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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Earning stripes in medical machine learning
Today we are living through one of those heady situations in which scientific, technical, and commercial frontiers all simultaneously advance in a grand interrelated dance. Advances in computer technology in the last decade opened up the potential for big gains in applications of neural networks aimed at recognizing and diagnosing visual images. Many startups and …
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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 …
The Aftermath of the Dyn DDOS Attack
Nobody knows who organized the attack. It might have come from an angry gamer, or from a rogue spy, or, perhaps, an angry rogue spy playing games. The program hijacked many cameras and home devices, and redirected them to engineer a series of distributed denial of server (DDOS) attacks on a few hours apart, all …
Report on Media Regulation
Following a comprehensive report on market structure and antitrust, the Committee for the Study of Digital Platforms (at the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago) has released a report that I was a co-author on, on the media and regulatory options to enhance citizen welfare. Our main policy recommendations are: Introducing some public funding …
Misapplied metaphors in AI policy
Many querulous conversations fan the flames in policy debates about artificial intelligence. Everyone agrees we are transitioning to something, but not on what that will be. Anyone want to venture a guess? It is safe to bet on widespread use of neural networks and deep learning. Anything else? Some futurists also forecast a confrontation between …
The unintended consequences of France’s ban on statistical analysis of Judges
If someone had said that I would be writing a blog post to consider a law that might imprison people for conducting statistical analysis on publicly available data, I would have thought that was unlikely because who would ever propose, let alone enact, such a law? The other day we got our answer: France! The …
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A new one for price discrimination: taxing the late
One of the popular travel options in Toronto is Porter Airlines which operates out of the City Airport and so is just 15 minutes from my University of Toronto office. Because it is a small airport, it is the kind of airport where you can literally leave an hour before your flight with no problems. …
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