Podcasts about Gary Becker

¿Por qué es un problema que haya menos gente en el mundo? Esta es la pregunta que le hago a Marc, que ha participado en la publicación de Dependency and depopulation? por McKinsey Global Institute. En este amplio informe se desarrollan las perspectivas sociales y económicas en la sociedad occidental. La demografía evoluciona de una pirámide hacia un obelisco y esto tendrá grandes consecuencia en la economía, con una población más envejecida que consume, ahorra y produce de forma muy distinta.Antiguos episodios con Marc:K121. Marc Canal. El triunfo de las ciudades.Kapital es posible gracias a sus colaboradores:UTAMED⁠⁠. La universidad online del siglo XXI.UTAMED, la universidad oficial y online de la Fundación Unicaja, nace para romper las barreras que durante décadas han limitado el acceso a la educación y la cultura. Con exámenes 100 % online y financiación sin intereses, ofrecemos una formación accesible, flexible y comprometida con el presente. Porque hoy ya no basta con obtener un título: en UTAMED te preparamos para trabajar desde el primer año. Lo hacemos junto a la empresa, adaptando los contenidos académicos a sus demandas reales, para que nuestros estudiantes adquieran las competencias más valoradas en el mercado laboral. Por ser oyente de este podcast, tienes un descuento del 30% en todo el catálogo de grados y másteres, oficiales y propios.⁠⁠La casa ESE⁠. ¿Cómo quieres vivir?Ya lleváis viendo nuestra promo un mes y se va notando el interés en la comunidad de Kapital por este tipo de proyectos. Si en un principio hemos puesto foco en Madrid es porque creemos que es el residencial más ESE, pero también tenemos ya en proceso en Cantabria y Comunidad Valenciana y vendrán más (como amenaza velada). Para aquellos que paséis o hayáis pasado con interés por mapadecasas.com, mirad en vuestra bandeja de spam porque la info que adjuntamos se va ahí algunas veces desgraciadamente. Y si no os va tanto el tema conjunto residencial, y tenéis o buscáis parcela para haceros una casita eficiente y acogedora, también nos tenéis en lacasaese.com dando respuesta a aquellos que no se quieren complicar la vida.Índice:2:25 Proyecciones demográficas.4:36 Hijos como bien de consumo.7:53 Consecuencia de la baja natalidad en el PIB.17:22 El crecimiento económico son más posibilidades.24:02 Vivimos en el mejor momento de la historia.29:38 Renunciar al talento de los mayores.39:55 El consumo en una población envejecida.48:46 Impacto sobre las finanzas públicas.57:41 Medidas pronatalista.1:08:54 Trabajar más y mejor.1:13:55 Política industrial europea.Apuntes:Dependency and depopulation? McKinsey Global Institute.The journey of humanity. Oded Galor.Human capital. Gary Becker.Factfulness. Hans Rosling.

Gary Becker is the director of TechNoSin.org, an organization committed to point each eternal soul to the Cross of Jesus, to point people to the holy character of Jesus particularly in our digital world and to get people established in Bible teaching churches.Technology is on the increase and we can hardly keep up with its development. With the proliferation of technology also comes increased access to websites, pop-ups and ads designed to lure and derail people from living a life of purity.On that note, Jim quoted some research from LifePlan. They indicate that we live in a "pornified culture." They report that more people view internet pornography every month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. In 2016 people watched 4.6 billion hours of pornography at just one of the more than 42 million pornographic websites. That's the equivalent of 524,000 years spent watching porn in a single year!Gary began by warning listeners that every technological platform, even the good ones, are out to addict everyone. He also noted that although the person you may be viewing is smiling, there could be someone off-camera pointing a gun at them because they're involved in human trafficking. The victim in the picture or video is someone's daughter or child.Gary is on a mission to "G"-rate the internet. In this case that "G" also includes the letters "o" and "d" so that every screen choice would be pleasing to God from a heart that's filled with the Holy Spirit and controlled by the Scriptures and God's plan for our life, purity and holiness. Review this broadcast as Gary describes his program for doing this called, the TechNoSin Challenge.

Gary Becker is the director of TechNoSin.org, an organization committed to point each eternal soul to the Cross of Jesus, to point people to the holy character of Jesus particularly in our digital world and to get people established in Bible teaching churches.Technology is on the increase and we can hardly keep up with its development. With the proliferation of technology also comes increased access to websites, pop-ups and ads designed to lure and derail people from living a life of purity.On that note, Jim quoted some research from LifePlan. They indicate that we live in a "pornified culture." They report that more people view internet pornography every month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. In 2016 people watched 4.6 billion hours of pornography at just one of the more than 42 million pornographic websites. That's the equivalent of 524,000 years spent watching porn in a single year!Gary began by warning listeners that every technological platform, even the good ones, are out to addict everyone. He also noted that although the person you may be viewing is smiling, there could be someone off-camera pointing a gun at them because they're involved in human trafficking. The victim in the picture or video is someone's daughter or child.Gary is on a mission to "G"-rate the internet. In this case that "G" also includes the letters "o" and "d" so that every screen choice would be pleasing to God from a heart that's filled with the Holy Spirit and controlled by the Scriptures and God's plan for our life, purity and holiness. Review this broadcast as Gary describes his program for doing this called, the TechNoSin Challenge.

I was pleased to be joined by the illustrious Dr. Peter Linneman to get his thoughts on the economy, tariffs and the industrial real estate market!In the interview Dr. Peter Linneman shares his perspective on current events in the industrial real estate market, emphasizing the importance of cutting through the noise to focus on fundamental economic indicators such as job growth, GDP trends, and capital flows. He uses an analogy of trying to predict the Super Bowl winner 10 years from now to illustrate the futility of long-term market forecasts based on short-term events. Linneman discusses the state of various real estate sectors, noting that office spaces have bottomed out and are starting to recover, while industrial warehouses, particularly big-box facilities, have experienced overbuilding but are expected to absorb excess supply due to steady demand growth. He also addresses reshoring and manufacturing, stating it will remain limited due to higher labor costs in the U.S., and emphasizes America's economic strength due to robust capital markets and innovation. Linneman remains optimistic about the resilience and long-term strength of the U.S. economy despite ongoing challenges.About Dr. Linneman: For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular, and highly regarded, Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI. Most recently, he co-authored (with Dr. Michael Roizen and Albert Ratner) the best-selling book "The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow."Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast. Connect with Dr. Linneman:Website: https://www.linnemanassociates.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlinneman/SAM Elimu charity: https://www.samelimucharity.org/--

"So the American Journal of Medicine was 'the green journal' ... Radiology was 'the grey journal' ... AJR is 'the yellow journal' ... I did not want people to be able to get away with that with JVIR, because I wanted them to have to articulate the name. And nobody's going to ask for 'the mauve journal.'"—Gary Becker, MD, FSIRIn this episode, part of the ongoing celebration of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) 50th anniversary, host Daniel Y. Sze, MD, PhD, FSIR, editor-in-chief of SIR's Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (JVIR), discusses the journal's history with its very first editor-in-chief, Gary Becker, MD, FSIR, including what led to the journal's launch, the early challenges he had to overcome and more.Related resources:Visit the JVIR websiteView the JVIR special issue on the SIR 50th AnniversaryView the society's 50th Anniversary celebration pageSIR thanks BD for its generous support of the Kinked Wire.Contact us with your ideas and questions, or read more about about interventional radiology in IR Quarterly magazine or SIR's Patient Center.(c) Society of Interventional Radiology.Support the show

This past spring, protests over the war in Gaza roiled college campuses across America. But what sort of effect has the war in Gaza had on college campuses in Israel? What is the mood like on campus when many students are called up to fight? Do courses in the liberal arts feel less relevant in the middle of a war? And how do the practicalities of war affect day-to-day academic operations?On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions—and more—with Russ Roberts, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. Nat and Russ discuss how higher education in Israel is different than higher education in America; what makes Shalem College unique; how the war has affected academic life at Shalem College; whether older students are more receptive to a liberal arts education; what it's like running a startup college; studying under Gary Becker; how campus protests in America appear from Israel; the effects of Israeli dynamism on campus life; the state of economics; educating leaders; and more.Russ Roberts is the president of Shalem College, the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the author of several books, and the host of EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious.Show Notes:The New NormalA Little Light Amid the DarknessThe Sirens of Israel

Welcome to the last podcast interview of 2024! This is the fourth season, 10th episode, which I guess puts us between 110-120 interviews so far. This week's interview with an economist, learning more about their personal story, is Ted Joyce. Ted is a Professor of Economics at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research's Health Economics program. He's renowned for his contributions to demography and reproductive health policy and his work has appeared in top journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, New England Journal of Medicine, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Ted has been a role model for me ever since I graduated in 2007, graciously corresponding with me, meeting with me at conferences, and talking to me about research and navigating the ropes. He was Mike Grossman's student at CUNY, who I interviewed before and who is himself a very prominent health economist who was also one of Gary Becker's first students. As my advisor, David Mustard, was also a Becker student, that makes me and Ted cousins. So it was nice having a family reunion for this interview. Happy new year everyone. May you all be at ease, be at peace, be safe and be happy. 2025 here we come!Scott's Mixtape 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

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Episode 9, season 4. And I just did the math, and we are at 113 episodes so far since I started. What a fun journey it's been too. So many interesting people, so many interesting stories, so much fun to connect with them and be, for just one hour, getting to hear them all. For those new to the podcast, this is a podcast about the personal stories of living economists where I listen to them share parts of the arc of their journey. Primarily as their life moving towards being an economist and having been one. It moves between the personal and professional in whatever way feels right at the moment. And this week's guest is Francine Blau. Dr. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and she's had a long and prolific career studying two overlapping topics — labor economics and the gender wage gap. She is, if I can say it, the labor economist's labor economist. Deep labor economics, relevant, empirical, pioneering. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be in the room with her at SOLE meetings and seminars from the very start. In the interview, we learn a lot about her life. We discussed what it was like at Harvard in the early 1970s, why she chose Harvard over MIT, her father's difficult story as a teacher in the NYC during a difficult time in US political history involving the unions, certain university's bans on allowing women into their PhD programs (e.g., Princeton), and the importance that Richard Freeman had on her committee in what she ultimately ended up writing a dissertation on, which I'll explain in a moment. I promised her an hour, so some of the things I'd wanted to ask, like how she saw the credibility revolution emerge around her, I never got to get to. But I loved what we did get to cover, and wish I had had another hour with her. If I can geek out for just a moment, this is a bit of a longer opener as I normally write, but Francine Blau was truly a pioneer and I'll just mention one thing — her dissertation. I kind of knew that she was a pioneer because I knew about her full body of work, which is frankly gigantic, which was why I wanted to interview her in the first place, but to be honest, I really didn't know the start and that context at all. I think it's fair to say that she was one of the very first economists to be focused on the gender wage gap. I think maybe Claudia Goldin, which I'll mention in a second, would be an exception in that perhaps it's a tie between them. There had been obviously work on the economics of discrimination; that had been Gary Becker's dissertation topic at the University of Chicago in 1955. And Dr. Blau suggested that both Claudia Goldin and Yoram Ben-Porath had also worked on that, but in terms of timing, I think that Dr. Blau predates Ben-Porath but not necessarily Dr. Goldin. Dr. Goldin's first publication on the gender differences is a 1977 article in the Journal of Economic History entitled “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 to 1880” and I don't think anything Dr. Ben-Porath wrote when Dr. Blau had graduated in 1975 from Harvard. Probably of those two, it would be Goldin's JEH that would be the closest to something as in-depth and which had comparable calendar date timing as to what and when Dr. Blau published her dissertation (as a book in 1977), but very different in that it was contemporary, not historical, and it concerned women in the modern work place, and specifically within the firm itself. Dr. Blau's dissertation was unlike the current style of dissertations which is the “three essay” model. It was a book length dissertation which she published in 1977 entitled Equal Pay in the Office. It was a 1975 dissertation that far predates the work that would come much later on the personnel economics literature we associate with Ed Lazear and Sherwin Rosen. Her dissertation explores many topics that would've perfectly fit into that material, but predates it by maybe 10 years arguably, and focuses intently on gender wage disparities between male and female office workers in the United States. She in that dissertation, written partly under the guidance of the labor economist Richard Freeman, examined the extent of wage differentials in the office place, explores the factors contributing to these disparities, and evaluates the effectiveness of equal pay legislation in addressing gender-based wage inequality. I found a copy of it, which I think may be out of print, and am ordering it now, but from what I have been able to gather, it was way ahead of its time, and I mean that. Dr. Blau is a role model for many people, myself included. The steady march of her career, the consistency, the work ethic, the creativity — it's the hallmark of a great economist and great scholar. I asked her how she managed to do it and it was interesting what she told me — she attributed a desire to not let down her coauthors as part of how she's managed to maintain that steady body of work for the last 50 years. That's a lesson I'm going to try to remember going forward. This is again a great interview to share. Share with friends, family, students and colleagues, mentors, people outside economics, people inside economics. I was very inspired by the interview and hope you are too.Scott's Mixtape 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

Today's podcast is titled, “Preferences, Self-interest, and Subtle Choices.” Recorded in 1993, Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Gary Becker and Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, discuss the ways in which preferences and self-interest influence our decisions. Listen now, and don't forget to subscribe to get updates each week for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

The author of the classic The Selfish Gene is still changing the way we think about evolution. SOURCE:Richard Dawkins, professor emeritus of the public understanding of science at Oxford University. RESOURCES:The Genetic Book of the Dead, by Richard Dawkins (2024).Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, by Richard Dawkins (2021)."About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated," by Gregory A. Smith (Pew Research Center, 2021).Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature, by Nick Davies (2015).The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (2006)."Why the Universe Seems So Strange," by Richard Dawkins (TED Global, 2005)."Surprising Stats About Child Carseats," by Steve Levitt (TED Global, 2005)."Genes and Memes," by John Maynard Smith (London Review of Books, 1982).The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, by Richard Dawkins (1982).The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins (1976)."Child Endowments and the Quantity and Quality of Children," by Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes (Journal of Political Economy, 1976)."Selective Pecking in the Domestic Chick," by Richard Dawkins (University of Oxford Ph.D. thesis, 1966). EXTRAS:"The World's Most Controversial Ornithologist," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024)."Is Gynecology the Best Innovation Ever?" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024).

Roland Fryer is an American economist and tenured professor at Harvard University. He received a PhD in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker. He joined the faculty of Harvard University and rapidly rose through the academic ranks becoming, at age 30, their second-youngest professor. In 2019, he published an analysis that found black and Hispanic Americans were no more likely than white Americans to be shot by police in a given interaction with police. The paper: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423?mobileUi=0& Watch the Munk Debate: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? Live June 17th. Join today to live stream. Click here: https://bit.ly/munk_debate Monetary Metals: Buy gold and earn interest on it! Find out more at https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | info@xentricapc.com | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1194, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: And The Award Goes To... 1: This nutty comic won a 1996 National Society of Film Critics award for his role as "The Nutty Professor". Eddie Murphy. 2: Barbara Walters' "20/20" co-host, in 1998 he was awarded the Children's Champion Award from UNICEF. Hugh Downs. 3: While president of the Philippines, she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. Corazon Aquino. 4: Category for which James Tobin, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman all won Nobel Prizes. Economics. 5: This Spanish cellist was among the first recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Pablo Casals. Round 2. Category: The Old Testament 1: Potiphar's wife tries to seduce this dream translator, who resists and ends up being sent to jail. Joseph. 2: Recipient of God's bad news "Thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go thither". Moses. 3: One lie he told was "If they bind me with 7 green withs that were never dried, then shall I be weak". Samson. 4: He interpreted the "handwriting on the wall" for Belshazzar. Daniel. 5: In Exodus 21, 2 of the 4 body parts that follow "Thou shalt give life for life...". (2 of) an eye, a tooth, a hand and a foot. Round 3. Category: 20Th C. Quotes 1: A remark attributed to Eldridge Cleaver states, "You're either part of the solution or part of" this. the problem. 2: In a 1969 speech, he was 1st to refer to "The Great Silent Majority". Richard Nixon. 3: This clergyman wrote from a Birmingham jail, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere". Martin Luther King, Jr.. 4: Establishing scholarships in his will he said, "Educational relations make the strongest tie". Cecil Rhodes. 5: This famed WWII correspondent stated, "I write from the worm's-eye point of view". Ernie Pyle. Round 4. Category: Let'S Go For A Spin. With Spin in quotes 1: "Melrose Place" was one for "Beverly Hills 90210". a spin-off. 2: Here are the rules: if the soda container stops rotating and faces you, it's time to pucker up. spin the bottle. 3: It can be a yarn maker, or a woman who never married. a spinster. 4: It's the rotating skid of a car losing control. a spinout. 5: The bowman on a yacht is there to set this sail. a spinnaker. Round 5. Category: Tools Of The Kitchen 1: Different types of these can remove hot stuff from the oven or catch baseballs. a mitt. 2: A pair of hinged metal griddles with a honeycombed interior make up one of these. a waffle iron. 3: Both a product such as Adolph's and a kitchen tool have this name, referring to what they do to meat. a tenderizer. 4: You'll be draining without straining using a Williams-Sonoma one of these holey items. a colander. 5: The name of this perforated pasta prep bowl is from the Latin for "strain". a colander. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

Dans l'épisode 128 du Trio Économique, Vincent propose de régler tous les problèmes liés à l'immigration en implantant la proposition de l'économiste Gary Becker : un permis de 50 000 $. Chaque immigrant devrait payer cette somme pour venir s'installer ici, en échange de laquelle il recevrait les mêmes droits que les autres citoyens, sauf le droit de vote pour 5 ans. Ainsi, terminer les débats sur les seuils, terminer la francisation, terminer les mythes sur le coût social, etc. Seuls ceux qui sont motivés et ayant un désir de s'intégrer seraient prêts à payer les 50k. En contrepartie, l'argent amassé par cette taxe pourrait être utilisé pour baisser les impôts des locaux et donc leur bénéficier. Dans la partie PATREON, Ian parle de son amour pour le steak dans le micro-onde et on équilibre le budget en coupant massivement dans une série de dépenses et de ministères inutiles et ce, sans couper AUCUN service aux citoyens et sans toucher à la santé ! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:30 Comment répondre à TOUTES les objections 8:00 Gary Becker : un permis d'immigration 13:45 Baisser les impôts avec le 50K $ 18:20 Et les pauvres ? 23:00 L'encan ou le prix ? 26:15 Compenser les locaux $ 33:44 Tu peux revendre ton permis 37:50 Regroupement familial 41:10 Interlude de Milton Friedman 45:05 Compatibilité des civilisations 54:25 Les accords internationaux 57:00 Conclusion Visiter notre Patreon pour des podcasts sans publicités avec quelques extras : www.patreon.com/isenechal Notre page Facebook : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ISenechal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Notre compte Twitter : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/PiluleRouge_CA⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Notrecompte TikTok : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@iansenechal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ian & Frank : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6FX9rKclX7qdlegxVFhO3B ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Les Affranchis : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/61ZraWorXHQL64KriHnWPr?si=e0ca97a8510845c6⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/letrioeconomique/message

04-11-2024 Casey B. Mulligan Learn more about the interview and get additional links here: https://usabusinessradio.com/reflecting-on-the-work-of-gary-becker/ Subscribe to the best of our content here: https://priceofbusiness.substack.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCywgbHv7dpiBG2Qswr_ceEQ

Richard Epstein remembers the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman and discusses the long-running debate between Kahneman’s research on behavioral economics and the rational-choice models popularized by Gary Becker and Ronald Coase.

Richard Epstein remembers the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman and discusses the long-running debate between Kahneman's research on behavioral economics and the rational-choice models popularized by Gary Becker and Ronald Coase.

