Someone recently sent me this old video snippet (about 30 seconds) from an interview in Stockholm in 2012. Whenever I'm asked about my high school career I try to emphasize that I'm a big fan of education, even though I didn't finish high school.
Note to the un-Facebooked: if, like me, you don't have a facebook account, you may have to close a facebook come-on before you can see the video.
Books inscribed by the author are stories in themselves.
Here's a story published last year in The New Yorker about the rare book market, and the art of selling.
A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges. By Tad Friend
"Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf—sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. When I told him that Susan Cheever, the writer and the daughter of John Cheever, said that Horowitz had paid her handsomely for her father’s inscribed novels and letters “because Glenn is a gentleman, and because he wanted to help me,” he seemed offended. “I like Susan enormously,” he assured me, “but I bought from her at prices that allowed me to sell the material profitably.”
...
" Traditional collecting aims at first editions in “pristine” or “mint” condition; the booksellers’ wry joke is “Never judge a book by its contents.”
Here's a magisterial handbook chapter, by Muriel Niederle
Experiments: Why, How, and A Users Guide for Producers as well as Consumers by Muriel Niederle
NBER Working Paper 33630, DOI 10.3386/w33630, March 2025A
Abstract:"This chapter is intended as an introduction to laboratory experiments, when to use, how to evaluate them, why they matter and what are the pitfalls when designing them. I hope that users as well as consumers will find Sections that broaden their views. I start with when an economist might want to run an experiment. I then discuss basic lessons when designing experiments. I introduce a language to start a systematic description of tools we have when designing experiments to show the importance or role of a new model or force in explaining behavior. The penultimate chapter provides an advanced toolkit for running experiments. I end this chapter with my views on pre-registration, pre-analysis plans and the need for replications, robustness tests and extensions. "
...
"While I hope to convey general lessons, I will make them more accessible and understandable by providing specific examples. These will often, though not always, come from my own papers, or from economists whose work I know exceptionally well (mostly my advisors, students or coauthors). While this may seem self-serving, the main reason is that for those experiments I know– rather than have to infer– why authors made certain choices. And one aspect of experiments that will become obvious almost immediately, is that they require the researcher to make a lot of decisions. This chapter therefore is in no way a literature survey, nor really a highlight of amazing papers. It rather showcases papers whose history I am exceptionally familiar with. I will also not provide negative examples, but rather present potential pitfalls, with one exception in Section 3.1 "
Susan Athey, throughout her career and in her presidential address to the AEA, has added to our vision of how economists can make our way in the world.
Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products By Susan Athey, American Economic Review 2025, 115(4): 1059–1099, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.115.4.1059
"This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to each stage of the innovation process. Key contributions include identifying problems, developing theoretical frameworks, translating goals into measurable outcomes, analyzing historical data, and estimating counterfactual outcomes. The paper also surveys recently developed tools designed to address challenges in designing and analyzing data from complex experiments "
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I'm fond of papers that consider "The Economist As..." See e.g.
This year there's one headline that stands out from all the others:
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. By Jeffrey Goldberg
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Back before the November election, the headlines that seemed most Foolish were much more cheerful
(And here's the video)
LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine
Here's the NYT story out this morning,
And here's the letter (and all the signatures):
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.
For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world. Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.
The undersigned are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, representing some of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.
The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration. The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students—the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.
The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education—and the research those institutions conduct.
The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence. It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.
A climate of fear has descended on the research community. Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable. Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.
If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.
We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced. We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.
The views expressed here are our own and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions.
Congestion Pricing: Economics, Theory, Reality
March 29, 2025 • 57 mins
with @mostrovs @skominers @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m your host Robert Hackett, and today we’re talking about congestion pricing — an area of mechanism design that’s aimed at alleviating something everyone hates: traffic.
Now you may have heard this term recently since New York adopted its own version of congestion pricing at the beginning of the year. This is the first program of its kind in the U.S. — and it’s got supporters and detractors. We’ll talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about much more.
In the first part of today’s episode we’ll trace the history of the economic ideas that got us here. In the middle, we’ll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives. And in the final part, we’ll explore parallels to — and implications for — crypto networks.
Our guests are Michael Ostrovsky, a Stanford Economics Professor who specializes in this area and who has done research on congestion pricing in New York. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Research Partner Scott Kominers, who is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship.
Resources:
Billionnaires have been moving to Palm Beach and that has changed the local market for nannys.
The New Yorker has the story:
The Six-Figure Nannies and Housekeepers of Palm Beach. An influx of ultra-high-net-worth newcomers has increased demand for experienced—and discreet—household staff. By Emily Witt
"Palm Beach is an island—known locally as “the Island”—connected to the larger and less posh city of West Palm Beach, on the mainland, by a series of bridges. It was first developed as a winter escape for the wealthy, in the late nineteenth century, by the railroad and Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, and quickly became an old-money enclave whose pretentiousness was entwined with antisemitism and racism.
...
" an estimated sixty-five billionaires now have homes in Palm Beach County. President Trump’s ties to Florida, especially his seventeen-acre oceanfront social club, Mar-a-Lago, have cemented South Florida as a center of financial and political power, and there’s heavy overlap between the list of his boosters and the newcomers to Palm Beach
...
"A director of estates managing a family’s eight or ten houses might earn three to five hundred thousand dollars a year and oversee dozens of employees and contractors, but even housekeepers, if they possess the right qualifications, can earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year with benefits, and paid vacation, in certain markets
...
"Thompson said that she had already signed up two hundred and fourteen members to the Polo Club that year. (At thirty-four thousand dollars, its initiation fee is much lower than those of Palm Beach’s Carriage House, the Breakers, or Mar-a-Lago, whose fee Trump hiked in August to a million dollars.)
...
" In job interviews, Lisa Miller, senior search executive with Mahler Private Staffing, will test candidates. “One of the joys of what I do is getting them not to be discreet,” Miller said, of the interviewing process. “I ask them questions and see if they share too much.”
...
“The parents want to have the top staff, so they hire the top nannies,” she said. “They’ve been in élite people’s homes, they don’t get starstruck if they see a professional athlete or someone that’s in the White House.”
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