference-in-differences, don’t forget to check out Brant Callaway’s workshop on Mixtape Sessions tonight! You can sign up here! Don’t forget also to share the workshop to everybody you’ve ever met in your entire life, as well as post to your online dating profile!

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
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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!

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
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FAQ

How many episodes does The Mixtape with Scott have?

The Mixtape with Scott currently has 115 episodes available.

What topics does The Mixtape with Scott cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts, Social Sciences, Science, Business and Careers.

What is the most popular episode on The Mixtape with Scott?

The episode title 'S2E30: Dr. John Cawley, Health Economist, Becker's Student, Cornell Professor' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on The Mixtape with Scott?

The average episode length on The Mixtape with Scott is 70 minutes.

How often are episodes of The Mixtape with Scott released?

Episodes of The Mixtape with Scott are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of The Mixtape with Scott?

The first episode of The Mixtape with Scott was released on Mar 18, 2022.

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