Podcast appearances and mentions of Kenneth J Arrow

My guest today is Michael Mauboussin (@mjmauboussin), one of the world's leading experts in finance. Michael serves as Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, Morgan Stanley. He has authored three books and regularly appears in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and other publications. Since 1993, Michael has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School and is also the chairman emeritus of the board of trustees at the Santa Fe Institute. In our conversation, we delve into the dynamics of markets, discuss all sorts of increasing returns, and explore topics such as Charles Darwin, policymaking, AI and Web3, and the Santa Fe Institute. I hope you enjoy our discussion. Find me on X at @⁠ProfSchrepel⁠⁠⁠⁠. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Scaling Theory podcast. ** References: Michael J. Mauboussin & Dan Callahan, "Increasing Returns: Identifying Forms of Increasing Returns and What Drives Them" (2024) https://perma.cc/Y3DN-LNMY Michael J. Mauboussin & Dan Callahan, "Stock Market Concentration: How Much Is Too Much?" (2024) https://perma.cc/7EEX-ZY9T Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882 https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Charles-Darwin-1809-1882/dp/0393310698  David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (2007) https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Wealth-Nations-Economic-Discovery/dp/0393329887 James Bessen, The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (2022) https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/James-Bessen/dp/0300255047 Chris Dixon, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (2023) https://readwriteown.com Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/digital-empires-9780197649268 Kenneth J. Arrow, "The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing" (1962) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2295952 J. Doyne Farmer, Making Sense of Chaos (2024) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/284357/making-sense-of-chaos-by-farmer-j-doyne/9780241201978

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a blast. I'm talking this week Dr. Marianne Wanamaker, professor of economics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the new dean at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. Marianne has had a spectacular run since graduating from Northwestern in 2009: NBER, IZA, a stint in the White House (former chief domestic economist at Council of Economic Advisors and senior labor economist), a ton of other stuff. She's an economic historian by training, a specialist in American economic history specifically and demography, and won the 2019 Kenneth J. Arrow award (with Marcella Alsan) for a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on the lasting impacts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on trust in the healthcare system among African-Americans. She is a brilliant and creative young economist, an excellent instructor, and a mix of entrepreneur and civil servant. I had a great time in this interview getting to know her better, and hope you are inspired to hear her story like I was. And as always, thank you for your support of the show! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Today's podcast is titled, “Economic Theory and Fluctuations in Output and Inflation.” Dr. Kenneth J. Arrow, Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University and 1972 Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Science and Professor John B. Taylor, Senior Fellow and Professor of Economics at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, discuss economic theory and fluctuations in output and inflation. Listen now, and don't forget to subscribe to get updates each week for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Show notes:Today we tackle a key concept in economics, the idea of market equilibrium, both general and partial. A part of this talk also involves the role of information and that of regulation. We start with polymath Kenneth Joseph Arrow, a key figure in many economic insights. From him we move to a key Chicago school figure and funnyman, George Joseph Stigler. Finally, we star the French economist Gérard Debreu. In season 1 (Danish) we reviewed the history of economic thought before WWII. The coming seasons are dedicated to the Nobel Prize in Economics, and I am joined by economist Otto Brøns-Petersen. The Nobel prize is a good benchmark for how the field and profession of economics developed after WWII. We will focus both on the scientific contributions and on the people behind them. These are all star economists and worthy of your time and attention. Some will mainly feature in one episode, others in several. We therefore advice that you listen in the thematic order we propose – but it is up to you. Rest assured, we will cover all… Eventually.ReferencesKenneth J. Arrow – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 3 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1972/arrow/lecture/Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values. Yale University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nqb90. Kenneth J. Arrow; Gerard Debreu. Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy. Econometrica, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Jul., 1954), pp. 265-290.Gerard Debreu – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 3 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1983/debreu/lecture/George J. Stigler – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 3 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1982/stigler/lecture/George J. Stigler – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Mon. 3 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1982/stigler/speech/George J. Stigler. (2003). Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. Bibliovault OAI Repository, the University of Chicago Press. George J. Stigler, 1971. "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 2(1), pages 3-21, Spring.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó la Conferencia Magistral en directo a través de www.frdelpino.es titulada «El futuro del capitalismo» que impartieron Anne Case y Angus Deaton con motivo se su última obra titulada «Muertes por desesperación y el futuro del capitalismo» publicada por Deusto. Anne Case es Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emérita en la Universidad de Princeton, donde dirige el Programa de Investigación en Estudios del Desarrollo. La profesora Case ha escrito extensamente sobre la salud a lo largo de su vida. Entre otros galardones, ha recibido el Premio Kenneth J. Arrow en Economía de la Salud de la Asociación Internacional de Economía de la Salud, por su trabajo sobre los vínculos entre economía y salud en la infancia, y el Premio Cozzarelli de la National Academy of Sciences por su investigación sobre morbilidad y mortalidad en la mediana edad. Angus Deaton es investigador principal y profesor emérito Dwight D. Eisenhower de economía y asuntos internacionales en la Escuela de Asuntos Públicos e Internacionales Woodrow Wilson y en el Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Princeton. En el año 2015 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía por sus aportaciones al análisis del consumo, la pobreza y el bienestar.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó la Conferencia Magistral en directo a través de www.frdelpino.es titulada «El futuro del capitalismo» que impartieron Anne Case y Angus Deaton con motivo se su última obra titulada «Muertes por desesperación y el futuro del capitalismo» publicada por Deusto. Anne Case es Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emérita en la Universidad de Princeton, donde dirige el Programa de Investigación en Estudios del Desarrollo. La profesora Case ha escrito extensamente sobre la salud a lo largo de su vida. Entre otros galardones, ha recibido el Premio Kenneth J. Arrow en Economía de la Salud de la Asociación Internacional de Economía de la Salud, por su trabajo sobre los vínculos entre economía y salud en la infancia, y el Premio Cozzarelli de la National Academy of Sciences por su investigación sobre morbilidad y mortalidad en la mediana edad. Angus Deaton es investigador principal y profesor emérito Dwight D. Eisenhower de economía y asuntos internacionales en la Escuela de Asuntos Públicos e Internacionales Woodrow Wilson y en el Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Princeton. En el año 2015 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía por sus aportaciones al análisis del consumo, la pobreza y el bienestar.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó la Conferencia Magistral en directo a través de www.frdelpino.es titulada «El futuro del capitalismo» que impartieron Anne Case y Angus Deaton con motivo se su última obra titulada «Muertes por desesperación y el futuro del capitalismo» publicada por Deusto. Anne Case es Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emérita en la Universidad de Princeton, donde dirige el Programa de Investigación en Estudios del Desarrollo. La profesora Case ha escrito extensamente sobre la salud a lo largo de su vida. Entre otros galardones, ha recibido el Premio Kenneth J. Arrow en Economía de la Salud de la Asociación Internacional de Economía de la Salud, por su trabajo sobre los vínculos entre economía y salud en la infancia, y el Premio Cozzarelli de la National Academy of Sciences por su investigación sobre morbilidad y mortalidad en la mediana edad. Angus Deaton es investigador principal y profesor emérito Dwight D. Eisenhower de economía y asuntos internacionales en la Escuela de Asuntos Públicos e Internacionales Woodrow Wilson y en el Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Princeton. En el año 2015 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía por sus aportaciones al análisis del consumo, la pobreza y el bienestar.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó la Conferencia Magistral en directo a través de www.frdelpino.es titulada «El futuro del capitalismo» que impartieron Anne Case y Angus Deaton con motivo se su última obra titulada «Muertes por desesperación y el futuro del capitalismo» publicada por Deusto. Anne Case es Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emérita en la Universidad de Princeton, donde dirige el Programa de Investigación en Estudios del Desarrollo. La profesora Case ha escrito extensamente sobre la salud a lo largo de su vida. Entre otros galardones, ha recibido el Premio Kenneth J. Arrow en Economía de la Salud de la Asociación Internacional de Economía de la Salud, por su trabajo sobre los vínculos entre economía y salud en la infancia, y el Premio Cozzarelli de la National Academy of Sciences por su investigación sobre morbilidad y mortalidad en la mediana edad. Angus Deaton es investigador principal y profesor emérito Dwight D. Eisenhower de economía y asuntos internacionales en la Escuela de Asuntos Públicos e Internacionales Woodrow Wilson y en el Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Princeton. En el año 2015 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía por sus aportaciones al análisis del consumo, la pobreza y el bienestar.