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! To set up this week's guest, let me just share real quick a personal anecdote. When I graduated college, I got a job as a qualitative research analyst doing focus groups and in-depth interviews. I had majored in literature, so this was my first exposure to anything related to the social sciences. I loved the freedom the job gave me to collect my own data and develop my own theories about why people did the things they did. In the evenings I would read articles and books in sociology and anthropology as I felt more grounding in the social sciences could help me in doing a better job. One night I read Gary Becker's Nobel Prize speech, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life”, at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin working paper series. I was hooked. By the time I finished his speech, I knew I wanted to be an economist. But then I read other things too, like a quantitative paper by John Lott and David Mustard's quantitative study on concealed carry laws and crime, and was equally mesmerized. And in that working paper series, I kept coming across references to someone named Ronald Coase and I then went elsewhere to learn about him and his prolific work. David Mustard was a Gary Becker student, and his paper on concealed carry had left an impression on me. He was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia so I applied there and one other school that used his county level crime data for studies on crime. I got into both and went with my ex-wife to visit the school and the faculty. In preparing for the trip, I read a paper by a professor at the University of Georgia named Peter Klein. The paper was entitled “New Institutional Economics” and it drew extensively on that Nobel Prize winning economist I had been learning about, Ronald Coase, another Nobel Laureate named Doug North at Washington University, and Oliver Williamson, a professor at Berkeley. The article was fascinating. It was about a field called “New Institutional Economics”, which I'd never heard of, and Klein explained it well. It was about the endogenous evolution of “institutions” to support and facilitate the organization of human interactions at a high level, most often to support commerce and trade though not just that. The ideas were deep and fascinating. I remember reading that article with a pen and highlighter, going over it and over it, hanging on every word. Not only was the topic fascinating, the author writing it was an excellent writer. There was not a wasted word in it. So when I met with the faculty, including Peter, I was sold on Georgia. But unfortunately, Peter was leaving Georgia for Mizzou and so I just barely missed being in the department with him. So that is a long winded bit of background into telling you that today's guest is someone I've known now for over 20 years — Peter Klein, the W. W. Caruth Endowed Chair at Baylor University in the Entrepreneurship department. Peter is now a professor as well as the department chair at Baylor in our Entrepreneurship department. And so it is my pleasure to introduce you to him. Peter did a PhD at Berkeley and studied under Oliver Williamson, who I mentioned earlier. Williamson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for extending Coase's theory of the firm and helping develop a more robust theory based on transaction cost economics. Peter's work on the firm extends a lot of this work on transaction cost economics continues in that line focusing on the organization of the firm. He is the author of countless articles as well as a new book entitled Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (with Nicolai Foss). It has been a real joy having him here since I missed him the first time around.As long time listeners know, though, I typically am doing a “mini-series” within the podcast, though, and Peter fits into one of those mini-series. Those mini-series are “the econometricians”, “causal inference and natural experiment methodology”, “Becker's students”, “economists going to tech”, and then “public policy”. But another one I'm slowly picking at has to do with the wings of the profession that fall outside of the exclusively neoclassical tradition, one of which is Austrian economics. And Peter comes from that tradition, though he has mixed it with mainstream economics and made it into something of his own. So, with that being said, let me now turn you over to the podcast! Thanks again for tuning in!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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape is Pierre Chiappori, a micro theorist at Columbia University. While Pierre is not technically a student of Gary Becker's, there are many people who counted Becker as a colleague that probably at times did consider them also Becker's student, and I suspect Pierre is one such person. I learned of Dr. Chiappori in graduate school while studying economics of the family. His collective models of the household always seemed a little bit outside of what I was studying, which was typically the Nash bargaining models of marriage, but I was also very interested too. It's a run of papers he did in the 1990s, overlapping with when he was at Chicago with Becker, that sort of was the catalyst to ask him on the show. When I learned that he grew up in Monaco under the shadow of Princess Grace Kelly, and that he like me also loved Rear Window, I knew it was going to be an interesting talk. I hope you all enjoy it. Remember, the story of economics has been tributaries, many eddies, and listening all of them is in my opinion a way to show consideration to those people where consideration is nothing more than allowing their story to become real to us. I continue to believe that it is in the act of listening to stories that we are transformed and learn our own way. So I encourage you to listen closely to the story of Dr. Pierre Chiappori. Oh and this is our 87th interview. 13 more and we hit 100! 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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Imagine looking at the world and seeing economics everywhere. Whether it was in family dynamics, discrimination in the workplace, the criminal mind…absolutely anything!!! When first mooted this was an alien idea to many, including many economists but this was the novel approach of the highly influential and award-winning economist Gary Becker. Becker is many economists' favourite economist, at least those economists keenest on market-based, "rational" approaches. Where once economics stayed in its lane, now, post-Becker, Economics goes wherever it chooses, with tools such as cost-benefit analyses applied in all areas of human activity. Nothing is safe from economics thanks to Gary Becker! Whether he deserves our thanks our opprobrium for this is debatable but in this episode of their award winning podcast, Pete and Gav, your friendly neighbourhood economists, explore his life and ideas. So if you are wondering why students should now do an investment appraisal before going to university or why siblings are nice to each other, even when they are horrible to other people, then this podcast is for you! As always there is a quiz, some music and book recommendations and a cocktail you can make to compliment the episode. Technical support comes from ‘Ace of Bass' Nic.

The Mixtape with Scott is a weekly podcast devoted to building out a selected part of the collective story of the last 50 years of the economics profession by listening to the personal stories of living economists. And this week's guest is a the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College in Vermont, Caitlin Myers who I am fortunate to count as both a coauthor and friend, as well as an professional admirer. Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Texas's economics department and is one of those young economists who hit the ground running and has only gotten faster. A senior economist told me recently she is *the* abortion researcher at this moment in time having made major contributions to both the scientific record and the policy discussion regarding abortion policy, its causes and its consequences. She is as far as economists go meticulous, thoughtful, passionate, principled and creative, and while she is not directly a student of Gary Becker, or Claudia Goldin for that matter, she is very clearly part of their influence on labor economics and on Caitlin in turn. Thank you again for tuning in to the podcast. If you like it, please share, follow and all that.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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Gary Becker, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Expert on PTSD joins Megan and Tom discussing the conflict with Israel and Hamas triggering PTSD in soldiers. 

n this podcast episode, we talk about the secrets to achieving an enviable physique, often seen in Hollywood stars and fitness models. We emphasize the importance of building muscle and provide insights into various workout techniques for muscle growth. From explosive high pulls to farmer carries, the host explains the significance of different exercises in developing the desired physique, including powerful traps and shoulders.   The concept of training to failure is discussed, indicating that pushing oneself beyond comfort zones is key to seeing results. A method called "rest-pause sets" is introduced, which encourages pushing harder during the final set of exercises without compromising safety. For women, the episode urges them to lift heavier weights, as many are stronger than they might think.   The convo continues with the importance of muscle-building for aging gracefully. Muscle-building leads to better metabolic rates, improved functional strength, higher stamina, increased insulin sensitivity, better mental health, and protection against chronic diseases. The idea of getting lean first before muscle-building is explored as an effective approach.   Key Takeaways:   Training to failure is crucial for muscle growth. Building muscle has long-term health benefits. A lean body is the foundation for successful muscle-building.   Resources:   The episode references the book "The Million Dollar Body Method" and suggests visiting gitnatesbook.com for more information on the topic.   [0:00 - 8:12] Fitness and nutrition for a "million-dollar body".  Bodybuilding and muscle gain for actors in Hollywood.  The differences in training habits between celebrities like Tom Hardy and personal trainers. Proper shoulder exercises for mobility and pain relief. [10:35 - 27:35] Training upper traps and building explosive power.  The importance of building upper back muscles through exercises like shrugs and farmer carries. Building muscle and athleticism through exercises like farmer's carries and rowing.  Tricep exercises and proper rep scheme for muscle growth.  the importance of taking sets to failure to stimulate muscle growth and strength gains. Using rest pause sets for muscle growth and mental toughness.  [31:48 - 35:30] Gary Becker suggests avoiding pursuit of comfort to achieve ideal aging. Muscle building and its benefits for metabolism and functional strength. Benefits of weightlifting for overall health and wellness.  Muscle building and energy levels.  Keto diet for bodybuilding with an outlier example.

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com* Elvis Costello's dad is the best dancer* Orthodox Shyne* Jamaicans vs….ummm…non-island people* Close enough* The race blob* The Australia craze / Jacko* Gross Steven Segal songs* “The molester Rolf Harris?”* Revisiting the dumb debate * Ron, Vivek, et al* In praise of Gary Becker (and his family)* OJ Simpson: Slashing government spending* Moynihan's baggage has shifted on this…

To access a FREE collection of resources, go to www.TheMaverickVault.com   Explore the intricacies of real estate investing and delve into the current state of the economic market in this episode featuring Dr. Peter Linneman. Gain valuable insights into emerging trends, metrics, and strategies to maximize returns while mitigating risks. Unveil the opportunities that await in this ever-evolving landscape by tuning in today!   Key Takeaways From This Episode Important inflation metrics you need to know in the current economic market  The impact of Federal Reserve System policies on property investors and capital markets  A simple analysis of the economic growth of various nations  Ultimate benefits of investing in multifamily and retail properties  Qualities to look for in a real estate investment partner  Advantages of learning from seasoned investors   References/Links Mentioned Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio | Kindle and Hardcover About Dr. Peter Linneman Dr. Peter Linneman, a renowned figure in real estate, has gained global recognition for his combination of rigorous scholarship and practical business insights. With over 45 years of experience, he has received prestigious accolades, including the Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research from PREA, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center, and the Special Achievement Award from Realty Stock Magazine. He has been named one of the "25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and included in The New York Observer's list of the "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate." Dr. Linneman earned his Master and Doctorate in Economics under the guidance of esteemed Nobel Prize winners, such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz, and Jim Heckman. He was the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the renowned Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During his tenure at Wharton, he co-edited The Wharton Real Estate Review and published over 100 scholarly articles. He authored eight editions of the acclaimed book "Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities" and the widely read quarterly report, the Linneman Letter. He co-created the highly regarded Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI. Recently, he co-authored the best-selling book "The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow" with Dr. Michael Roizen and Albert Ratner. Besides his academic accomplishments, Dr. Linneman has enjoyed a successful business career as the Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates.   Connect with Dr. Peter Website: Linneman Asscociates, LLC  Email: dlinneman@linnemanassociates.com    Are you a passive real estate investor seeking financial freedom? Almost daily, new headlines break on the latest financial market upset. Now is the time to get educated on how to strategically invest in commercial real estate for long-term financial freedom. Grab your copy of “How to Passively Invest in a Changing Economic Environment” Go to…www.MavericksInvest.com Want to keep up to date on the commercial real estate market, trends, investing tips and know what Neil is buying right now? Connect with him at Legacy Impact Investors and be sure to register for his newsletter. Connect with Neil Timmins on LinkedIn. If there is a topic you want to know more about or a guest that you would like to see on the show, shoot Neil a message on LinkedIn.   About Neil Timmins Having completed hundreds of Fix & Flips, Wholesales, Wholetails, Novations, and Owner-Financed deals, Neil longed to quit forfeiting time for dollars. After building a portfolio of single-family rentals to produce passive income, he found the strategy to be anything but passive. Neil didn't go looking for his first commercial deal—he stumbled into it. Since then, he has refined the process of analyzing and buying commercial properties that produce stellar cash flow. Neil has been involved in over $300,000,000 in real estate transactions. While his holdings in commercial assets include apartments, offices, mobile home parks, and self-storage units, his passion is industrial property. Neil now has verticals in residential real estate, multiple commercial asset classes, brokerage, publishing, and a successful podcast.   Click here to see video of the podcast. 

Derek Neal interviewIt's Tuesday which is usually the day of the week I release a new episode for season two of the Mixtape with Scott. These interviews consist of me interviewing an economist, though sometimes I deviate and interview other social scientists or authors. The idea of the podcast is a little out there: “to be an oral history of the economics profession, focusing selectively on topics from the last 50 years, by listening to the personal stories of the economists themselves”Topics include things like causal inference and econometrics, Princeton Industrial Relation Section in the 80s and 90s, economists in the tech sector, Gary Becker's former students, and “public policy” more generally. Each episode is about an hour though sometimes they go longer, and one time it went on for 3 hours (I haven't posted that one yet). We start when they were little and usually end with where they are now, pausing often to discuss some of the more memorable work they have done. This week I interviewed Derek Neal, a labor economist and professor of economics at the University of Chicago. If I had to summarize one thing that described this interview, and what I learned from Derek's life, it would be that he has been riding on a knife edge of close calls and good luck. Take for instance how fortunate he was that his economics professor at small college in Georgia where he grew up had been denied tenure at Kentucky. Arriving at this college, he took it upon himself to prepare students for grad school by teaching them not just economics, but through independent studies tons of the math that they did not have access to. And Derek was one of them. Or Bill Johnson, his adviser at Virginia, who helped him learn about the important craft of writing. Or the famous Sherwin Rosen who took Derek under his wing at Chicago the second he arrived there as an assistant professor. Derek was generous in our interview. He peeled back the curtain a little and walked me through his life through all this serendipity, the “unmerited grace”, as he calls it, to where he is now. Unmerited grace tends to create within the recipient a sense of calling to do the same for others, and the sense I get, and the rumors I hear from others, is that Derek works hard to be for others what his mentors had been for him. I was told by a former student of his just this week that Derek was an incredible adviser, “but very tough”. A description I've heard from others whose papers he edited when he was editor at the Journal of Political Economy, too. For people, like me, who love the stories of the old economists at the University of Chicago, hearing more about people like Sherwin Rosen (who hasn't come up before on the show) and Gary Becker (who has) should delight you. It was also good to have a southerner whose drawl matched my own. You be the judge who carries it better — me or Derek. I hope you find this emerging mosaic of stories of our profession of the last 50 years as interesting as me. I am appreciative of all these people giving me an hour of their time and sharing their stories and the stories around them as they followed their own path. I hope you hear their story, but as corny as it sounds, our story and your story too. Hearing stories, listening to stories, and telling stories are important to me, and I'm glad I get to share these with you. So thanks for listening and tuning in. Don't forget to like, share, follow and subscribe! 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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr. Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. He introduced a theory which would later become part of mainstream economics and among the first to propagate the theory of consumption smoothing. During the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its initial conclusions. He theorized that there existed a natural rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted a macroeconomic viewpoint known as monetarism and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy, as compared to rapid, and unexpected changes. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's monetary policy in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, and becoming Emeritus professor in economics in 1983, Friedman served as an advisor to Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal government intervention in social matters. He once stated that his role in eliminating conscription in the United States was his proudest achievement. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, school vouchers and opposition to the war on drugs and support for drug liberalization policies. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice. Friedman's works cover a broad range of economic topics and public policy issues. His books and essays have had global influence, including in former communist states. A 2011 survey of economists commissioned by the EJW ranked Friedman as the second-most popular economist of the 20th century, following only John Maynard Keynes. Upon his death, The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century ... possibly of all of it". Original video ⁠here⁠⁠ Full Wikipedia entry ⁠here⁠ Milton Friedman's books ⁠here --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

In this week's episode of The Mixtape with Scott, I introduce you to the one and only, Dan Hamermesh. Dan is professor emeritus now at the University of Texas where he spent the last part of his career. He's part of the story of Princeton that I've been interested in telling, as he was there from 1969 to 1973 before heading to Michigan State where he was until 1993. He then went down the street from me to Austin at University of Texas until 2014. Dan did his undergraduate in economics from the University of Chicago where he got to see some of the big labor economists of that era up close, like H. Gregg Lewis, who was also Gary Becker's adviser. It was really interesting to hear Dan's impressions of Lewis; for the first time, I wondered if all of the ethos and worldview we associate with Becker (“thinking like an economist” where economics was “everywhere”) might in fact be attributable to Lewis, even though Lewis was in many ways a traditional labor economist, and you could say Becker was a bit more nontraditional since he took economics in an imperialistic fashion into areas like the family and discrimination, among others. Dan provides some interesting perspective.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Dan has been a premier labor economist his entire life, and is an important part of the story of labor and empirical micro of the last quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century. An unusually productive economist who blended well the price theory of Chicago with contemporary empiricism that we closely associate with labor economics in general. A very funny and energetic man, he is also one of those you tend to say “they've forgotten more economics than I'll ever know”. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Dan, but I always do. So please welcome MC Hammer himself, Dan Hamermesh. Opening music credits: Wes Cunningham Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxpayer's tax liability, and it includes dishonest tax reporting, declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, overstating deductions, using bribes against authorities in countries with high corruption rates and hiding money in secret locations. Tax evasion is an activity commonly associated with the informal economy. One measure of the extent of tax evasion (the "tax gap") is the amount of unreported income, which is the difference between the amount of income that should be reported to the tax authorities and the actual amount reported. In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce one's tax burden. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that intend to subvert a state's tax system, but such classification of tax avoidance is disputable since avoidance is lawful in self-creating systems. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be practiced by corporations, trusts, or individuals. Economics. In 1968, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker first theorized the economics of crime, on the basis of which authors M G Allingham and A Sandmo produced, in 1972, an economic model of tax evasion. This model deals with the evasion of income tax, the main source of tax revenue in developed countries. According to the authors, the level of evasion of income tax depends on the detection probability and the level of punishment provided by law. Later studies, however, pointed to limitations of the model, highlighting that individuals are also more likely to comply with taxes when they believe that tax money is appropriately used and when they can take part in public decisions. The literature's theoretical models are elegant in their effort to identify the variables likely to affect non-compliance. Alternative specifications, however, yield conflicting results concerning both the signs and magnitudes of variables believed to affect tax evasion. Empirical work is required to resolve the theoretical ambiguities. Income tax evasion appears to be positively influenced by the tax rate, the unemployment rate, the level of income and dissatisfaction with government. The U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986 appears to have reduced tax evasion in the United States. In a 2017 study Alstadsæter et al concluded based on random stratified audits and leaked data that occurrence of tax evasion rises sharply as amount of wealth rises and that the very richest are about 10 times more likely than average people to engage in tax evasion. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/law-school/support

Econtalk Podcast Notes Key Takeaways According to René Girard, there are two types of desire: physical and metaphysical Physical desire is a desire for physical utility – that is, what the object can provide us in and of itselfMetaphysical desire is a desire for identity – that is, what the objects say about usGirard believes that humans desire persistence (wanting our names to last), power, and social reality (recognition, fame, and to be lauded by the social groups we're in)Girard believes we fulfill these fundamental desires by making associations with objects by choosing models whom we already think have this heightened beingGirard thinks our fundamental desires – our moral paradigms – are anchored to these models and their associated objects and valuesGirard argues that the strength of your desire can't indicate its authenticity and whether it's truly yours or not Girard sees metaphysical desire as the original sin; it is the drive to rival God and his metaphysical splendor Johnathan believes there are two solutions to metaphysical desires: Identify that the metaphysical desire is completely perverse and not seek itAlign your physical and metaphysical desiresThere is also a negative component to mimesis: the desire to be distant from objects associated with having a deficiency of beingOur sense of being is fundamentally shaped and determined by the cultures we're in and the models we're exposed to Machiavelli saw people as fundamentally egocentric, and that social participation was not the end, but the instrumental means to satisfy appetite and self-preservationWe come to view our social aspect as a way to serve our appetite; we've become reduced to these utility-maximizing creatures without consideration of spirit at all Once our core human ends are satisfied, most economic decision-making comes from the social dimension that is difficult to model with mathematics Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgWhen the 20-year-old overachiever Johnathan Bi's first startup crashed and burned, he headed to a Zen retreat in the Catskills to "debug himself." He discovered René Girard and his mimetic theory--the idea that imitation is a key and often unconscious driver of human behavior. Listen as entrepreneur and philosopher Bi shares with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what he learned from Girard and Girard's insights into how we meet our primal need for money, fame, and power. The conversation includes the contrasts between economics and Girard's perspective.

When the 20-year-old overachiever Johnathan Bi's first startup crashed and burned, he headed to a Zen retreat in the Catskills to "debug himself." He discovered René Girard and his mimetic theory--the idea that imitation is a key and often unconscious driver of human behavior. Listen as entrepreneur and philosopher Bi shares with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what he learned from Girard and Girard's insights into how we meet our primal need for money, fame, and power. The conversation includes the contrasts between economics and Girard's perspective.

