Today is publication day for Innovation + Equality: How to create a future that is more Star Trek than Terminator (MIT Press). This is my book -- co-authored with Andrew Leigh (the author of Randomistas) -- that examines the relationship between having more equality and more innovation. We make the case that you can have …
Does being rich make you better at allocating capital?
Thanks to this interesting debate last week between Saez, Summers and Mankiw on the wealth tax, there has been considerable discussion of the possible effects of a wealth tax. As is usual with these things, the main discussion has been what a wealth tax will do to the behaviour of those taxed at the margin. …
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2019 NBER AI Conference
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Catherine Tucker, and I recently hosted the third NBER Conference in the Economics of Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. The conference provides a place for scholars from different fields of economics to discuss the implications of the rise of AI. The fields this year included macro, labor, theory, development, mechanism design, econometrics, …
Paying for Data
In the New York Times, there is a video opinion piece from Jaron Lanier which makes the case for finding a way for consumers to be paid for their data. I really enjoyed the accessibility of this piece as I think it helped make a clearer case. But I found myself with some big questions …
Are broken promises an antitrust violation?
That is the question that Dina Srinivasan answers in the affirmative in her paper "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook." This is an interesting set of issues because, frankly, my observation is that Facebook, while having a dominant position in social media (which is not an antitrust violation) had not violated antitrust law getting to that position …
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2018 Digital Year in Review
It is time once again to give awards for the biggest events in IT in 2018. And what a fun year to review! So many crazy events deserve ridicule. Where to start? Before we begin, let’s review the rules. They have not changed since last year. Any event can receive an award if it contains …
A pound of flesh for touching the progress of science
I should have gone straight to Wikipedia. Instead I put the Latin words “In Situ” into Google. The dermatologist had spelled it for me, and the Wikipedia entry appeared at the top. It said the following, “In archaeology, in situ refers to an artifact that has not been moved from its original place of deposition. …
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MIT Sloan Management Review Strategy Forum is now live
At Chicago Booth, there is a panel of famous economists who are posed various economics forecasting and policy questions and you can see which way the economic winds are blowing. The IGM Panel has been running successfully for a few years now. Tim Simcoe who had worked at the Council of Economic Advisors had noted …
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Digitopoly — the Audio Version
A company called curio.io offered to take certain posts on Digitopoly and have a professional narrator read them. I have heard that many people like audio versions of written stuff and so was happy to let them at it. Their first post is below.
A limit to Bitcoin scale?
Eric Budish has a new paper out on "The Economic Limits of the Blockchain." He demonstrates a potentially fundamental contradiction at the heart of 'proof of work' schemes to support cryptocurrencies -- the most famous of which is, of course, Bitcoin. It is an incredibly clear issue so I figured I would recount it here. …
Digitopoly 