The Mixtape with Scott

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.