Shoshana Grossbard, Economist, Professor, Editor, Becker's StudentI recently volunteered to teach a new class on the history of economic thought and it has been profoundly rewarding for me. I love economics but I also love the stories of its players, my tribe, the economists. This person critiquing that person, this idea twisting around that other persons idea. The idea I might get paid to study people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus? Pinch me — I must be dreaming. What's been interesting to me is how much I recognize. Even though I have never read Malthus theory of gluts before, it's somehow eerily familiar. But it's more than just seeing the traces of later theories in these early writers. Reading history is also helping reframe the broad story of economics itself — the story of capitalism, its tensions, the conflicts between people, the appropriation and division of surplus, and the organization accomplished through markets and exchange. Reading history helps makes sense of me and others when I see the full sweep of the times and the debates. But some people are remembered, some people aren't. Some ideas were dropped and some hung around. Sometimes they were omitted because the theories while useful and intriguing explanations then were not as useful as another explanation that would replace it. That process of what we remember and what we forget happens at all levels, big and small, and it too is part of the story of economics in a way. This idea that now long gone economists were once in their offices working earnestly on ideas we have collectively chosen to ignore and forget is not itself tragic, though. Nor is what was selected to persist glorious. Both simply are. Most of the things I have chosen or done in fact no one will ever know. Most of the words I have said, no one was present to hear. History has forgotten more than it has remembered. Nevertheless I want to know. I want to learn all the stories, all the people, all the ideas, all the ways that ideas are forged and changed and kept and passed around. I know that it sounds a bit dramatic to say “My people”. What a strange way to self identify. And yet it is genuine. I am an economist. It will say in my tombstone that I was an economist even. I am more an economist than I am almost any other thing. So perhaps that's why I care about the stories of the economists — the people and the ideas. I care about the people too. I care especially about the stories that for one reason or another would simply never be told were we not to ask and listen with open mind and accepting hearts, the hallmark of curiosity. I see my podcast as a way to collect the stories of people whose stories don't show up in the footnotes of our textbooks. I do it around topics I care about like causal inference, economists in tech, and public policy. And one of the series I have been doing I call “Becker's students”. I chose Gary Becker because it was Becker's Nobel prize speech more than any other intellectual experience I had that prompted me to get a PhD in economics. He has cast a massive shadow over me. And my series so far has included interviews with two of his former students from when he was a professor at Columbia University: Robert Michael and Michael Grossman. But this week I am talking with one of his students from the University of Chicago where he spent the majority of his career. My guest this week is Shoshana Grossbard, professor of economics at San Diego State University, and editor of Review of Economics of the Household. This interview was one of the best interview experiences I have had yet. Shoshana was honest, warm, and most of all very candid about her career, about the history of household economics, the things that had major impacts on her, but also the discouragements in her career. That she would share both the highs and lows as well as her thoughts about economics as a science and its practitioners so transparently with me of all people was deeply humbling for me. You will learn that Becker was an important figure for her, not surprisingly as he was her advisor, but like many important people to us who we've known for years, the relationship was also a complicated one. His influence cast a long shadow over who she chose to become, and I appreciated that she was so forthright. I hope you like this interview too. Please tell others about it! Don't forget to subscribe and if you like it, consider supporting 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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Shoshana Grossbard, Economist, Professor, Editor, Becker's StudentI recently volunteered to teach a new class on the history of economic thought and it has been profoundly rewarding for me. I love economics but I also love the stories of its players, my tribe, the economists. This person critiquing that person, this idea twisting around that other persons idea. The idea I might get paid to study people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus? Pinch me — I must be dreaming. What's been interesting to me is how much I recognize. Even though I have never read Malthus theory of gluts before, it's somehow eerily familiar. But it's more than just seeing the traces of later theories in these early writers. Reading history is also helping reframe the broad story of economics itself — the story of capitalism, its tensions, the conflicts between people, the appropriation and division of surplus, and the organization accomplished through markets and exchange. Reading history helps makes sense of me and others when I see the full sweep of the times and the debates. But some people are remembered, some people aren't. Some ideas were dropped and some hung around. Sometimes they were omitted because the theories while useful and intriguing explanations then were not as useful as another explanation that would replace it. That process of what we remember and what we forget happens at all levels, big and small, and it too is part of the story of economics in a way. This idea that now long gone economists were once in their offices working earnestly on ideas we have collectively chosen to ignore and forget is not itself tragic, though. Nor is what was selected to persist glorious. Both simply are. Most of the things I have chosen or done in fact no one will ever know. Most of the words I have said, no one was present to hear. History has forgotten more than it has remembered. Nevertheless I want to know. I want to learn all the stories, all the people, all the ideas, all the ways that ideas are forged and changed and kept and passed around. I know that it sounds a bit dramatic to say “My people”. What a strange way to self identify. And yet it is genuine. I am an economist. It will say in my tombstone that I was an economist even. I am more an economist than I am almost any other thing. So perhaps that's why I care about the stories of the economists — the people and the ideas. I care about the people too. I care especially about the stories that for one reason or another would simply never be told were we not to ask and listen with open mind and accepting hearts, the hallmark of curiosity. I see my podcast as a way to collect the stories of people whose stories don't show up in the footnotes of our textbooks. I do it around topics I care about like causal inference, economists in tech, and public policy. And one of the series I have been doing I call “Becker's students”. I chose Gary Becker because it was Becker's Nobel prize speech more than any other intellectual experience I had that prompted me to get a PhD in economics. He has cast a massive shadow over me. And my series so far has included interviews with two of his former students from when he was a professor at Columbia University: Robert Michael and Michael Grossman. But this week I am talking with one of his students from the University of Chicago where he spent the majority of his career. My guest this week is Shoshana Grossbard, professor of economics at San Diego State University, and editor of Review of Economics of the Household. This interview was one of the best interview experiences I have had yet. Shoshana was honest, warm, and most of all very candid about her career, about the history of household economics, the things that had major impacts on her, but also the discouragements in her career. That she would share both the highs and lows as well as her thoughts about economics as a science and its practitioners so transparently with me of all people was deeply humbling for me. You will learn that Becker was an important figure for her, not surprisingly as he was her advisor, but like many important people to us who we've known for years, the relationship was also a complicated one. His influence cast a long shadow over who she chose to become, and I appreciated that she was so forthright. I hope you like this interview too. Please tell others about it! Don't forget to subscribe and if you like it, consider supporting 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 Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Today, Peter Linneman shares how people's life expectancies limit us from embracing our full potential and capabilities. Peter has been in the business and has been giving gifts of greater quality of living standards.    Peter believes that the most unvalued skill in life is intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity will make people take action, but sometimes, it leads them to be blind but smart enough to recover from that. The inspiring words from Peter are that people are just afraid of conditions, not age. Realizing you're capable will be a big help, so listen to this!   Key Points from This Episode:   How to notice cognitive bias? Peter shares how to check people's thinking Why are people constantly distracted by things that seem unimportant but are not that important? How can people be active and reactive to people from tough times? Ten years from now, Peter explains why the success and failure of people have nothing to do with what happens six months from now. How is it empowering oneself to give the most extraordinary talents? Peter shares that a lot of people settle for mediocrity. How important is it that people should be aware of how they behave and interact with the environment? Peter shares how people can do better than mediocre.  Why is it important to focus on what matters? Tweetables: “Don't get distracted by shiny objects ” - Peter Linneman  “And I could promise you, it's not, it's not easy. It's just what you do ” - Peter Linneman “There are times when you can do so much better than mediocre ” - Peter Linneman   Links Mentioned Peter Linneman's Website   About Peter Linneman For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".   After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the  Wharton School of Business at the  University of Pennsylvania. For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center.  During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular, and highly regarded, Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI.    Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.   Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast.   --------------- Are you a real estate investor looking to elevate your income, freedom & lifestyle? If so, optimize your daily performance by downloading our free guide, Raising the Bar - 5 Steps to Elevate Your Habits, at elevatepod.com. In this guide, created by your host Tyler Chesser, you'll learn why you do what you do, how to easily institute cues in your environment to trigger desired behavior, directly applicable steps to create a fulfilling future and much more. Get your free copy at elevatepod.com and kick-start your new habits today. Your future self will thank you! This episode of Elevate is brought to you by CF Capital, a national real estate investment firm. CF Capital's mission is to provide property investment and asset management solutions to help investors like you maximize their returns by investing in high-value multifamily communities. If you are looking for risk-adjusted alternative investments in quality apartment communities, and are seeking tax optimized cash flow with appreciation upside without all the hassle of management, you might benefit from learning more about investing alongside our team. You're invited to reach out and learn how you can invest with us by visiting cfcapllc.com. 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In this episode of Purpose-Driven Wealth, your host, Mo Bina, and Peter Linneman weigh everything about today's uncertain world economic market. During the early take-off of the real estate industry, Peter saw how things developed. With years of insight into the investing world, here, Peter answers whether or not the FED should raise interest rates, how Russia's war on Ukraine benefits the US, his perspective on today's inflation, and so much more. In this episode, Peter talks about: How real estate was back then… Keeping a balanced view of the inflation Yes—the FED should raise interest rates Higher oil prices help the US Peter Linneman's opinion on crypto and so much more! About Peter Linneman:   For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".   After receiving both his Master's and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz, and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the  Wharton School of Business at the  University of Pennsylvania.   For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review.   He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular and highly regarded Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI.   Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.   Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast.   Follow Peter Linneman on:   Website:          https://www.linnemanassociates.com/ Email:              dlinneman@linnemanassociates.com   Connect with Mo Bina on:   Website:          https://www.high-risecapital.com/ Medium:          https://mobina.medium.com/ YouTube:        https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ISsEKBHlkX7lk9b68SKLA/featured Instagram:       https://www.instagram.com/highrisecapital/   For more information on passive investing in commercial real estate, please check out our free eBook — More Doors, More Profits — by clicking here: https://www.high-risecapital.com/resources-index      

This week I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University and editor-in-chief at the Journal of Human Resources. I am a long time admirer of Dr. Aizer’s work and have followed her career with curiosity for a long time. Some of her papers imprinted pretty strongly on me. I’ll just briefly mention one.Her 2015 article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics with Joe Doyle on juvenile incarceration, for instance, has haunted me for many many years. It was the first or second paper I had seen at the time that had used the now popular “leniency design” to examine the causal effect of being incarcerated as a youth on high school completion and other outcomes as well as adult incarceration. Simply comparing those outcomes for those incarcerated and those not incarcerated as a kid will not reveal the causal effect of juvenile incarceration if juvenile incarceration suffers from selection bias on unobservable confounders. So Dr. Aizer with Joe Doyle used a clever approach to overcome that problem in which they found quasi-random variation, disconnected from the unobserved confounder, in juvenile incarceration caused by the random assignment of juvenile judges. As these judges varied in the propensity to sentence kids, they effectively utilized the judges’ own decisions as life changing lotteries which they then used to study the effect of juvenile incarceration on high school and adult incarceration. And the findings were bleak, depressing, enraging, upsetting, sad, all the emotions. They found that indeed being assigned to a more strict judge substantially raised one’s chances of being sentenced as a kid. Using linked administrative data connecting each of those kids to their Chicago Public School data as well as Cook County incarceration data, they then found that being incarcerated significantly increased the effect of committing a criminal offense as an adult, and it decreased the probability of finishing high school. The kids, best they could tell, mostly didn’t return after their juvenile incarceration, but if they did return, they were more likely to be given a emotional and behavioral disorder label in the data. My interpretation was always severe — incarceration had scarred the kids, traumatizing them, and they weren’t the same. The paper would haunt me for various personal reasons as I saw a loved one arrested and spent time in jail on numerous occasions. I would see kids in my local community who had grown up with our kids arrested and think of Dr. Aizer' and Joe Doyle’s study, concluding the most important thing I could do was bail them out. The paper was one of many events in my own life that led me to transition my research to mental illness within corrections and self harm attempts by inmates even. But there’s other personal reasons I wanted to interview Dr. Aizer. Dr. Aizer went to UCLA where she studied with Janet Currie, Adriana Lleras-Muney and Guido Imbens. Recall that when Imbens was denied tenure at Harvard, he went to UCLA. Currie, who had attended Princeton at the same time as Angrist, Imbens’ coauthor on many papers on instrumental variables in the 1990s, was an original economist focused on the family, but unlike Becker and others, brought with her that focused attention to finding variation in data that could plausibly recover causal effects. The story, in other words, of Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section and design based causal inference, going back to Orley Ashenfelter, was spreading through the profession through the placements of scholars at places like UCLA, which is where Dr. Aizer was a student. In this storyline in my head, Dr. Aizer was a type of first generation member of the credibility revolution, and I wanted to talk to her not only for her scholarly work’s influence on me, but also because I wanted to continue tracing Imbens and Angrist’s influence on the profession through UCLA. The interview, though, was warm and interesting throughout. Dr. Aizer is a bright light in the profession working on important questions in the family, poverty and public policy. For anyone interested in the hardships of our communities and neighborhoods, I highly recommend to you her work. Now let me beg for your support. Scott’s Substack and the podcast, Mixtape with Scott, are user supported. If your willingness to pay for the episodes and the explainers (I’m going to write some more I promise!), please consider becoming a subscriber! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TranscriptScott Cunningham:In this week's episode of the Mix Tape podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University in Rhode Island and editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources. I have had a keen interest in Anna Aizer and her career and her work for a couple of reasons. Actually a lot, but here's two. First, she did her PhD at UCLA when Janet Currie was there, as well as when Guido Imbens was there. Imbens taught there after he left Harvard, for those of you that remember that interview I did with him. Recall my overarching conviction that Princeton's industrial relations section, which was where Orley Ashelfeltner, David Card, Alan Kruger, Bob Lalonde, Josh Angrist originated from, as well as Janet Currie.My conviction that this was the ground zero of design based causal inference. And that design based causal inference spread through economics, not really through econometrics, and econometrics textbooks, but really through applied people. She also worked with Adriana Lleras-Muney, who's also at UCLA now, who was a student of Rajeev Dehejia, who wrote a seminal work in economics using propensity score, who was also Josh Angrist’s student at MIT. So you can see, Anna fits my obsession with a sociological mapping out of the spread of causal inference through the applied community.But putting aside Anna as being instrumentally interesting, I am directly interested in her and her work on domestic violence and youth incarceration among other things. I've followed it super closely, teach a lot of these papers all the time, think about them even more. In this episode, we basically walked through her early life in Manhattan to her time at Amherst College, to her first jobs working in nonprofits, in areas of reform and poverty, to graduate school. We talked about her thoughts about domestic violence and poverty and crime along the way, too. And it was just a real honor and a pleasure to get to talk to her. I hope you like it as much as me. My name is Scott Cunningham and this is Mix Tape podcast. Okay. It's really great to introduce my guest this week on the podcast, Anna Aizer. Anna, thank you so much for being on the podcast.Anna Aizer:Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.Scott Cunningham:Before we get started, could you tell us obviously your name and your training and where you work?Anna Aizer:Sure. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University. I did my PhD at UCLA oh many years ago. Before that actually I got a masters in public health. Sorry. I have a strong public health interest and focus in a lot of my work. I'm also currently the co-director of the NBR program on children. That is a program at the NBR that is focused entirely on the economics of children and families. I'm the editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources.Scott Cunningham:Great. It's so nice to meet in person. I've been a long time reader of your papers because you write about these topics on violence against women. There's not a lot of people in economics that do. And the way that you approach it shares a lot of my own thoughts. I'm going to talk about it later, but it's really nice to meet in person.Anna Aizer:Sure. Nice to meet you, too.Scott Cunningham:Okay. I want to break up the conversation a little bit into your life. First part, just talk about your life growing up. And then the second part, I want to talk about research stuff. So where did you grow up?Anna Aizer:I grew up in New York City.Scott Cunningham:Oh, okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah, I did.Scott Cunningham:Which, borough was it?Anna Aizer:Manhattan.Scott Cunningham:Oh, okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. Upper side. But when I went off to college, I went to rural Massachusetts.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I went to Amherst, which is a very small liberal arts college in the Berkshires. That was a very different experience for me. And believe it or not, I was not an econ major.Scott Cunningham:Oh, you weren't?Anna Aizer:In fact I was not. I only took one econ course my entire four years in college.Scott Cunningham:Oh, wow. Wait, so what'd you major in?Anna Aizer:I majored in American studies with a focus on colonial American history and literature.Scott Cunningham:Mm. On literature. Oh, that's what I majored in, too.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. So early American history. So what, was this was the 1700s or even-Anna Aizer:Yeah. So I did a lot of 17, 1800s, a lot of the New Republic period. My undergraduate thesis was actually on girls schooling in the Early Republic.Scott Cunningham:Oh wow. What was the deal with girls schooling in the Early Republic?Anna Aizer:What was the deal with the girls schooling? Well, it depends. For most of the Northeast, the focused on girls schooling was really this idea that it was a new country, they were going to have to have leaders in this new country, and someone had to educate those leaders. Someone had to educate those little boys to grow up, to go ahead and lead this country. And so the idea was, well, we had to start educating moms so that they could rear boys who could then go on to this great nation.Scott Cunningham:I see. Women's education was an input in male leadership?Anna Aizer:That's correct.Scott Cunningham:Got it. Got it. Wow. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I get that. You start educating women though, I suspect that you get more than just male leaders.Anna Aizer:I think that's right. It was an unintended consequence.Scott Cunningham:Unintended consequence. They didn't think that far ahead. Okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's a very good point to make, because two women who were educated in one of the first schools dedicated to educating women so that they could go on and rear their boys to be strong leaders were Katherine Beecher, who went on to create one of the most important girls schools in Troy, New York. And Harriet Beecher Stowe of course, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.Scott Cunningham:They're related?Anna Aizer:Yeah. They are sisters. They are sisters.Scott Cunningham:Oh, they're sisters.Anna Aizer:They were one of the first sets of girls who were educated in this mindset of we need leaders so let's have some educated moms. And they of course had other ideas and they went and formed schools and wrote incredibly important works of fiction that ended up playing a pretty significant role in the Civil War.Scott Cunningham:Wow. Was this the thing over in England too? Or was this just an American deal?Anna Aizer:I don't know the answer to that.Scott Cunningham:Huh. I guess they have a different production function for leaders in England where as we it's very decentralized here or something. Right?Anna Aizer:Right. So you're saying in England they already had their system of you go to Eaten, and then you go to Cambridge or Oxford. Right. I think that's probably right. So we didn't have that here.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. That's right. I mean, you're creating everything from scratch. And with such a reactionary response to England who knows what kinds of revolutionary approaches you're taking to... That's probably pretty revolutionary, right? Say we're going to teach women even though it's in order to produce male leaders, it's still thinking outside the box a little bit.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I suppose that's true. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:That's cool. How come you didn't end up in... So you end up at Amherst. As a kid in Manhattan, what were you doing? You were reading books and stuff? You were a big reader?Anna Aizer:I suppose. Yeah. I suppose so.Scott Cunningham:Is that what drew you to Amherst, a liberal arts college?Anna Aizer:I don't really know. I don't think I actually knew what I wanted until much later in life. I was an American studies major, which at the time I learned a lot. It took me a while to gravitate to economics. Once I did, it was clear that that was really the right path for me.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. One question I want to leave your kid. So your parents let you ride the subway when you were a little kid?Anna Aizer:Oh yes.Scott Cunningham:Oh gosh. I bet that was so cool.Anna Aizer:Oh yes. I grew up in New York City during the '70s and '80s, which was far more dangerous than it was today. But at that time parents had a much more hands off approach to parenting. I think I was eight years old when I started taking public transportation by myself.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. There was latch key parents back then?Anna Aizer:Sure.Scott Cunningham:So you jump on the subway. Where are you going at eight years old in Manhattan?Anna Aizer:You go to school.Scott Cunningham:You're just catching the subway to go to school?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Oh, that's so cool. I bet you had a great childhood.Anna Aizer:I have to say it was pretty good.Scott Cunningham:Oh man.Anna Aizer:I can't complain.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, but it was the same kind of thing. Well, it was very different than Manhattan, but just being able to have that level of... It's all survivor bias. The other kids that are getting really neglected and abused. But those of us that made it out a lot it's like, all you have is great memories of being able to do whatever.Anna Aizer:Right. Agreed.Scott Cunningham:So you wrote this thesis. At Amherst, did everybody write a thesis? Is that real common?Anna Aizer:Most people did. I think a third of the students wrote a thesis. It was very common.Scott Cunningham:But you're gravitating towards research, though?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So it was clear that I really, really enjoyed that a lot. In fact, more recently in my economic research I have done a lot more historical work than I had done initially. So I think that training has really come in handy.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. What did you like about that project that you wrote your thesis on? What did it make-Anna Aizer:Well, it was really a lot of fun. I focused on two schools in particular. I focused on this school in Lichfield, Connecticut, and another school in Pennsylvania, a Quaker school in Westtown. I focused on those two schools because those two schools, for whatever reason, kept a lot of their records. They have really wonderful-Scott Cunningham:Oh my God. You had their records?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So you have really wonderful archives where you could just go through and read all about what they were thinking about, when they founded the schools, what the curriculum should be like. And even some of the writings of some of the students and teachers.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh.Anna Aizer:So it was really just a tremendous amount of fun to read all of that stuff, all that primary materials.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. Wait. Did you actually have the names of the kids? Did you see their-Anna Aizer:Sure. They had all of that.Scott Cunningham:Did you have the census records and stuff?Anna Aizer:Oh, I guess you could. I mean, this was so long ago before people were doing all that cool linking, but yeah, you absolutely could.Scott Cunningham:Oh, that's so neat. I wonder where those kids ended up. What did it make you feel doing that research, that was so original and just being out there in these archives?Anna Aizer:Well, it was just amazing how much you could learn by just peeking into people's lives. It was really exciting. It was really fun. And you just felt like you were discovering something new.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you liked that. But that's interesting because some people would be like, oh, discovering something new. I don't even care about that. When you were discovering something new, you were like, I like this feeling.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. I really did.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:I really did.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. So what happened? So you graduate?Anna Aizer:I graduated. My first job was actually working for an Alternative To Incarceration program in New York City. So I moved back home. You have to remember, this was early mid '90s, and this was the peak in terms of crime rates in the country, and in New York City in particular. And the jails-Scott Cunningham:Before you say this, when you were growing up, did your parents... Was it like people were cognizant... I mean, now you know, oh, it was the peak because it's fallen so much, but what was the conversation like as a kid about crime?Anna Aizer:In the '90s in New York City at this time, that was really the crack cocaine epidemic, so there was a lot of talk about that. That really did dominate a lot of the media at the time. It really was a big concern.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah.Anna Aizer:As we know, the city and the state, not just in New York, but nationally, really responded with very tough on crime approach, started incarcerating a lot of people. So much so that they were really out of space in the New York City jail. So Rikers Island was at capacity, even upstate prisons were pretty full. The city, not because they were concerned that we were putting too many people in jail, which has... After the fact we know that we did put too many people in jail, that there was a cost to these incredibly high incarceration rates.Anna Aizer:At the time, the concern was that we don't have enough space, so what are we going to do? The city funded an Alternative To Incarceration program for youth. It was called the Court Employment Project. It was really focused on kids between the ages of 16 and 21 who were charged with a felony in New York state Supreme Court. And these were kids who were being charged as adults, treated as adults in the system. New York City has since raised the age of majority, but at that time it was 16. So we were focused on really younger 16 to 21. Well then, most of the kids we were working with were 16 to 18.Scott Cunningham:What kind of felonies are we talking about? Is this the drug felonies? Or is it [inaudible 00:15:51]?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So a lot of it was possession with intent to sell, selling. But also robbery, that was pretty common as well. We were only working with kids that were facing at least six months in adult prison, essentially. That was the rule for our program. Because again, our program was really focused on trying to reduce the number of people who were being detained and incarcerated for long periods of time. So we were only dealing with people who had-Scott Cunningham:Wait, real quick. So you're in your early 20s?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So I would've been about 23.Scott Cunningham:How'd you find this gig? You were just going back to New York City? Or what was the deal?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I knew I wanted to go back home. At that time, jobs were advertised in the paper, so you looked through the help wanted ads and you just sent cover letters and resumes by mail to whatever jobs appealed to you. I was interested in those jobs. I was also interested in working with public defenders, so the Legal Aid Society in New York, I applied for a number of jobs there.Scott Cunningham:Where's this coming from? What's your values exactly at this time? You're concerned about poverty or concerned about something? What's the deal?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I guess I already was really worried. I was really concerned about low income kids who were really... I felt already were getting derailed at very young ages in a way that I thought would be very hard for them to recover. I think that in that sense was really confirmed when I started working that these were kids who in a split minute their lives were just totally changed. So certainly in the case of things like robberies, these were often group of kids with not much to do, just getting into trouble, and it just getting too far too quick. And before they knew it, they were facing two to six years. I mean, it was just really tragic.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know. Six months. You think about it, too. You're looking at these six months in the program. You start looking at six months and you think, oh, that's six months. The thing is, those things cascade, because six months with a felony record serving prison becomes de facto a cycle of repeated six months, one year, two years.Anna Aizer:Sure.Scott Cunningham:You just end up... Well, that's going to be a paper that you end up writing, so I'll hold off on that. Okay. So you end up applying, you spray the city with all these resumes. And then this thing. So what is this company? This is a nonprofit?Anna Aizer:Yep. So it's a nonprofit that had a contract with the city. They had a contract with the city. Again, they were funded really because the city could not afford to put any more people on Rikers Island.Scott Cunningham:So it's like a mass incarceration response almost?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Capacity constraints.Anna Aizer:They were at capacity, so they needed to do something. So what this program was, it was an intensive supervision program. The kids had to come in at least twice a week and meet with a counselor. The counselor would provide counseling services and also check in on them, make sure they were going to school or working or getting their GED. And then they would write up these long reports.Anna Aizer:I only worked in the courts, so I wasn't doing any of the counseling myself. I had no qualifications to do that. I worked in the courts, so my job was to screen kids for eligibility for the program, interview them, see if they were good candidates. Then talk to their families, talk to their lawyers. And then talk to the judge eventually about the program and about what we would be doing and why we thought this person was a good candidate. And then once they were in the program, I would then provide updates or reports back to the judge and the defense attorney to let them know how the individual was doing.Scott Cunningham:And wait. What is the treatment going to be that things are doing?Anna Aizer:Again, so it was really-Scott Cunningham:It's a deferment of you're going to go to jail?Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's exactly right. It was a six month program. If they made it through after six months, they would be sentenced to probation instead of jail time.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. They would refer adjudication type concept.Anna Aizer:Exactly.Scott Cunningham:Right. Yeah.Anna Aizer:Exactly. So that was the idea.Scott Cunningham:But it's non random. And I know you're not-Anna Aizer:It was, yeah.Scott Cunningham:You're not thinking about the future Anna Aizer [inaudible 00:21:17], but it's not random.Anna Aizer:No.Scott Cunningham:What is it conditioned on? Because you're doing all of it, right?Anna Aizer:Right. Right. So you look at a kid's record. You would look at whether or not the kid seem to have support. The downside was if a kid didn't make it through the program they might be sentenced to more time-Scott Cunningham:Really?Anna Aizer:than they would have... Maybe. I mean, the judge would-Scott Cunningham:Why? Because you're getting a new judge or something?Anna Aizer:No, it's the same judge. But the judges say, "Look, I'm going to give you a chance. Instead of sending you away now for six to 18, I'm going to give you an opportunity to prove yourself. Six months, stay out of trouble, complete this program. And then I'm going to send you to probation. But if you don't complete the program, I'm going to sentence you more." In the end, they might not have actually done that. They certainly didn't tie their hands in any way.Scott Cunningham:What do they doing? Why are they doing that? Why is a judge doing that? They're trying to deal with some sort of adverse selection or something? They don't want people to-Anna Aizer:They want to create an incentive for the kid to-Scott Cunningham:They're trying to create an incentive for the kid. Got it. Okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. They-Scott Cunningham:Like a little scared straight thing?Anna Aizer:A little. I mean, the judges always think that. It's not clear that that works. I don't think that really matters so much in the decision making of young people. I think it's-Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Totally. Totally.Anna Aizer:But that certainly was on the mind I think of many of the judges.Scott Cunningham:It's funny though. When I think about this paper that we're going to talk about a little bit, it's like you're already aware of, oh, these judges have a little bit of discretion. They're saying a bunch of stuff that's not in the law. "If you don't do this, I'm going to give you penalize, I'm going to give you really bad grade at the end with another year in prison." Did that cross your mind that you were noticing that judges were... This judge does that and this other judge does not tend to do that, is that something you could have noticed?Anna Aizer:Absolutely.Scott Cunningham:Oh, wow.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So there were many, many judges. So this is Manhattan. This is the main criminal courts in Manhattan, so I had many, many judges, a lot of people. The way it works is once you've been indicted on a felony you come before one of these three judges. They're called conference judges. They try to dispose of the case. Either the case gets dismissed or they take the plea deal. But if that doesn't happen, they reach into a bin, literally a lottery-Scott Cunningham:It's like a bingo ball machine?Anna Aizer:It's a lottery with all these different judges' courtrooms. They pull out a number, and that's the number of the courtroom you get assigned to. You know right then if you get assigned to certain judges, for sure that kid is going to do jail time. And if you get assigned to other judges, for sure that kid is going to get probation.Scott Cunningham:Who knows this? The kids don't.Anna Aizer:The kids don't, but they don't know it.Scott Cunningham:They can't comprehend.Anna Aizer:But their attorney will know it.Scott Cunningham:And then maybe their parents.Anna Aizer:No, I don't think their parents would know.Scott Cunningham:Although, who in a group of kids that maybe their parents aren't as-Anna Aizer:I don't think their parents would know it, either. You would know it because you have to remember that all of the judges for the most part were either defense attorneys or prosecutors before they were judges, and you can tell. The judges who would-Scott Cunningham:Is that the main source of the discretion that you notice?Anna Aizer:I think so. I think so. I think the judges who previously prosecute-Scott Cunningham:I mean, they're such different. It does seem like the prosecutors and the defense attorneys are almost cut from a completely different worldview and set of values.Anna Aizer:I think that's right.Scott Cunningham:I had this friend that was a public defender in Athens and he was like... I think this is what he said. I'm not going to say his name because he probably didn't say this, but I thought he basically said, "I don't like prosecutors because they think they are always guilty."Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:And you could tell. The public defender, they were like, "My whole job is to not do that." I could just imagine that shaping... Either there's a lot of selection into that or that just really... You hear that all the time. There's got to be human capital with that.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I agree. I think they have a different perspective, which is what draws them to either defense work or prosecutorial work. But then you have to remember their jobs are really very different. So the prosecutor he or she is just dealing with the victims, so that's who they're talking to all day. The defense attorney is talking to the defendant and getting to know them and their families. They really just have very different sympathies. And the judges come from one or the other.Scott Cunningham:One or the other.Anna Aizer:So you can see it.Scott Cunningham:So you're a kid, you're young person. What are you feeling over the course of working with this? Tell me a little bit about your growth and the thoughts that you're thinking about.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I really felt like these were kids that just got derailed, that these were kids, they were in a very tough situation. They made a decision and they had no idea what the consequences of that were going to be. Nor should they have. They were 16. It's very hard to know where these things end up. I did feel as though the criminal justice system was way too harsh.Scott Cunningham:You could tell. Because the whole point of this nonprofit you're working on is a response to such an excessive amount of penalization. They literally don't have any room.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. They don't have any room for anybody.Anna Aizer:Yeah. They had no room. That's exactly right.Scott Cunningham:We're doing so much punishment we can't even do it right.Anna Aizer:That's exactly right. In the juvenile and criminal justice system, more generally, there's a disproportionate involvement of Black and Hispanic youth.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:But they are 100% poor.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:So that's the other thing. And that just seemed incredibly unfair to me.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:And it's not the case that not poor kids don't also mess up. They do.Scott Cunningham:They just can avoid the 10,000... There's 10,000 events from the mess up to the things that these kids are facing in this program that they have many ways of mitigating it.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's right.Scott Cunningham:There's even in terms of parents spending a ton of money, or just saying you can't hang out with these people. There's a bunch of stuff that poor families just are like... So you're feeling heavyhearted.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:You could have gone in a different direction. You could have not gone to graduate school or gone to get this master's. What's the decision criteria where you're thinking I've got to go in a new direction?Anna Aizer:Yeah. At a certain point I just felt as though I needed more training. I wanted more of a professional degree, so I got a degree in public health where you learned a lot about the health system and financing and the social determinants of health. I felt like I needed, again, more training. I should say, I went from that job, not directly back to graduate school, but I went and I worked in not a homeless shelter, but a service center for homeless people also in New York City. I went from the criminal justice system to the homeless system. I was there for another year. And then I went back to school.Scott Cunningham:To what, two or three years total between Amherst and graduate school?Anna Aizer:That's correct. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:That's correct.Scott Cunningham:It's interesting you go to public health because I think a lot of people that don't know anything about anything, they'll be like, well, she's doing criminal justice so I could have seen her going to law school. Now she's going to the homeless thing. Okay, well, maybe she could do social work. What were the things you were thinking of? And how did you end up choosing public health? Because a lot of people don't associate either of those things with public health. They heard the word health.Anna Aizer:Right. So a couple things. One, I thought about law school, but I felt as though lawyers deal with the problem after it's happened.Scott Cunningham:Right.Anna Aizer:And I felt like maybe we should focus more on preventing.Scott Cunningham:Right.Anna Aizer:And the other thing, when I worked with homeless people I really did start to feel like this was a homeless individuals... Homeless families are different. I worked with homeless single adults, and for the most part in New York City at that time, all of the homeless single adults had serious mental health problems.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:I really came to see homelessness as a public health problem.Scott Cunningham:A mental health problem.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:They hit public health. Got it.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Right. Right.Anna Aizer:So that's really how... I could have done social work, but that's not really what I wanted to do.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. But it's funny you say preventative. To me when I hear that I'm thinking, oh, Anna's already starting to think about public policy.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I was.Scott Cunningham:I wouldn't necessarily think that if you were to tell me you went and got a master's in social work.Anna Aizer:Yeah. No, I think that's [inaudible 00:31:54]-Scott Cunningham:Because that cold be clinical or much more working with the... You would've had that experience and you'd be like, I want to work with these families. But that's not what you thought, so something else is going on. So you're thinking I want to do what?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I really was interested in policy already then.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. And that makes the masters of public health make a lot of sense.Anna Aizer:Correct. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:I see. So where'd you end up going, Harvard?Anna Aizer:I went to Harvard. Yeah. I got a masters in health policy and administration. And then I moved to DC. I worked for Mathematica policy research for two years, and I learned a lot about policy research.Scott Cunningham:Are you getting a quantitative training at the master's of public health when you went?Anna Aizer:Yeah, so that's where I really took my first micro theory class and my first statistics class. So I took biostatistics and micro theory there. And when I worked at Mathematica, I worked with a lot of economists. So most of the senior researchers at Mathematica were economists by training. That's where I really got exposure to the way economists think about, research and policy evaluation. It was then that I decided I wanted to go back and get a PhD in economics.Scott Cunningham:Okay. So what was it? What's the deal? Why do you like economics at this point?Anna Aizer:The senior researchers at Mathematica were either economists or sociologists or political scientists. I just felt like the economists had a very clear way in which they set up problems. I think that goes back to economic models of decision making.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:And it just struck me that that was just a very good way to conceptualize almost any problem. I also liked the way they thought about data. I think the people that I worked most closely with and came to admire were all economists. So that's how that-Scott Cunningham:And how long were you there? Were you doing public policy stuff at Mathematica?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I was doing a lot of evaluations of Medicaid programs. In particular, Medicaid managed care, moving from a different financing model for Medicaid and evaluating that, and various settings, and writing them policy briefs so that... God. It was either two or three years, I can't really remember, maybe three years. I think I was there three years and then I went back to graduate school.Scott Cunningham:And then you go to UCLA?Anna Aizer:And then I went to UCLA.Scott Cunningham:Am I right that you were working mainly with Janet Curry?Anna Aizer:Yes. So Janet Curry was my-Scott Cunningham:You worked pretty closely with her?Anna Aizer:Yeah. She was my main advisor. The other folks I worked with were Joe Huts and Jeff Grogger.Scott Cunningham:And who?Anna Aizer:Jeff Grogger.Scott Cunningham:Oh, Jeff Grogger?Anna Aizer:None of whom are there anymore.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. I'm just curious. I associate you a lot with... Because I wrote that book on causal inference I'm obsessed with the causal inference stuff in all these weird ways, with all the people. I see Princeton industrial relations section, Card, Angres, et cetera. And then I see Janet Curry. And then I see you at UCLA, and I associate you so much with that methodological approach, especially for some of the papers that I've known really well. Did you get a sense when you were at UCLA, oh, this is causal inference, this is different, this is the credibility revolution? Or was it just really subtle, or this is just how you do empirical work?Anna Aizer:That's a great question. So I should also say that my first year econometrics teacher was Hero Inmans.Scott Cunningham:Was it, really?Anna Aizer:Yeah. Hero [inaudible 00:36:18] UCLA.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. I didn't know that.Anna Aizer:For a short period of time. I was lucky enough that he was there when I was there. So he taught me in my first and my second years. So of course he was very much big part of this. And actually Enrico Moretti was also at UCLA when I was there, so I took courses with him. I think between Janet, Hero, Enrico and Joe Huts, they were really in the thick of it. That was the way it was done.Scott Cunningham:That was the way it was done.Anna Aizer:That was the way it was done.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. What did you learn? What do you think the salient concepts were that had you... This is a make believe, right? But I'm just saying, had you gone to a different school where you didn't have any of those people, what do you think the salient econometric causal inference kind of things were to you that you were like, oh, this is what I notice I keep doing over and over again, or keep thinking about?Anna Aizer:Well, I would say that the method was in service to the question. I feel as though I'm seeing it more these days. People, they find an experiment, a natural experiment, and then they figure out the question. That's not how I remember it. You had the question and then the method was in service to that question. I worry that that's getting a little bit lost these days, that people have the experiment and then they're searching for the question. I think that ends up being less interesting and less important.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There were certain economists, I think, that were so successful as approaching it that way. It seems like it was cut both ways, because it seems like applied causal inference grew on the back of that kind of natural experiment first, but it almost becomes... To a kid with a hammer, everything's a nail, so it's just like, look through the newspaper, look for a natural experiment. What can I do? How can I do this? How can I [handle 00:38:49]?Scott Cunningham:And it is funny. I don't think it's as satisfying too, just even emotionally. I guess you can find discoveries that way, like you were, but it does feel like you don't end up building up all the human capital with the importance of that question. It's almost like, you're like, well, how can I make this question really important? As opposed to it is important.Anna Aizer:Right.Scott Cunningham:What were you studying? I know what you were studying. At UCLA, what was the question that you were really captivated by?Anna Aizer:So I was really focused on health. You have to remember, I'd done a master's in public health and I just worked at Mathematica, so I was really focused on health. So really all of my dissertation was on health. My main dissertation chapter was actually on Medicaid in California. It was on the importance of enrolling kids early in Medicaids. I don't know if you know much about the Medicaid program, but there are many kids, 60% of kids, who are uninsured are actually eligible for the Medicaid program, but not enrolled in the Medicaid program. And that's partly because-Scott Cunningham:60%?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Wow.Anna Aizer:We could reduce the number of kids who are uninsured in this country by more than half if you just enrolled all those kids who were eligible for Medicaid in the program.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:And part of the-Scott Cunningham:We saw that in that Oregon Medicaid experiment.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Oregon was mostly adults. I don't know how these numbers differ for adults and kids. I'm really more focused on kids. It's partly by design because Medicaid is a program. If you show up at the hospital and you don't have insurance and you're eligible for Medicaid, the hospital will enroll you. And most people know that.Scott Cunningham:Oh, is that right?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, because they have every interest. They want to get paid, so they'll enroll you in the Medicaid program, but there's a cost to that. Because what that means is that kids, if parents know that once they go to the hospital their kid will be enrolled in the Medicaid program should they need hospitalization, they don't end up getting them enrolled prior to that. So they miss out on the ambulatory preventative care that might prevent them from being hospitalized to begin with. And that's partly because of the structure of the program, but that's also because the states made it difficult for kids to enroll in the Medicaid program. In California, there was a big change. The application for Medicaid used to be 20 pages long. Imagine that, right? They cut it down to four.Scott Cunningham:What kind of stuff are they asking on those 20 pages?Anna Aizer:Who knows? Who knows what they're asking.Scott Cunningham:Good grief. I mean, they're wanting them on there. Are they screening them out or are they just-Anna Aizer:I think that's partly what they were trying to do, right?Scott Cunningham:Screen them out? Because it's expensive.Anna Aizer:It's expensive.Scott Cunningham:You've got some of these legislators, they're like, this is expensive and I don't even want to do this so add a dozen pages.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So just make it hard. Now, what happened in '97 was the child health insurance program, CHIP. And they said, "If you want CHIP money..." So that's federal money to ensure more kids. "If you want CHIP money, federal money, you are going to have to enroll more kids in the Medicaid program. You have to do outreach." So the states actually were forced, and that's actually what prompted California to go from a 20 page application to a four page application. They also spent about $20 million on advertisement and basically training community based organizations in how to complete a Medicaid application. So they train them. "Here, you can help your clients enroll in Medicaid. For every application that you help that ends up getting onto the Medicaid program we'll give you 50 bucks." And this really mattered. A lot of kids started enrolling in the Medicaid program who otherwise wouldn't, particularly Hispanic and Asian American kids.Scott Cunningham:Is this what your dissertation ends up being about?Anna Aizer:This is what my dissertation is about.Scott Cunningham:On both the shortening and the payment?Anna Aizer:So it was basically once they started doing this you started seeing big increases in the number of kids who were enrolled in the Medicaid program. And you saw declines in hospitalizations for things like asthma. Asthma is a condition for which if you're being seen and treated on an ambulatory basis, you shouldn't end up in the hospital.Scott Cunningham:Oh. Wait. So what's your control group and all this stuff?Anna Aizer:What the state did was they targeted different areas, and provided training to those community based organizations in how to complete a Medicaid application. So they gave me all that data.Scott Cunningham:Get out of here.Anna Aizer:So I had all the data.Scott Cunningham:So you're doing some IB thing? You're doing some-Anna Aizer:Yeah. It was, basically if you live in a neighborhood where a community based organization had already been trained then you were much more likely to be enrolled in the Medicaid program. So you can see that.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. This is so cool. Were you excited when you found that?Anna Aizer:I was super excited.Scott Cunningham:I bet.Anna Aizer:I was super excited. This was so old. I was begging Medicaid to send me this data. Begging, begging, begging. And they weren't really answering. And then one day Janet came in to the office where all the graduate students sit, and she said, "I think I got this fax for you." She handed this 20 page fax that has all the data on what community organization got trained and when.Scott Cunningham:Okay. Anna, I want to ask a meta question real quick. You just said, these days people maybe start with natural experiment first, but originally it was question first. Okay. Not devil's advocate, but just a statement of facts. The one reason they may do that is because when you find these kinds of natural experiments or whatever, it almost just feels almost itself random. You're weren't even really looking for it. You read something in the newspaper, you're like, oh my gosh, they're doing this weird thing. And the risk of going question first is, you could have this incredibly important question, like the Medicaid project payment thing, and you're like, if everybody in my department, like Hero Inmans and Moretti and Curry, who are to answer a question either subtly or not so subtly, or to answer a question is going to require this credible design and we really need you to staple this dissertation together. You're going to have to have a-Anna Aizer:I think that's why you have lots-Scott Cunningham:It seems really risky. It seems really risky.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think you have to have lots of ideas.Scott Cunningham:You have to have lots of ideas.Anna Aizer:I think you have lots of ideas. A good friend of mine in graduate school was Enrico Moretti's RA. He told me that Enrico had tons of ideas. Wes, this was my friend, his RA, would just do some really quick takes on all of these ideas. And if there was something there he'd pursue it. But if there was nothing there he'd drop it.Scott Cunningham:What does that mean, nothing there, something there? What does that mean?Anna Aizer:Either, if you can't find exaggerate variation or the exaggerate variation doesn't actually work, you don't have the first stage, he'd just drop it and move on to something else.Scott Cunningham:That's a skill. That's almost some therapeutic skill to be excited about something and willing to let it go.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's actually-Scott Cunningham:You got a lot of ideas?Anna Aizer:I had a lot of ideas. It never worked out.Scott Cunningham:Never worked out. And that's normal.Anna Aizer:I think that's normal.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. That's not a bad thing.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think that's how research should go. In fact, I'm not as good as Enrico, I probably hold on to things for longer than I should.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Boy, where'd you end up publishing that work? I should know this, but I don't know.Anna Aizer:That published in Restat Review Economics Institute.Scott Cunningham:Oh, cool. So what'd you end up finding?Anna Aizer:So what I end up finding is if you pay these organizations to enroll... Well, a couple things. Advertisement, just blanketing the television and radio with information. Sign up for Medicaid, sign up for CHIP, that does not work at all.Scott Cunningham:Doesn't work?Anna Aizer:No.Scott Cunningham:Advertising doesn't work?Anna Aizer:It doesn't work. What works is having these communities organizations help families complete the application. That's incredibly important.Scott Cunningham:That's a supply demand kind of philosophy that you see in drugs, too. Mark Anderson has this paper on meth. They would post these advertisements of people that were addicted to meth. They look horrible. They lose their teeth and all this stuff. It didn't do anything.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like you're talking about a group of people. They're like, they need more assistance. They need somebody... You think about that thing you were saying earlier about these kids that are higher income versus lower income. When I said there were 10,000 steps that the higher income people had, it wasn't really like the kids, it was external forces that were investing, going after them.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Right.Scott Cunningham:It seems like incentives need to be targeted to people to go after. For whatever reason it is not enough to just simply have it. You need people going in and helping along the way.Anna Aizer:Right. Agreed. I agree. They need support.Scott Cunningham:They need support.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Okay. So that is amazing. I bet your advisors were so proud of you for that project.Anna Aizer:I don't know.Scott Cunningham:I think so.Anna Aizer:You'd hope so, but that'll be icing on the cake.Scott Cunningham:Right. Exactly. Yeah. I guess that's not super important.Anna Aizer:Yeah, it is. You do always want your advisor... I mean, I had tremendous respect for all my advisors. So yeah, I'd be very pleased if they liked the work that I did. Basically, states did spend this money to enroll kids early, but it paid off because it meant that they were less likely to be hospitalized. In fact, some of these programs can be very much cost effective.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah. I had told myself, I was like, well, I'm asking Anna about the juvenile incarceration paper with Joe Doyle. And then I was going to ask her about domestic violence. And I feel like I've got to make a hard choice now, because I don't have a lot of time. So I was thinking, well, let's see how this goes. And then we can fit. So domestic violence. First thing I want to ask is, how did you get interested in that topic? And when did it start? In a way I could almost imagine, oh, you've been thinking about domestic violence forever.Anna Aizer:Yes. So I actually-Scott Cunningham:You've been thinking about women ever since college.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's true. And made that connection. This was basically my first big project after I started at Brown. After my dissertation I was thinking, okay, what's my next big project going to be? And I think that's a very important decision for junior faculty to think about. After you finish publishing your dissertation you got to think about what's my next big project? Because it takes so long to publish anything in economics, that's really going to matter a lot. That might be the only thing you publish before you're coming up for tenure given how long.Anna Aizer:I was thinking about it, and I just felt like I didn't have a clear question in mind, but just been looking at the numbers it's incredibly prevalent, domestic violence. But it's also shown some pretty encouraging trends. Domestic violence against women has been declining pretty significantly. In the US, I think about... I haven't looked the number up recently, but it was about 1,000 women a year were being killed, and so many more actually are victims of domestic violence. And if you look at victimization surveys, between one and three and one in four women in the US report ever being the victim of domestic violence. It's really prevalent. And it just struck me, this is a big problem and I don't know how to answer it, but we should know more about it given just how prevalent it is. And so that's how I started.Anna Aizer:I have a good friend from high school, and she's a lawyer in New York City. She was working with victims of domestic violence. She's a lawyer by training. She used to say, "These women have nothing. They have no resources. They are so poor." That, to me, just made me think about, okay, I need to start thinking about income and resources and poverty and domestic violence, because clearly that's a big part of this.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. I feel like you and I ended up responding to the bargaining theory papers in the exact same way. That's when I was studying a lot of my stuff on couples and things and bad behavior on the part of the men, I was always thinking about sex ratios in the marriage market. Why I was thinking about that was the ability to exit the partnership could be really, really important. And I was curious. You can talk about people not having resources and not necessarily be thinking in terms of one of these Nash bargaining, like Manser and Brown, and McElroy and Horn, and Shelly Lundberg kinds of ways of thinking. I was curious, were you thinking about those theory papers a lot? Or am I just projecting?Anna Aizer:I had this friend, again, who was working and telling me just how poor many of the women she was working with were. And then once you actually look at the statistics, the survey statistics, it's true that any woman can be a victim of domestic violence, but it is really a poor woman problem. So it's very clear to me that poverty has a lot to do with it. It's because many of these women have no other source of support. They have low levels was in schooling. They have few prospects in the labor market. And they're really stuck. That is ultimately-Scott Cunningham:Stuck as in cannot leave.Anna Aizer:Cannot leave. I mean, they have a very-Scott Cunningham:Because that's the solution. That's one of the most important solutions, which is probably you need to leave the relationship.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Or you need to be able to threaten to leave.Scott Cunningham:You need to be able to threaten to leave. How important do you think the credible threat is? Because my sense is, that's to an economist, because they're like, you should thinking about unions and stuff. They're like, oh, credible threats. That's all you got to, you have to do it. I feel like, I don't know if that really works. I actually think the truth is you're going to have to leave. And maybe there's some marginal guy. We're talking about the marginal guy, but whatever, that's the info marginal, whatever. The extensive marginal guy, he's got narcissism personality disorder, substance abuse problems.Anna Aizer:Yeah. You may be right.Scott Cunningham:He's got major, major problems. And that stuff is very inelastic to everything.Anna Aizer:Yeah. You may be right. I can't answer this because I don't know for sure. At the same time I remember talking to some folks about this, and their feeling was that it's all a continuum of a bad relationship. Violence may be one extreme, but relationships have ebbs and flows. They can be better at some points and worse at others. So they did feel as though a relationship didn't always have to be violent, that you could have relationships that were violent at one point but then were no longer. Of course, you also have relationships in which that's not the case, and the only solution is to leave. But there could very well be relationships where you can have better and worse periods.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. The reason why I bring it up is because I feel like these days you hear a lot about mental health. Well, you hear about mental health period, but in domestic violence there'll be also an emerging story of the narcissist personality disorder. I've been always lately thinking, I've been like, I wonder if this is true. Anecdotally, what you see a lot is how manipulative... And that's like a very judgemental way of putting it, but I don't know how else to say it. How manipulative one of the person can be towards the other where they're like, "Well, if you loved me..." They get all this trepped up stories about love. What love becoming almost this story.Scott Cunningham:I've wondered for those people that can't or won't... It's actually won't, right? They can leave. I mean, there are some people they will be literally harmed if they leave, so I'm not talking about those people. But I mean, the person that literally you're watching an equilibrium where they don't leave, I've wondered lately if it's like, the victim is all tangled up with loyalty and love.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Sure.Scott Cunningham:And it is taken advantage of by a person that no one can tell them not to love this person. That's nobody's business.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is a really complicated thing.Scott Cunningham:It is so complicated. It is so complicated. Finding the policies that provide resources to a person. Some of that might be a person that's at those earlier ebbs too, those earlier ebbs in the bad relationship. And you're like, well, some people may not be ready to leave yet.Anna Aizer:I mean, this a thing where I do think the right policy response is providing resources to women, but also probably interventions aimed at the assailant is probably going to be just as effective. Sorry. My phone is ringing.Scott Cunningham:That's okay.Anna Aizer:Hello. Sorry about that. I thought it might be my kids.Scott Cunningham:I wonder about these battery courts. Have you heard about these [inaudible 01:00:05] courts?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, they're-Scott Cunningham:I wonder what you know about those?Anna Aizer:Yeah. Not a lot, I would say.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. These issues of poverty and mental health and all of these things interacting in order to get healing and healthy meaningful lives to all everyone is... I do think this is something that economists can offer, but it's not something that... I wouldn't say there's a ton of people. You're one of a small number of people working on domestic violence, it seems like.Anna Aizer:It's a very hard thing to study. Data's very difficult to come by for obvious reasons, for a good reason. I mean, this is data that needs to be protected. Glenn Ludwig and the crime lab in Chicago, they're doing work around violence reduction more generally. And probably many of those principles and findings probably relate to domestic violence as well, changing the behavior of young people so that they are less quick to react and less quick to react in a violent way. When they do, we would probably have some pretty important spillover to domestic violence as well, I think.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.Anna Aizer:I think there are ways to reduce violence more generally that would probably apply to the setting of domestic violence.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. It's funny, circling back to that judge who threatens with higher penalties. I think economists, when they think about violence and things like that, you're an exception for thinking about outside options and stuff like that, but the shadow of Gary Becker's deterrence hypothesis, it can just be this straight jacket for a lot of people, because they just only think in terms of relative price changes on the punishment margins. When you talk to psychologists, or you read that psychology literature about narcissism or borderline personality disorder or substance abuse, you're talking about a group of people that are, for variety of reasons, have really low discount rates or just have beliefs that things don't apply to them. Or in no uncertain terms, the elasticities of violent behavior with respect to some unknown punishment that you don't even know if it's going to real, it just seems like, we don't really know, but [inaudible 01:03:06] really big.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So there was this criminologist named Mark Kleiman. Do you know that name?Scott Cunningham:Oh yeah. Mark Kleiman. Yeah. Yeah.Anna Aizer:I mean his big thing was, it should be swift, sure and short. That's how we should do punishment. He felt as though that would be far preferable to the system in which there's uncertainty. But if it doesn't work out, you're going to spend a lot of time in jail. He thought that was a fair model.Scott Cunningham:The thing is, though, swift certain and did you say short?Anna Aizer:Short.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Well, with prison sentences lingering on your record it is by definition never short.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:You face these labor market scarrings and you can't get housing, you can't get jobs and that does not go away. So even if the prison sentence is short, the person... I just feel like this is the tension around violence in the country, which is punishment has so many margins where it is permanent. It's got so many margins. And just being in a cage is only one of them.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, particularly for young people, jail is incredibly scarring.Scott Cunningham:Incredibly scarring. Incredibly scarring. We've been studying suicide attempts in the jail and we-Anna Aizer:Yes, that's right.Scott Cunningham:We walked the jail for this one particular jail. I have never in my life seen anything like that. I've been working on this project for four years. I hadn't walked to the jail. I don't know. It's not the first thing that came to my mind. The team finally walked the jail. I spent the whole day there. The jails have so much mental illness in it. They just are in... It's not even cages. A cage has... Air gets in. It's a sealed box. It's like Houdini's box. They stay there, and for a variety of regulatory reasons and so forth, they stay in there. Can't have a lot of materials if they are at risk. If they've come in with psychosis because of substance abuse or underlying mental illness stuff, they might get moved into certain types of physical quarters. I just can't even imagine, just in an hour, let alone... And that's just jail. That's not even prison. It's just absolutely a trauma box.Scott Cunningham:Unfortunately, we didn't get to talk about your paper with Joe Doyle on the juvenile incarceration. But every time I teach that juvenile incarceration paper, where kids were incarcerated as a young person, and then end up not going back. It's not even the future prison part, it's the not going back to high school.Anna Aizer:Oh, of course.Scott Cunningham:And then when they go back, they're labeled with a behavioral emotional disorder. It's really like anybody that's had any exposure to a kid involved in corrections, you're like, oh, I know exactly what that is. They were traumatized. You don't even have to come up with some exotic economic theory. They were traumatized. That's why they come back to school with a behavioral emotional disorder. It is [inaudible 01:06:59].Anna Aizer:Yep. That's good.Scott Cunningham:That paper is one of the most important papers I have personally ever read. I teach it nonstop. And I've even cried teaching it in class. I get so emotional when I get to that part, because, I don't know about you, but it seems like it's really hard not to come away with... A lot of papers you read, you're like, well, we're not really sure exactly all to make of it. But when I read that paper that you wrote, I just think, especially when you think about the leniency design, I just think these kids probably didn't need to go to prison.Anna Aizer:Oh yeah.Scott Cunningham:Honestly, what else are you going to say? They end up committing more crimes. And they are not going back to school. How was this the policy goal? What was it like writing that paper when you started to realize what was going on?Anna Aizer:Again, when I worked in this Alternative to Incarceration program we had kids come into the program who had spent some time in jail. And we had kids who had spent very little time, maybe just a night. The kids who had spent even just three weeks in jail, they always did worse in the program. Always. It was a known fact. The program knew it. And the question was, well, are these kids somehow different? There was a reason why they were in jail and these other kids weren't. Is that why they do worse in the program? Maybe they're in jail because their family didn't show up for them in court. They couldn't make bail.Anna Aizer:Or was it something about spending three weeks in jail that just made it impossible for them to complete the program? This was a big question that was on everybody's mind. We talked about this quite a bit at the program, and we didn't know the answer. When I finally figured out how to do it, working with Joe, I wanted to know the answer to a question that I had been thinking about for over a decade.Scott Cunningham:Gosh. Were you emotionally upset when you started to see coefficients get really big?Anna Aizer:It really was not surprising. It really wasn't, because these are kids who are only marginally attached to school. These are not the kids who were going to school, doing well in school. These are kids who were not really that attached to school for whatever reason. So you take them out even for a month, they're not going to go back. I mean, it's obvious. We saw that in the program. What they ended up doing was moving a lot of kids from school to GED because they had not been involved in school, they were not involved in school. It just was much more likely that they would be able to complete a GED than actually go back to high school and finish.Scott Cunningham:Your paper, it like hit home for personal reasons. We had an event happen. I wrote a professor. I was like, this thing had happened. Anna and Joe find this result. I feel hopeless. There's this kid in town and I raised money for him. Basically, I was like, you just got to do everything in your power to not let them spend an extra minute in jail. And all this scared straight stuff. Parents get into it, too. They're exhausted. They're like, "Well, he's got to learn his lesson." Nobody learns a damn thing in jail. They don't learn a lesson. Because y

This week I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University and editor-in-chief at the Journal of Human Resources. I am a long time admirer of Dr. Aizer's work and have followed her career with curiosity for a long time. Some of her papers imprinted pretty strongly on me. I'll just briefly mention one.Her 2015 article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics with Joe Doyle on juvenile incarceration, for instance, has haunted me for many many years. It was the first or second paper I had seen at the time that had used the now popular “leniency design” to examine the causal effect of being incarcerated as a youth on high school completion and other outcomes as well as adult incarceration. Simply comparing those outcomes for those incarcerated and those not incarcerated as a kid will not reveal the causal effect of juvenile incarceration if juvenile incarceration suffers from selection bias on unobservable confounders. So Dr. Aizer with Joe Doyle used a clever approach to overcome that problem in which they found quasi-random variation, disconnected from the unobserved confounder, in juvenile incarceration caused by the random assignment of juvenile judges. As these judges varied in the propensity to sentence kids, they effectively utilized the judges' own decisions as life changing lotteries which they then used to study the effect of juvenile incarceration on high school and adult incarceration. And the findings were bleak, depressing, enraging, upsetting, sad, all the emotions. They found that indeed being assigned to a more strict judge substantially raised one's chances of being sentenced as a kid. Using linked administrative data connecting each of those kids to their Chicago Public School data as well as Cook County incarceration data, they then found that being incarcerated significantly increased the effect of committing a criminal offense as an adult, and it decreased the probability of finishing high school. The kids, best they could tell, mostly didn't return after their juvenile incarceration, but if they did return, they were more likely to be given a emotional and behavioral disorder label in the data. My interpretation was always severe — incarceration had scarred the kids, traumatizing them, and they weren't the same. The paper would haunt me for various personal reasons as I saw a loved one arrested and spent time in jail on numerous occasions. I would see kids in my local community who had grown up with our kids arrested and think of Dr. Aizer' and Joe Doyle's study, concluding the most important thing I could do was bail them out. The paper was one of many events in my own life that led me to transition my research to mental illness within corrections and self harm attempts by inmates even. But there's other personal reasons I wanted to interview Dr. Aizer. Dr. Aizer went to UCLA where she studied with Janet Currie, Adriana Lleras-Muney and Guido Imbens. Recall that when Imbens was denied tenure at Harvard, he went to UCLA. Currie, who had attended Princeton at the same time as Angrist, Imbens' coauthor on many papers on instrumental variables in the 1990s, was an original economist focused on the family, but unlike Becker and others, brought with her that focused attention to finding variation in data that could plausibly recover causal effects. The story, in other words, of Princeton's Industrial Relations Section and design based causal inference, going back to Orley Ashenfelter, was spreading through the profession through the placements of scholars at places like UCLA, which is where Dr. Aizer was a student. In this storyline in my head, Dr. Aizer was a type of first generation member of the credibility revolution, and I wanted to talk to her not only for her scholarly work's influence on me, but also because I wanted to continue tracing Imbens and Angrist's influence on the profession through UCLA. The interview, though, was warm and interesting throughout. Dr. Aizer is a bright light in the profession working on important questions in the family, poverty and public policy. For anyone interested in the hardships of our communities and neighborhoods, I highly recommend to you her work. Now let me beg for your support. Scott's Substack and the podcast, Mixtape with Scott, are user supported. If your willingness to pay for the episodes and the explainers (I'm going to write some more I promise!), please consider becoming a subscriber! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TranscriptScott Cunningham:In this week's episode of the Mix Tape podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University in Rhode Island and editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources. I have had a keen interest in Anna Aizer and her career and her work for a couple of reasons. Actually a lot, but here's two. First, she did her PhD at UCLA when Janet Currie was there, as well as when Guido Imbens was there. Imbens taught there after he left Harvard, for those of you that remember that interview I did with him. Recall my overarching conviction that Princeton's industrial relations section, which was where Orley Ashelfeltner, David Card, Alan Kruger, Bob Lalonde, Josh Angrist originated from, as well as Janet Currie.My conviction that this was the ground zero of design based causal inference. And that design based causal inference spread through economics, not really through econometrics, and econometrics textbooks, but really through applied people. She also worked with Adriana Lleras-Muney, who's also at UCLA now, who was a student of Rajeev Dehejia, who wrote a seminal work in economics using propensity score, who was also Josh Angrist's student at MIT. So you can see, Anna fits my obsession with a sociological mapping out of the spread of causal inference through the applied community.But putting aside Anna as being instrumentally interesting, I am directly interested in her and her work on domestic violence and youth incarceration among other things. I've followed it super closely, teach a lot of these papers all the time, think about them even more. In this episode, we basically walked through her early life in Manhattan to her time at Amherst College, to her first jobs working in nonprofits, in areas of reform and poverty, to graduate school. We talked about her thoughts about domestic violence and poverty and crime along the way, too. And it was just a real honor and a pleasure to get to talk to her. I hope you like it as much as me. My name is Scott Cunningham and this is Mix Tape podcast. Okay. It's really great to introduce my guest this week on the podcast, Anna Aizer. Anna, thank you so much for being on the podcast.Anna Aizer:Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.Scott Cunningham:Before we get started, could you tell us obviously your name and your training and where you work?Anna Aizer:Sure. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University. I did my PhD at UCLA oh many years ago. Before that actually I got a masters in public health. Sorry. I have a strong public health interest and focus in a lot of my work. I'm also currently the co-director of the NBR program on children. That is a program at the NBR that is focused entirely on the economics of children and families. I'm the editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources.Scott Cunningham:Great. It's so nice to meet in person. I've been a long time reader of your papers because you write about these topics on violence against women. There's not a lot of people in economics that do. And the way that you approach it shares a lot of my own thoughts. I'm going to talk about it later, but it's really nice to meet in person.Anna Aizer:Sure. Nice to meet you, too.Scott Cunningham:Okay. I want to break up the conversation a little bit into your life. First part, just talk about your life growing up. And then the second part, I want to talk about research stuff. So where did you grow up?Anna Aizer:I grew up in New York City.Scott Cunningham:Oh, okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah, I did.Scott Cunningham:Which, borough was it?Anna Aizer:Manhattan.Scott Cunningham:Oh, okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. Upper side. But when I went off to college, I went to rural Massachusetts.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I went to Amherst, which is a very small liberal arts college in the Berkshires. That was a very different experience for me. And believe it or not, I was not an econ major.Scott Cunningham:Oh, you weren't?Anna Aizer:In fact I was not. I only took one econ course my entire four years in college.Scott Cunningham:Oh, wow. Wait, so what'd you major in?Anna Aizer:I majored in American studies with a focus on colonial American history and literature.Scott Cunningham:Mm. On literature. Oh, that's what I majored in, too.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. So early American history. So what, was this was the 1700s or even-Anna Aizer:Yeah. So I did a lot of 17, 1800s, a lot of the New Republic period. My undergraduate thesis was actually on girls schooling in the Early Republic.Scott Cunningham:Oh wow. What was the deal with girls schooling in the Early Republic?Anna Aizer:What was the deal with the girls schooling? Well, it depends. For most of the Northeast, the focused on girls schooling was really this idea that it was a new country, they were going to have to have leaders in this new country, and someone had to educate those leaders. Someone had to educate those little boys to grow up, to go ahead and lead this country. And so the idea was, well, we had to start educating moms so that they could rear boys who could then go on to this great nation.Scott Cunningham:I see. Women's education was an input in male leadership?Anna Aizer:That's correct.Scott Cunningham:Got it. Got it. Wow. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I get that. You start educating women though, I suspect that you get more than just male leaders.Anna Aizer:I think that's right. It was an unintended consequence.Scott Cunningham:Unintended consequence. They didn't think that far ahead. Okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's a very good point to make, because two women who were educated in one of the first schools dedicated to educating women so that they could go on and rear their boys to be strong leaders were Katherine Beecher, who went on to create one of the most important girls schools in Troy, New York. And Harriet Beecher Stowe of course, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.Scott Cunningham:They're related?Anna Aizer:Yeah. They are sisters. They are sisters.Scott Cunningham:Oh, they're sisters.Anna Aizer:They were one of the first sets of girls who were educated in this mindset of we need leaders so let's have some educated moms. And they of course had other ideas and they went and formed schools and wrote incredibly important works of fiction that ended up playing a pretty significant role in the Civil War.Scott Cunningham:Wow. Was this the thing over in England too? Or was this just an American deal?Anna Aizer:I don't know the answer to that.Scott Cunningham:Huh. I guess they have a different production function for leaders in England where as we it's very decentralized here or something. Right?Anna Aizer:Right. So you're saying in England they already had their system of you go to Eaten, and then you go to Cambridge or Oxford. Right. I think that's probably right. So we didn't have that here.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. That's right. I mean, you're creating everything from scratch. And with such a reactionary response to England who knows what kinds of revolutionary approaches you're taking to... That's probably pretty revolutionary, right? Say we're going to teach women even though it's in order to produce male leaders, it's still thinking outside the box a little bit.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I suppose that's true. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:That's cool. How come you didn't end up in... So you end up at Amherst. As a kid in Manhattan, what were you doing? You were reading books and stuff? You were a big reader?Anna Aizer:I suppose. Yeah. I suppose so.Scott Cunningham:Is that what drew you to Amherst, a liberal arts college?Anna Aizer:I don't really know. I don't think I actually knew what I wanted until much later in life. I was an American studies major, which at the time I learned a lot. It took me a while to gravitate to economics. Once I did, it was clear that that was really the right path for me.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. One question I want to leave your kid. So your parents let you ride the subway when you were a little kid?Anna Aizer:Oh yes.Scott Cunningham:Oh gosh. I bet that was so cool.Anna Aizer:Oh yes. I grew up in New York City during the '70s and '80s, which was far more dangerous than it was today. But at that time parents had a much more hands off approach to parenting. I think I was eight years old when I started taking public transportation by myself.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. There was latch key parents back then?Anna Aizer:Sure.Scott Cunningham:So you jump on the subway. Where are you going at eight years old in Manhattan?Anna Aizer:You go to school.Scott Cunningham:You're just catching the subway to go to school?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Oh, that's so cool. I bet you had a great childhood.Anna Aizer:I have to say it was pretty good.Scott Cunningham:Oh man.Anna Aizer:I can't complain.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, but it was the same kind of thing. Well, it was very different than Manhattan, but just being able to have that level of... It's all survivor bias. The other kids that are getting really neglected and abused. But those of us that made it out a lot it's like, all you have is great memories of being able to do whatever.Anna Aizer:Right. Agreed.Scott Cunningham:So you wrote this thesis. At Amherst, did everybody write a thesis? Is that real common?Anna Aizer:Most people did. I think a third of the students wrote a thesis. It was very common.Scott Cunningham:But you're gravitating towards research, though?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So it was clear that I really, really enjoyed that a lot. In fact, more recently in my economic research I have done a lot more historical work than I had done initially. So I think that training has really come in handy.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. What did you like about that project that you wrote your thesis on? What did it make-Anna Aizer:Well, it was really a lot of fun. I focused on two schools in particular. I focused on this school in Lichfield, Connecticut, and another school in Pennsylvania, a Quaker school in Westtown. I focused on those two schools because those two schools, for whatever reason, kept a lot of their records. They have really wonderful-Scott Cunningham:Oh my God. You had their records?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So you have really wonderful archives where you could just go through and read all about what they were thinking about, when they founded the schools, what the curriculum should be like. And even some of the writings of some of the students and teachers.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh.Anna Aizer:So it was really just a tremendous amount of fun to read all of that stuff, all that primary materials.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. Wait. Did you actually have the names of the kids? Did you see their-Anna Aizer:Sure. They had all of that.Scott Cunningham:Did you have the census records and stuff?Anna Aizer:Oh, I guess you could. I mean, this was so long ago before people were doing all that cool linking, but yeah, you absolutely could.Scott Cunningham:Oh, that's so neat. I wonder where those kids ended up. What did it make you feel doing that research, that was so original and just being out there in these archives?Anna Aizer:Well, it was just amazing how much you could learn by just peeking into people's lives. It was really exciting. It was really fun. And you just felt like you were discovering something new.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you liked that. But that's interesting because some people would be like, oh, discovering something new. I don't even care about that. When you were discovering something new, you were like, I like this feeling.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. I really did.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:I really did.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. So what happened? So you graduate?Anna Aizer:I graduated. My first job was actually working for an Alternative To Incarceration program in New York City. So I moved back home. You have to remember, this was early mid '90s, and this was the peak in terms of crime rates in the country, and in New York City in particular. And the jails-Scott Cunningham:Before you say this, when you were growing up, did your parents... Was it like people were cognizant... I mean, now you know, oh, it was the peak because it's fallen so much, but what was the conversation like as a kid about crime?Anna Aizer:In the '90s in New York City at this time, that was really the crack cocaine epidemic, so there was a lot of talk about that. That really did dominate a lot of the media at the time. It really was a big concern.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah.Anna Aizer:As we know, the city and the state, not just in New York, but nationally, really responded with very tough on crime approach, started incarcerating a lot of people. So much so that they were really out of space in the New York City jail. So Rikers Island was at capacity, even upstate prisons were pretty full. The city, not because they were concerned that we were putting too many people in jail, which has... After the fact we know that we did put too many people in jail, that there was a cost to these incredibly high incarceration rates.Anna Aizer:At the time, the concern was that we don't have enough space, so what are we going to do? The city funded an Alternative To Incarceration program for youth. It was called the Court Employment Project. It was really focused on kids between the ages of 16 and 21 who were charged with a felony in New York state Supreme Court. And these were kids who were being charged as adults, treated as adults in the system. New York City has since raised the age of majority, but at that time it was 16. So we were focused on really younger 16 to 21. Well then, most of the kids we were working with were 16 to 18.Scott Cunningham:What kind of felonies are we talking about? Is this the drug felonies? Or is it [inaudible 00:15:51]?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So a lot of it was possession with intent to sell, selling. But also robbery, that was pretty common as well. We were only working with kids that were facing at least six months in adult prison, essentially. That was the rule for our program. Because again, our program was really focused on trying to reduce the number of people who were being detained and incarcerated for long periods of time. So we were only dealing with people who had-Scott Cunningham:Wait, real quick. So you're in your early 20s?Anna Aizer:Yeah. So I would've been about 23.Scott Cunningham:How'd you find this gig? You were just going back to New York City? Or what was the deal?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I knew I wanted to go back home. At that time, jobs were advertised in the paper, so you looked through the help wanted ads and you just sent cover letters and resumes by mail to whatever jobs appealed to you. I was interested in those jobs. I was also interested in working with public defenders, so the Legal Aid Society in New York, I applied for a number of jobs there.Scott Cunningham:Where's this coming from? What's your values exactly at this time? You're concerned about poverty or concerned about something? What's the deal?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I guess I already was really worried. I was really concerned about low income kids who were really... I felt already were getting derailed at very young ages in a way that I thought would be very hard for them to recover. I think that in that sense was really confirmed when I started working that these were kids who in a split minute their lives were just totally changed. So certainly in the case of things like robberies, these were often group of kids with not much to do, just getting into trouble, and it just getting too far too quick. And before they knew it, they were facing two to six years. I mean, it was just really tragic.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know. Six months. You think about it, too. You're looking at these six months in the program. You start looking at six months and you think, oh, that's six months. The thing is, those things cascade, because six months with a felony record serving prison becomes de facto a cycle of repeated six months, one year, two years.Anna Aizer:Sure.Scott Cunningham:You just end up... Well, that's going to be a paper that you end up writing, so I'll hold off on that. Okay. So you end up applying, you spray the city with all these resumes. And then this thing. So what is this company? This is a nonprofit?Anna Aizer:Yep. So it's a nonprofit that had a contract with the city. They had a contract with the city. Again, they were funded really because the city could not afford to put any more people on Rikers Island.Scott Cunningham:So it's like a mass incarceration response almost?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Capacity constraints.Anna Aizer:They were at capacity, so they needed to do something. So what this program was, it was an intensive supervision program. The kids had to come in at least twice a week and meet with a counselor. The counselor would provide counseling services and also check in on them, make sure they were going to school or working or getting their GED. And then they would write up these long reports.Anna Aizer:I only worked in the courts, so I wasn't doing any of the counseling myself. I had no qualifications to do that. I worked in the courts, so my job was to screen kids for eligibility for the program, interview them, see if they were good candidates. Then talk to their families, talk to their lawyers. And then talk to the judge eventually about the program and about what we would be doing and why we thought this person was a good candidate. And then once they were in the program, I would then provide updates or reports back to the judge and the defense attorney to let them know how the individual was doing.Scott Cunningham:And wait. What is the treatment going to be that things are doing?Anna Aizer:Again, so it was really-Scott Cunningham:It's a deferment of you're going to go to jail?Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's exactly right. It was a six month program. If they made it through after six months, they would be sentenced to probation instead of jail time.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. They would refer adjudication type concept.Anna Aizer:Exactly.Scott Cunningham:Right. Yeah.Anna Aizer:Exactly. So that was the idea.Scott Cunningham:But it's non random. And I know you're not-Anna Aizer:It was, yeah.Scott Cunningham:You're not thinking about the future Anna Aizer [inaudible 00:21:17], but it's not random.Anna Aizer:No.Scott Cunningham:What is it conditioned on? Because you're doing all of it, right?Anna Aizer:Right. Right. So you look at a kid's record. You would look at whether or not the kid seem to have support. The downside was if a kid didn't make it through the program they might be sentenced to more time-Scott Cunningham:Really?Anna Aizer:than they would have... Maybe. I mean, the judge would-Scott Cunningham:Why? Because you're getting a new judge or something?Anna Aizer:No, it's the same judge. But the judges say, "Look, I'm going to give you a chance. Instead of sending you away now for six to 18, I'm going to give you an opportunity to prove yourself. Six months, stay out of trouble, complete this program. And then I'm going to send you to probation. But if you don't complete the program, I'm going to sentence you more." In the end, they might not have actually done that. They certainly didn't tie their hands in any way.Scott Cunningham:What do they doing? Why are they doing that? Why is a judge doing that? They're trying to deal with some sort of adverse selection or something? They don't want people to-Anna Aizer:They want to create an incentive for the kid to-Scott Cunningham:They're trying to create an incentive for the kid. Got it. Okay.Anna Aizer:Yeah. They-Scott Cunningham:Like a little scared straight thing?Anna Aizer:A little. I mean, the judges always think that. It's not clear that that works. I don't think that really matters so much in the decision making of young people. I think it's-Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Totally. Totally.Anna Aizer:But that certainly was on the mind I think of many of the judges.Scott Cunningham:It's funny though. When I think about this paper that we're going to talk about a little bit, it's like you're already aware of, oh, these judges have a little bit of discretion. They're saying a bunch of stuff that's not in the law. "If you don't do this, I'm going to give you penalize, I'm going to give you really bad grade at the end with another year in prison." Did that cross your mind that you were noticing that judges were... This judge does that and this other judge does not tend to do that, is that something you could have noticed?Anna Aizer:Absolutely.Scott Cunningham:Oh, wow.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So there were many, many judges. So this is Manhattan. This is the main criminal courts in Manhattan, so I had many, many judges, a lot of people. The way it works is once you've been indicted on a felony you come before one of these three judges. They're called conference judges. They try to dispose of the case. Either the case gets dismissed or they take the plea deal. But if that doesn't happen, they reach into a bin, literally a lottery-Scott Cunningham:It's like a bingo ball machine?Anna Aizer:It's a lottery with all these different judges' courtrooms. They pull out a number, and that's the number of the courtroom you get assigned to. You know right then if you get assigned to certain judges, for sure that kid is going to do jail time. And if you get assigned to other judges, for sure that kid is going to get probation.Scott Cunningham:Who knows this? The kids don't.Anna Aizer:The kids don't, but they don't know it.Scott Cunningham:They can't comprehend.Anna Aizer:But their attorney will know it.Scott Cunningham:And then maybe their parents.Anna Aizer:No, I don't think their parents would know.Scott Cunningham:Although, who in a group of kids that maybe their parents aren't as-Anna Aizer:I don't think their parents would know it, either. You would know it because you have to remember that all of the judges for the most part were either defense attorneys or prosecutors before they were judges, and you can tell. The judges who would-Scott Cunningham:Is that the main source of the discretion that you notice?Anna Aizer:I think so. I think so. I think the judges who previously prosecute-Scott Cunningham:I mean, they're such different. It does seem like the prosecutors and the defense attorneys are almost cut from a completely different worldview and set of values.Anna Aizer:I think that's right.Scott Cunningham:I had this friend that was a public defender in Athens and he was like... I think this is what he said. I'm not going to say his name because he probably didn't say this, but I thought he basically said, "I don't like prosecutors because they think they are always guilty."Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:And you could tell. The public defender, they were like, "My whole job is to not do that." I could just imagine that shaping... Either there's a lot of selection into that or that just really... You hear that all the time. There's got to be human capital with that.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I agree. I think they have a different perspective, which is what draws them to either defense work or prosecutorial work. But then you have to remember their jobs are really very different. So the prosecutor he or she is just dealing with the victims, so that's who they're talking to all day. The defense attorney is talking to the defendant and getting to know them and their families. They really just have very different sympathies. And the judges come from one or the other.Scott Cunningham:One or the other.Anna Aizer:So you can see it.Scott Cunningham:So you're a kid, you're young person. What are you feeling over the course of working with this? Tell me a little bit about your growth and the thoughts that you're thinking about.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I really felt like these were kids that just got derailed, that these were kids, they were in a very tough situation. They made a decision and they had no idea what the consequences of that were going to be. Nor should they have. They were 16. It's very hard to know where these things end up. I did feel as though the criminal justice system was way too harsh.Scott Cunningham:You could tell. Because the whole point of this nonprofit you're working on is a response to such an excessive amount of penalization. They literally don't have any room.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. They don't have any room for anybody.Anna Aizer:Yeah. They had no room. That's exactly right.Scott Cunningham:We're doing so much punishment we can't even do it right.Anna Aizer:That's exactly right. In the juvenile and criminal justice system, more generally, there's a disproportionate involvement of Black and Hispanic youth.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:But they are 100% poor.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:So that's the other thing. And that just seemed incredibly unfair to me.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:And it's not the case that not poor kids don't also mess up. They do.Scott Cunningham:They just can avoid the 10,000... There's 10,000 events from the mess up to the things that these kids are facing in this program that they have many ways of mitigating it.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's right.Scott Cunningham:There's even in terms of parents spending a ton of money, or just saying you can't hang out with these people. There's a bunch of stuff that poor families just are like... So you're feeling heavyhearted.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:You could have gone in a different direction. You could have not gone to graduate school or gone to get this master's. What's the decision criteria where you're thinking I've got to go in a new direction?Anna Aizer:Yeah. At a certain point I just felt as though I needed more training. I wanted more of a professional degree, so I got a degree in public health where you learned a lot about the health system and financing and the social determinants of health. I felt like I needed, again, more training. I should say, I went from that job, not directly back to graduate school, but I went and I worked in not a homeless shelter, but a service center for homeless people also in New York City. I went from the criminal justice system to the homeless system. I was there for another year. And then I went back to school.Scott Cunningham:To what, two or three years total between Amherst and graduate school?Anna Aizer:That's correct. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:That's correct.Scott Cunningham:It's interesting you go to public health because I think a lot of people that don't know anything about anything, they'll be like, well, she's doing criminal justice so I could have seen her going to law school. Now she's going to the homeless thing. Okay, well, maybe she could do social work. What were the things you were thinking of? And how did you end up choosing public health? Because a lot of people don't associate either of those things with public health. They heard the word health.Anna Aizer:Right. So a couple things. One, I thought about law school, but I felt as though lawyers deal with the problem after it's happened.Scott Cunningham:Right.Anna Aizer:And I felt like maybe we should focus more on preventing.Scott Cunningham:Right.Anna Aizer:And the other thing, when I worked with homeless people I really did start to feel like this was a homeless individuals... Homeless families are different. I worked with homeless single adults, and for the most part in New York City at that time, all of the homeless single adults had serious mental health problems.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:I really came to see homelessness as a public health problem.Scott Cunningham:A mental health problem.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:They hit public health. Got it.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Right. Right.Anna Aizer:So that's really how... I could have done social work, but that's not really what I wanted to do.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. But it's funny you say preventative. To me when I hear that I'm thinking, oh, Anna's already starting to think about public policy.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I was.Scott Cunningham:I wouldn't necessarily think that if you were to tell me you went and got a master's in social work.Anna Aizer:Yeah. No, I think that's [inaudible 00:31:54]-Scott Cunningham:Because that cold be clinical or much more working with the... You would've had that experience and you'd be like, I want to work with these families. But that's not what you thought, so something else is going on. So you're thinking I want to do what?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think I really was interested in policy already then.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. And that makes the masters of public health make a lot of sense.Anna Aizer:Correct. Yeah.Scott Cunningham:I see. So where'd you end up going, Harvard?Anna Aizer:I went to Harvard. Yeah. I got a masters in health policy and administration. And then I moved to DC. I worked for Mathematica policy research for two years, and I learned a lot about policy research.Scott Cunningham:Are you getting a quantitative training at the master's of public health when you went?Anna Aizer:Yeah, so that's where I really took my first micro theory class and my first statistics class. So I took biostatistics and micro theory there. And when I worked at Mathematica, I worked with a lot of economists. So most of the senior researchers at Mathematica were economists by training. That's where I really got exposure to the way economists think about, research and policy evaluation. It was then that I decided I wanted to go back and get a PhD in economics.Scott Cunningham:Okay. So what was it? What's the deal? Why do you like economics at this point?Anna Aizer:The senior researchers at Mathematica were either economists or sociologists or political scientists. I just felt like the economists had a very clear way in which they set up problems. I think that goes back to economic models of decision making.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Right.Anna Aizer:And it just struck me that that was just a very good way to conceptualize almost any problem. I also liked the way they thought about data. I think the people that I worked most closely with and came to admire were all economists. So that's how that-Scott Cunningham:And how long were you there? Were you doing public policy stuff at Mathematica?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I was doing a lot of evaluations of Medicaid programs. In particular, Medicaid managed care, moving from a different financing model for Medicaid and evaluating that, and various settings, and writing them policy briefs so that... God. It was either two or three years, I can't really remember, maybe three years. I think I was there three years and then I went back to graduate school.Scott Cunningham:And then you go to UCLA?Anna Aizer:And then I went to UCLA.Scott Cunningham:Am I right that you were working mainly with Janet Curry?Anna Aizer:Yes. So Janet Curry was my-Scott Cunningham:You worked pretty closely with her?Anna Aizer:Yeah. She was my main advisor. The other folks I worked with were Joe Huts and Jeff Grogger.Scott Cunningham:And who?Anna Aizer:Jeff Grogger.Scott Cunningham:Oh, Jeff Grogger?Anna Aizer:None of whom are there anymore.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. I'm just curious. I associate you a lot with... Because I wrote that book on causal inference I'm obsessed with the causal inference stuff in all these weird ways, with all the people. I see Princeton industrial relations section, Card, Angres, et cetera. And then I see Janet Curry. And then I see you at UCLA, and I associate you so much with that methodological approach, especially for some of the papers that I've known really well. Did you get a sense when you were at UCLA, oh, this is causal inference, this is different, this is the credibility revolution? Or was it just really subtle, or this is just how you do empirical work?Anna Aizer:That's a great question. So I should also say that my first year econometrics teacher was Hero Inmans.Scott Cunningham:Was it, really?Anna Aizer:Yeah. Hero [inaudible 00:36:18] UCLA.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. I didn't know that.Anna Aizer:For a short period of time. I was lucky enough that he was there when I was there. So he taught me in my first and my second years. So of course he was very much big part of this. And actually Enrico Moretti was also at UCLA when I was there, so I took courses with him. I think between Janet, Hero, Enrico and Joe Huts, they were really in the thick of it. That was the way it was done.Scott Cunningham:That was the way it was done.Anna Aizer:That was the way it was done.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. What did you learn? What do you think the salient concepts were that had you... This is a make believe, right? But I'm just saying, had you gone to a different school where you didn't have any of those people, what do you think the salient econometric causal inference kind of things were to you that you were like, oh, this is what I notice I keep doing over and over again, or keep thinking about?Anna Aizer:Well, I would say that the method was in service to the question. I feel as though I'm seeing it more these days. People, they find an experiment, a natural experiment, and then they figure out the question. That's not how I remember it. You had the question and then the method was in service to that question. I worry that that's getting a little bit lost these days, that people have the experiment and then they're searching for the question. I think that ends up being less interesting and less important.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There were certain economists, I think, that were so successful as approaching it that way. It seems like it was cut both ways, because it seems like applied causal inference grew on the back of that kind of natural experiment first, but it almost becomes... To a kid with a hammer, everything's a nail, so it's just like, look through the newspaper, look for a natural experiment. What can I do? How can I do this? How can I [handle 00:38:49]?Scott Cunningham:And it is funny. I don't think it's as satisfying too, just even emotionally. I guess you can find discoveries that way, like you were, but it does feel like you don't end up building up all the human capital with the importance of that question. It's almost like, you're like, well, how can I make this question really important? As opposed to it is important.Anna Aizer:Right.Scott Cunningham:What were you studying? I know what you were studying. At UCLA, what was the question that you were really captivated by?Anna Aizer:So I was really focused on health. You have to remember, I'd done a master's in public health and I just worked at Mathematica, so I was really focused on health. So really all of my dissertation was on health. My main dissertation chapter was actually on Medicaid in California. It was on the importance of enrolling kids early in Medicaids. I don't know if you know much about the Medicaid program, but there are many kids, 60% of kids, who are uninsured are actually eligible for the Medicaid program, but not enrolled in the Medicaid program. And that's partly because-Scott Cunningham:60%?Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Wow.Anna Aizer:We could reduce the number of kids who are uninsured in this country by more than half if you just enrolled all those kids who were eligible for Medicaid in the program.Scott Cunningham:Yeah.Anna Aizer:And part of the-Scott Cunningham:We saw that in that Oregon Medicaid experiment.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Oregon was mostly adults. I don't know how these numbers differ for adults and kids. I'm really more focused on kids. It's partly by design because Medicaid is a program. If you show up at the hospital and you don't have insurance and you're eligible for Medicaid, the hospital will enroll you. And most people know that.Scott Cunningham:Oh, is that right?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, because they have every interest. They want to get paid, so they'll enroll you in the Medicaid program, but there's a cost to that. Because what that means is that kids, if parents know that once they go to the hospital their kid will be enrolled in the Medicaid program should they need hospitalization, they don't end up getting them enrolled prior to that. So they miss out on the ambulatory preventative care that might prevent them from being hospitalized to begin with. And that's partly because of the structure of the program, but that's also because the states made it difficult for kids to enroll in the Medicaid program. In California, there was a big change. The application for Medicaid used to be 20 pages long. Imagine that, right? They cut it down to four.Scott Cunningham:What kind of stuff are they asking on those 20 pages?Anna Aizer:Who knows? Who knows what they're asking.Scott Cunningham:Good grief. I mean, they're wanting them on there. Are they screening them out or are they just-Anna Aizer:I think that's partly what they were trying to do, right?Scott Cunningham:Screen them out? Because it's expensive.Anna Aizer:It's expensive.Scott Cunningham:You've got some of these legislators, they're like, this is expensive and I don't even want to do this so add a dozen pages.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So just make it hard. Now, what happened in '97 was the child health insurance program, CHIP. And they said, "If you want CHIP money..." So that's federal money to ensure more kids. "If you want CHIP money, federal money, you are going to have to enroll more kids in the Medicaid program. You have to do outreach." So the states actually were forced, and that's actually what prompted California to go from a 20 page application to a four page application. They also spent about $20 million on advertisement and basically training community based organizations in how to complete a Medicaid application. So they train them. "Here, you can help your clients enroll in Medicaid. For every application that you help that ends up getting onto the Medicaid program we'll give you 50 bucks." And this really mattered. A lot of kids started enrolling in the Medicaid program who otherwise wouldn't, particularly Hispanic and Asian American kids.Scott Cunningham:Is this what your dissertation ends up being about?Anna Aizer:This is what my dissertation is about.Scott Cunningham:On both the shortening and the payment?Anna Aizer:So it was basically once they started doing this you started seeing big increases in the number of kids who were enrolled in the Medicaid program. And you saw declines in hospitalizations for things like asthma. Asthma is a condition for which if you're being seen and treated on an ambulatory basis, you shouldn't end up in the hospital.Scott Cunningham:Oh. Wait. So what's your control group and all this stuff?Anna Aizer:What the state did was they targeted different areas, and provided training to those community based organizations in how to complete a Medicaid application. So they gave me all that data.Scott Cunningham:Get out of here.Anna Aizer:So I had all the data.Scott Cunningham:So you're doing some IB thing? You're doing some-Anna Aizer:Yeah. It was, basically if you live in a neighborhood where a community based organization had already been trained then you were much more likely to be enrolled in the Medicaid program. So you can see that.Scott Cunningham:Oh my gosh. This is so cool. Were you excited when you found that?Anna Aizer:I was super excited.Scott Cunningham:I bet.Anna Aizer:I was super excited. This was so old. I was begging Medicaid to send me this data. Begging, begging, begging. And they weren't really answering. And then one day Janet came in to the office where all the graduate students sit, and she said, "I think I got this fax for you." She handed this 20 page fax that has all the data on what community organization got trained and when.Scott Cunningham:Okay. Anna, I want to ask a meta question real quick. You just said, these days people maybe start with natural experiment first, but originally it was question first. Okay. Not devil's advocate, but just a statement of facts. The one reason they may do that is because when you find these kinds of natural experiments or whatever, it almost just feels almost itself random. You're weren't even really looking for it. You read something in the newspaper, you're like, oh my gosh, they're doing this weird thing. And the risk of going question first is, you could have this incredibly important question, like the Medicaid project payment thing, and you're like, if everybody in my department, like Hero Inmans and Moretti and Curry, who are to answer a question either subtly or not so subtly, or to answer a question is going to require this credible design and we really need you to staple this dissertation together. You're going to have to have a-Anna Aizer:I think that's why you have lots-Scott Cunningham:It seems really risky. It seems really risky.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think you have to have lots of ideas.Scott Cunningham:You have to have lots of ideas.Anna Aizer:I think you have lots of ideas. A good friend of mine in graduate school was Enrico Moretti's RA. He told me that Enrico had tons of ideas. Wes, this was my friend, his RA, would just do some really quick takes on all of these ideas. And if there was something there he'd pursue it. But if there was nothing there he'd drop it.Scott Cunningham:What does that mean, nothing there, something there? What does that mean?Anna Aizer:Either, if you can't find exaggerate variation or the exaggerate variation doesn't actually work, you don't have the first stage, he'd just drop it and move on to something else.Scott Cunningham:That's a skill. That's almost some therapeutic skill to be excited about something and willing to let it go.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's actually-Scott Cunningham:You got a lot of ideas?Anna Aizer:I had a lot of ideas. It never worked out.Scott Cunningham:Never worked out. And that's normal.Anna Aizer:I think that's normal.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. That's not a bad thing.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I think that's how research should go. In fact, I'm not as good as Enrico, I probably hold on to things for longer than I should.Scott Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Boy, where'd you end up publishing that work? I should know this, but I don't know.Anna Aizer:That published in Restat Review Economics Institute.Scott Cunningham:Oh, cool. So what'd you end up finding?Anna Aizer:So what I end up finding is if you pay these organizations to enroll... Well, a couple things. Advertisement, just blanketing the television and radio with information. Sign up for Medicaid, sign up for CHIP, that does not work at all.Scott Cunningham:Doesn't work?Anna Aizer:No.Scott Cunningham:Advertising doesn't work?Anna Aizer:It doesn't work. What works is having these communities organizations help families complete the application. That's incredibly important.Scott Cunningham:That's a supply demand kind of philosophy that you see in drugs, too. Mark Anderson has this paper on meth. They would post these advertisements of people that were addicted to meth. They look horrible. They lose their teeth and all this stuff. It didn't do anything.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like you're talking about a group of people. They're like, they need more assistance. They need somebody... You think about that thing you were saying earlier about these kids that are higher income versus lower income. When I said there were 10,000 steps that the higher income people had, it wasn't really like the kids, it was external forces that were investing, going after them.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Right.Scott Cunningham:It seems like incentives need to be targeted to people to go after. For whatever reason it is not enough to just simply have it. You need people going in and helping along the way.Anna Aizer:Right. Agreed. I agree. They need support.Scott Cunningham:They need support.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:Okay. So that is amazing. I bet your advisors were so proud of you for that project.Anna Aizer:I don't know.Scott Cunningham:I think so.Anna Aizer:You'd hope so, but that'll be icing on the cake.Scott Cunningham:Right. Exactly. Yeah. I guess that's not super important.Anna Aizer:Yeah, it is. You do always want your advisor... I mean, I had tremendous respect for all my advisors. So yeah, I'd be very pleased if they liked the work that I did. Basically, states did spend this money to enroll kids early, but it paid off because it meant that they were less likely to be hospitalized. In fact, some of these programs can be very much cost effective.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah. I had told myself, I was like, well, I'm asking Anna about the juvenile incarceration paper with Joe Doyle. And then I was going to ask her about domestic violence. And I feel like I've got to make a hard choice now, because I don't have a lot of time. So I was thinking, well, let's see how this goes. And then we can fit. So domestic violence. First thing I want to ask is, how did you get interested in that topic? And when did it start? In a way I could almost imagine, oh, you've been thinking about domestic violence forever.Anna Aizer:Yes. So I actually-Scott Cunningham:You've been thinking about women ever since college.Anna Aizer:Yeah. That's true. And made that connection. This was basically my first big project after I started at Brown. After my dissertation I was thinking, okay, what's my next big project going to be? And I think that's a very important decision for junior faculty to think about. After you finish publishing your dissertation you got to think about what's my next big project? Because it takes so long to publish anything in economics, that's really going to matter a lot. That might be the only thing you publish before you're coming up for tenure given how long.Anna Aizer:I was thinking about it, and I just felt like I didn't have a clear question in mind, but just been looking at the numbers it's incredibly prevalent, domestic violence. But it's also shown some pretty encouraging trends. Domestic violence against women has been declining pretty significantly. In the US, I think about... I haven't looked the number up recently, but it was about 1,000 women a year were being killed, and so many more actually are victims of domestic violence. And if you look at victimization surveys, between one and three and one in four women in the US report ever being the victim of domestic violence. It's really prevalent. And it just struck me, this is a big problem and I don't know how to answer it, but we should know more about it given just how prevalent it is. And so that's how I started.Anna Aizer:I have a good friend from high school, and she's a lawyer in New York City. She was working with victims of domestic violence. She's a lawyer by training. She used to say, "These women have nothing. They have no resources. They are so poor." That, to me, just made me think about, okay, I need to start thinking about income and resources and poverty and domestic violence, because clearly that's a big part of this.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. I feel like you and I ended up responding to the bargaining theory papers in the exact same way. That's when I was studying a lot of my stuff on couples and things and bad behavior on the part of the men, I was always thinking about sex ratios in the marriage market. Why I was thinking about that was the ability to exit the partnership could be really, really important. And I was curious. You can talk about people not having resources and not necessarily be thinking in terms of one of these Nash bargaining, like Manser and Brown, and McElroy and Horn, and Shelly Lundberg kinds of ways of thinking. I was curious, were you thinking about those theory papers a lot? Or am I just projecting?Anna Aizer:I had this friend, again, who was working and telling me just how poor many of the women she was working with were. And then once you actually look at the statistics, the survey statistics, it's true that any woman can be a victim of domestic violence, but it is really a poor woman problem. So it's very clear to me that poverty has a lot to do with it. It's because many of these women have no other source of support. They have low levels was in schooling. They have few prospects in the labor market. And they're really stuck. That is ultimately-Scott Cunningham:Stuck as in cannot leave.Anna Aizer:Cannot leave. I mean, they have a very-Scott Cunningham:Because that's the solution. That's one of the most important solutions, which is probably you need to leave the relationship.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Or you need to be able to threaten to leave.Scott Cunningham:You need to be able to threaten to leave. How important do you think the credible threat is? Because my sense is, that's to an economist, because they're like, you should thinking about unions and stuff. They're like, oh, credible threats. That's all you got to, you have to do it. I feel like, I don't know if that really works. I actually think the truth is you're going to have to leave. And maybe there's some marginal guy. We're talking about the marginal guy, but whatever, that's the info marginal, whatever. The extensive marginal guy, he's got narcissism personality disorder, substance abuse problems.Anna Aizer:Yeah. You may be right.Scott Cunningham:He's got major, major problems. And that stuff is very inelastic to everything.Anna Aizer:Yeah. You may be right. I can't answer this because I don't know for sure. At the same time I remember talking to some folks about this, and their feeling was that it's all a continuum of a bad relationship. Violence may be one extreme, but relationships have ebbs and flows. They can be better at some points and worse at others. So they did feel as though a relationship didn't always have to be violent, that you could have relationships that were violent at one point but then were no longer. Of course, you also have relationships in which that's not the case, and the only solution is to leave. But there could very well be relationships where you can have better and worse periods.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. The reason why I bring it up is because I feel like these days you hear a lot about mental health. Well, you hear about mental health period, but in domestic violence there'll be also an emerging story of the narcissist personality disorder. I've been always lately thinking, I've been like, I wonder if this is true. Anecdotally, what you see a lot is how manipulative... And that's like a very judgemental way of putting it, but I don't know how else to say it. How manipulative one of the person can be towards the other where they're like, "Well, if you loved me..." They get all this trepped up stories about love. What love becoming almost this story.Scott Cunningham:I've wondered for those people that can't or won't... It's actually won't, right? They can leave. I mean, there are some people they will be literally harmed if they leave, so I'm not talking about those people. But I mean, the person that literally you're watching an equilibrium where they don't leave, I've wondered lately if it's like, the victim is all tangled up with loyalty and love.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Sure.Scott Cunningham:And it is taken advantage of by a person that no one can tell them not to love this person. That's nobody's business.Anna Aizer:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is a really complicated thing.Scott Cunningham:It is so complicated. It is so complicated. Finding the policies that provide resources to a person. Some of that might be a person that's at those earlier ebbs too, those earlier ebbs in the bad relationship. And you're like, well, some people may not be ready to leave yet.Anna Aizer:I mean, this a thing where I do think the right policy response is providing resources to women, but also probably interventions aimed at the assailant is probably going to be just as effective. Sorry. My phone is ringing.Scott Cunningham:That's okay.Anna Aizer:Hello. Sorry about that. I thought it might be my kids.Scott Cunningham:I wonder about these battery courts. Have you heard about these [inaudible 01:00:05] courts?Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, they're-Scott Cunningham:I wonder what you know about those?Anna Aizer:Yeah. Not a lot, I would say.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. These issues of poverty and mental health and all of these things interacting in order to get healing and healthy meaningful lives to all everyone is... I do think this is something that economists can offer, but it's not something that... I wouldn't say there's a ton of people. You're one of a small number of people working on domestic violence, it seems like.Anna Aizer:It's a very hard thing to study. Data's very difficult to come by for obvious reasons, for a good reason. I mean, this is data that needs to be protected. Glenn Ludwig and the crime lab in Chicago, they're doing work around violence reduction more generally. And probably many of those principles and findings probably relate to domestic violence as well, changing the behavior of young people so that they are less quick to react and less quick to react in a violent way. When they do, we would probably have some pretty important spillover to domestic violence as well, I think.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.Anna Aizer:I think there are ways to reduce violence more generally that would probably apply to the setting of domestic violence.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. It's funny, circling back to that judge who threatens with higher penalties. I think economists, when they think about violence and things like that, you're an exception for thinking about outside options and stuff like that, but the shadow of Gary Becker's deterrence hypothesis, it can just be this straight jacket for a lot of people, because they just only think in terms of relative price changes on the punishment margins. When you talk to psychologists, or you read that psychology literature about narcissism or borderline personality disorder or substance abuse, you're talking about a group of people that are, for variety of reasons, have really low discount rates or just have beliefs that things don't apply to them. Or in no uncertain terms, the elasticities of violent behavior with respect to some unknown punishment that you don't even know if it's going to real, it just seems like, we don't really know, but [inaudible 01:03:06] really big.Anna Aizer:Yeah. So there was this criminologist named Mark Kleiman. Do you know that name?Scott Cunningham:Oh yeah. Mark Kleiman. Yeah. Yeah.Anna Aizer:I mean his big thing was, it should be swift, sure and short. That's how we should do punishment. He felt as though that would be far preferable to the system in which there's uncertainty. But if it doesn't work out, you're going to spend a lot of time in jail. He thought that was a fair model.Scott Cunningham:The thing is, though, swift certain and did you say short?Anna Aizer:Short.Scott Cunningham:Yeah. Well, with prison sentences lingering on your record it is by definition never short.Anna Aizer:Yeah.Scott Cunningham:You face these labor market scarrings and you can't get housing, you can't get jobs and that does not go away. So even if the prison sentence is short, the person... I just feel like this is the tension around violence in the country, which is punishment has so many margins where it is permanent. It's got so many margins. And just being in a cage is only one of them.Anna Aizer:Yeah. I mean, particularly for young people, jail is incredibly scarring.Scott Cunningham:Incredibly scarring. Incredibly scarring. We've been studying suicide attempts in the jail and we-Anna Aizer:Yes, that's right.Scott Cunningham:We walked the jail for this one particular jail. I have never in my life seen anything like that. I've been working on this project for four years. I hadn't walked to the jail. I don't know. It's not the first thing that came to my mind. The team finally walked the jail. I spent the whole day there. The jails have so much mental illness in it. They just are in... It's not even cages. A cage has... Air gets in. It's a sealed box. It's like Houdini's box. They stay there, and for a variety of regulatory reasons and so forth, they stay in there. Can't have a lot of materials if they are at risk. If they've come in with psychosis because of substance abuse or underlying mental illness stuff, they might get moved into certain types of physical quarters. I just can't even imagine, just in an hour, let alone... And that's just jail. That's not even prison. It's just absolutely a trauma box.Scott Cunningham:Unfortunately, we didn't get to talk about your paper with Joe Doyle on the juvenile incarceration. But every time I teach that juvenile incarceration paper, where kids were incarcerated as a young person, and then end up not going back. It's not even the future prison part, it's the not going back to high school.Anna Aizer:Oh, of course.Scott Cunningham:And then when they go back, they're labeled with a behavioral emotional disorder. It's really like anybody that's had any exposure to a kid involved in corrections, you're like, oh, I know exactly what that is. They were traumatized. You don't even have to come up with some exotic economic theory. They were traumatized. That's why they come back to school with a behavioral emotional disorder. It is [inaudible 01:06:59].Anna Aizer:Yep. That's good.Scott Cunningham:That paper is one of the most important papers I have personally ever read. I teach it nonstop. And I've even cried teaching it in class. I get so emotional when I get to that part, because, I don't know about you, but it seems like it's really hard not to come away with... A lot of papers you read, you're like, well, we're not really sure exactly all to make of it. But when I read that paper that you wrote, I just think, especially when you think about the leniency design, I just think these kids probably didn't need to go to prison.Anna Aizer:Oh yeah.Scott Cunningham:Honestly, what else are you going to say? They end up committing more crimes. And they are not going back to school. How was this the policy goal? What was it like writing that paper when you started to realize what was going on?Anna Aizer:Again, when I worked in this Alternative to Incarceration program we had kids come into the program who had spent some time in jail. And we had kids who had spent very little time, maybe just a night. The kids who had spent even just three weeks in jail, they always did worse in the program. Always. It was a known fact. The program knew it. And the question was, well, are these kids somehow different? There was a reason why they were in jail and these other kids weren't. Is that why they do worse in the program? Maybe they're in jail because their family didn't show up for them in court. They couldn't make bail.Anna Aizer:Or was it something about spending three weeks in jail that just made it impossible for them to complete the program? This was a big question that was on everybody's mind. We talked about this quite a bit at the program, and we didn't know the answer. When I finally figured out how to do it, working with Joe, I wanted to know the answer to a question that I had been thinking about for over a decade.Scott Cunningham:Gosh. Were you emotionally upset when you started to see coefficients get really big?Anna Aizer:It really was not surprising. It really wasn't, because these are kids who are only marginally attached to school. These are not the kids who were going to school, doing well in school. These are kids who were not really that attached to school for whatever reason. So you take them out even for a month, they're not going to go back. I mean, it's obvious. We saw that in the program. What they ended up doing was moving a lot of kids from school to GED because they had not been involved in school, they were not involved in school. It just was much more likely that they would be able to complete a GED than actually go back to high school and finish.Scott Cunningham:Your paper, it like hit home for personal reasons. We had an event happen. I wrote a professor. I was like, this thing had happened. Anna and Joe find this result. I feel hopeless. There's this kid in town and I raised money for him. Basically, I was like, you just got to do everything in your power to not let them spend an extra minute in jail. And all this scared straight stuff. Parents get into it, too. They're exhausted. They're like, "Well, he's got to learn his lesson." Nobody learns a damn thing in jail. They don't learn a lesson. Because you're just so hopeless. You start grasping at straws. And people will tell you that might happen.Scott

Robert Michael, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker from a productive period when Becker was at Columbia up through the late 1960s and in this interview shares a bit of why that time was so special. As you may recall, I have been doing my only little “mixtape” about Becker's students and previously interviewed Bob's old classmate and longtime friend, Mike Grossman. Bob describes a lot about the secret sauce that made Columbia such a special time for people like him, Mike, Bill and Elizabeth Landes, Isaac Ehrlich and many others. It wasn't merely the chance to be mentored by Becker according to Bob; it was also Jacob Mincer and how complementary those two were — yin and yang, theory and empirical rigor. Bob would go on to helping shape the profession, not merely through his wonderful scholarship, but also through his overseeing of numerous important panel and cross-sectional datasets. The two with which I am most familiar are the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which I wrote my dissertation on, and the National Health and Social Life Survey, a 1992 survey which was the first representative survey of adult American sexual behavior. He co-authored two books about sex in fact — one entitled The Social Organization of Sexuality and Sex in America. Both of these books document the sexual practices of adult Americans from that early 1992 period, riding on the crest of the AIDS epidemic and helping us better understand the basic facts about sex in America. I think you will be deeply moved, though, listening to Bob describe the lengths to which they at NORC went to talk to respondents and learn about their sexual behavior was stunning and not surprising. He notes that some respondents wept during the survey because, as they said, they had literally never talked to anyone about some of these important parts of their lives, some not even their own spouses, therapists or doctors. And yet Bob had with his team at NORC created such a safe, compassionate and respectful environment that not only could he ask intimate questions to strangers, but in fact have a nearly 90% response rate of people willing to share. A true model of science — curious, careful and compassionate.

Robert Michael, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker from a productive period when Becker was at Columbia up through the late 1960s and in this interview shares a bit of why that time was so special. As you may recall, I have been doing my only little “mixtape” about Becker's students and previously interviewed Bob's old classmate and longtime friend, Mike Grossman. Bob describes a lot about the secret sauce that made Columbia such a special time for people like him, Mike, Bill and Elizabeth Landes, Isaac Ehrlich and many others. It wasn't merely the chance to be mentored by Becker according to Bob; it was also Jacob Mincer and how complementary those two were — yin and yang, theory and empirical rigor. Bob would go on to helping shape the profession, not merely through his wonderful scholarship, but also through his overseeing of numerous important panel and cross-sectional datasets. The two with which I am most familiar are the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which I wrote my dissertation on, and the National Health and Social Life Survey, a 1992 survey which was the first representative survey of adult American sexual behavior. He co-authored two books about sex in fact — one entitled The Social Organization of Sexuality and Sex in America. Both of these books document the sexual practices of adult Americans from that early 1992 period, riding on the crest of the AIDS epidemic and helping us better understand the basic facts about sex in America. I think you will be deeply moved, though, listening to Bob describe the lengths to which they at NORC went to talk to respondents and learn about their sexual behavior was stunning and not surprising. He notes that some respondents wept during the survey because, as they said, they had literally never talked to anyone about some of these important parts of their lives, some not even their own spouses, therapists or doctors. And yet Bob had with his team at NORC created such a safe, compassionate and respectful environment that not only could he ask intimate questions to strangers, but in fact have a nearly 90% response rate of people willing to share. A true model of science — curious, careful and compassionate. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I introduce listeners to Michael Grossman, an early pioneer in the field of health economics. His dissertation work under at Columbia University on "health capital and demand" became a cornerstone of the modern field of health economics. We discuss his time growing up in New York, his time with Gary Becker at Columbia as his student, how he got into health in the first place, and much more. Mike is a much beloved economist and I hope you will enjoy this interview as much I did.

In this episode, I introduce listeners to Michael Grossman, an early pioneer in the field of health economics. His dissertation work under at Columbia University on "health capital and demand" became a cornerstone of the modern field of health economics. We discuss his time growing up in New York, his time with Gary Becker at Columbia as his student, how he got into health in the first place, and much more. Mike is a much beloved economist and I hope you will enjoy this interview as much I did. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

A new MP3 sermon from Trinity Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Memorial Service for Joe Piccolo Speaker: Gary Becker Broadcaster: Trinity Baptist Church Event: Funeral Service Date: 6/18/2022 Length: 96 min.

Dr. Jared Rubin is the co-author of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, which he wrote with Mark Koyama, a previous guest on the podcast. We are so happy to welcome Jared to the show today to discuss the thesis of his book, and what he and Mark aimed to add to the literature on the subject of economic growth in the contemporary context. This is a fascinating and thoughtful conversation, packed with insight and nuance on important arguments of the past, what is needed to broaden and enhance our understanding of economic growth, and how far these projects might go towards enabling us to see a better future. Dr. Rubin answers some questions about geographic, legal, and technological explanations for growth, and stresses the importance of synergy and interplay between these theories for a more illuminating picture. So to hear all this and a whole lot more, including many reasons to pick up his latest book, tune in today!   Key Points From This Episode:   •   Introducing the role of culture in economic growth, and tracing the roots of this inquiry. •   Positioning How the World Became Rich in the lineage of literature on the subject of growth.  •   Looking at England and the emergence of modern growth; arguments over the most important factors. •   Why Dr. Rubin tried to bring different theories into conversation through writing this book. •   Unpacking the argument for the role of liberal speech norms in the history of development, proposed by McCloskey. •   Technological progress and geographic endowments; why this relationship is worth exploration. •   Dr. Rubin's perspective on the role of law and legal systems in the growth trajectory of a country. •   Discussing the relative slowing of growth in the Western world and what this may mean. •   Dr. Rubin briefly comments on an argument for total factor productivity growth being linear. •   Thoughts on big picture topics through a micro lens. •   The lessons we can take from history for the most impactful policies for growth in the future.     Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   https://www.jaredcrubin.com/ (Dr. Jared Rubin) https://www.chapman.edu/ (Chapman University) https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Became-Rich-Historical/dp/1509540237 (How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth) https://twitter.com/jaredcrubin?lang=en (Dr. Jared Rubin on Twitter) https://economics.gmu.edu/people/mkoyama2 (Mark Koyama) https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-episode-16-state-capacity-religious-toleration-and-political-competition-with-mark-koyama/ (Charter Cities Podcast Episode 16 with Mark Koyama) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1995/lucas/biographical/ (Robert Lucas) https://economics.northwestern.edu/people/directory/joel-mokyr.html (Joel Mokyr) https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Growth-Origins-Schumpeter-Lectures/dp/0691168881 (Culture of Growth) https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/ (Joe Henrich) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist (Max Weber) https://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism/dp/1603866043 (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/facts/ (Gary Becker) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html (Culture and the Evolutionary Process) https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/o-grada-cormac (Cormac Ó Gráda) https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/ (Deidre McCloskey) https://growthecon.com/ (Deitrich Vollrath) https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Grown-Stagnant-Economy-Success/dp/0226820041 (Fully Grown) https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/thomas-philippon (Thomas Philippon) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/...

La racionalidad es limitada y la teoría del nudge, empujoncito en español, nos ayuda a decidir mejor. Elegimos por comparación y quien establece el contexto condiciona la elección. No todas las intuiciones son ineficientes, argumento de Taleb, pero sí existen patrones irracionales. La arquitectura de la decisión, añadiendo alternativas irrelevantes o cambiando el escenario por defecto, permite corregir esos sesgos. O explotarlos en beneficio de un tercero. Pedro mira los datos antes de dar su opinión.Apuntes:El economista como fontanero. Pedro Rey Biel & Marcel Jansen.¿Te arrepientes de haber jugado a la lotería? Pedro Rey Biel.Todo lo que he aprendido con la psicología económica. Richard Thaler.Pensar rápido, pensar despacio. Daniel Kahneman.Choice architecture. Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein & John Balz.Nudge. Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein.Nudging: A very short guide. Cass Sunstein.A fine is a price. Uri Gneezy & Aldo Rustichini.Psychological foundations of incentives. Ernst Fehr & Armin Falk.How tiny are your chances at winning the Powerball. Anna Becker.Repensar la pobreza. Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee.Buena economía para tiempos difíciles. Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee.The economic way of looking at life. Gary Becker.Freakonomics. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner.Superfreakonomics. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner.Índice:0.28. Un economista conductual en la Universidad de Chicago.10.31. Los supuestos erróneos de la racionalidad y la información perfecta.18.37. Experimentos controlados y aleatorizados para combatir la pobreza.40.20. Todo lo que publica el psicólogo ya lo sabe el vendedor de coches usados.47.47. El homo economicus no come cacahuetes.59.39. La guardería israelí en la que el incentivo monetário eliminó el incentivo social.1.18.15. El pánico al Covid en marzo del 2020 pudo salvarte la vida.1.25.05. El sesgo del statu quo y los dark patterns de Ryanair.1.29.40. Arquitectura de la decisión: la presentación de la comida en la cafetería.1.34.05. La nudge unit que asesora al gobierno británico.

Any work in social and behavioral science presumably – but not necessarily immediately - tells us something about humans in the real world. To come up with those insights, research usually occurs in laboratory settings, where the researchers control the independent variables and which, in essence, rules out research ‘in the wild.' Enter John List. “For years,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “economists thought that the world is so ‘dirty' that you can't do field experiments. They had the mentality of a test tube in a chemistry lab, and what they had learned was that if there was a speck of dirt in that tube, you're in trouble because you can't control exactly what is happening.” Since this complex real world isn't getting any cleaner, you could conclusively rule out field experiments, and that's what the ‘giants' of economics did for years. Or you could learn to work around the ‘dirt,' which is what List started doing around the turn of the millennium. “I actually use the world as my lab,” the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago says. Since an early start centering on sports trading cards and manure-fertilized crop land (real field work, a self-described “bucolic” List happily acknowledges), his university homepage details a raft of field experiments: “I have made use of several different markets, including using hospitals, pre-K, grammar, and high schools for educational field experiments, countless charitable fundraising field experiments to learn about the science of philanthropy, the Chicago Board of Trade, Costa Rican CEOs, the new automobile market, coin markets, auto repair markets, open air markets located throughout the globe, various venues on the internet, several auction settings, shopping malls, various labor markets, and partnered with various governmental agencies. More recently, I have been engaged in a series of field experiments with various publicly traded corporations—from car manufacturers to travel companies to ride-share.” In the podcast, List explains, “I don't anticipate or assume that I have a ‘clean test tube,' but what I do is I randomly place people into a treatment condition or a control condition, and then what I look at is their outcomes, and I take the difference between those outcomes. That differences out the ‘dirt.' “I can go to really dirty settings where other empirical approaches really take dramatic assumptions. All I need is really randomization and a few other things in place and then if I just take the simple difference, I can get an average treatment effect from that setting.” His work – in journal articles, popular books like The Voltage Effect and The Why Axis, in findings applied immediately outside of academe – has earned him widespread praise (Gary Becker terms his output as “revolutionary”), a huge list of honors, and a recurring spot on Nobel shortlists. For this podcast, List focuses on two of the many areas in which he's conducted field experiments: charitable giving and the gig economy. He describes one finding from working with different charities around the world over the last 25 years on what works best to raise money. For example, appeals to potential donors announcing their money would be matched when they gave, doubling or tripling a contribution's impact. When he started, it was presumed that the greater the leverage offered by a match, the more someone would give, since their total gift would be that much greater. “There was no science around it … it was art, or gut feeling.” It was also wrong. List tested the assumption, offering four different appeals to four different groups: one with just an appeal for funding, one with a 1:1 match, one with a 2:1 match, and the last a 3:1 match. And the results bore out that matching a contribution amped up the results – but the leverage didn't matter. “Just having the match matters, but the rate of the match does not matter.” List was later the chief economist with ride-share behemoth Uber – and then with its competitor, Lyft. He coined the term Ubernomics for his ability to manipulate the tsunami of data the company generated. “It's not only that you have access to a lot of data,” he says, “it's also that you have access to generating a lot of new data. As a field economist, this is a playground that is very, very difficult to beat.”

Lester interviews Gary Becker, CEO of ScriptSourcing – a brand that helps self-funded employers dramatically reduce pharmacy spend while providing plan members with a $0 copay for name brand and specialty medications. He breaks down exactly how his company is able achieve this through alternative reimbursement methods that many may not be aware of. The two also discuss how incentives between PBMs and employers can oftentimes be misaligned and review some of his successes working in the industry.