Political violence aside, the 20th century saw great progress. Looking at health progress, as one example, Princeton University economist Anne Case notes it was a century of expanding lifetimes. “Just to take one particular group,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “if you look at people aged 45 to 54 in the U.S., back in 1900 the death rate was 1,500 per 100,000. By the end of the century, it was down below 400 per 100,000. “The risk of dying just fell dramatically and fairly smoothly. There were a couple of spikes -- one was the 1918 flu epidemic -- and a little plateau in the 1960s when people were dying from having smoked heavily in their 20s and 30s and 40s. But people stopped smoking, there was a medical advance as antihypertensives came on the scene, and progress continued from 1970 through to the end of the century.” Even stubborn health disparities – such as the life expectancy gaps between say whites and blacks, or between the rich and the poor - narrowed in the century’s second half. “We thought that sort of progress should continue,” Case says. But as she and fellow Princeton economist Angus Deaton found as they sleuthed through the data, starting in the 1990s progress had reversed for a fairly large demographic in the U.S. population. “[W]hat Angus and I found was that after literally a century of progress, among whites without a college degree – these would be people without a four-year degree in the U.S. – mortality rates stopped falling and actually started to rise.” The trend was clear: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again. “This was stunning news to us and we thought we must have done something wrong because this never happens, or if it had happened, it would have been reported,” Case admits. But it was news, and Case and Deaton’s findings and analysis – that controllable behaviors like drug addiction, suicide and alcohol addiction were driving the numbers – created a furor. Citing sociologist Emile Durkheim’s argument that suicide is more likely when social integration breaks down, Case explains, “We think of all of these as a form of suicide – not necessarily that a drug addict wants to take him or herself out, but that it leads to that eventually.” Meanwhile, Case and Deaton’s shorthand expression ‘deaths of despair’ entered the common –not just the academic social science – lexicon. (It helped that they were speaking publicly about this “group that just wasn’t on anyone’s radar” at roughly the same time that a demographic both similar and similarly ‘unknown’ was seen as a surprise well of strength for the political maverick Donald Trump.) Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism is also the name of the new bestselling book that Case and Deaton, her husband, have written for Princeton University Press. (Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, has also appeared on Social Science Bites.) The book looks at the physical and mental causes of these deaths – Case and Deaton count 150,000 of them in 2018 alone – and how aspects of America’s unique medical and pharmaceutical system have resulted in this unique tragedy. Case explains that these deaths of despair didn’t suddenly arise in the 1990s, but they had been obscured by advances made in treating heart disease (and obesity, despair, drugs, alcohol are all hard on the heart). “As deaths of despair got larger and larger, it would have taken more progress against heart disease for this to continue to fly under the radar. Instead what happened was we stopped making progress against heart disease.” Also in the 1990s, prescription opioids became widely available in the United States – “a self-inflicted wound,” Case says that made the existing trend “horrifically” worse. “In the U.S. in the mid-1990s Oxycontin was allowed onto the streets. Any doctor with a script could prescribe it. It’s basically heroin in pill form with an FDA label on it, and they sprinkled it like jelly beans. It landed on very fertile soil.” Between opioids and existing problems with America’s mostly private health care system, deaths from despair keep rising. What might end this cycle? Something dramatic, Case says. And perhaps something already creating drama … “We think something is going to have to break, and break badly, in order for us to see reform. Maybe, possibly, COVID-19 is breaking things really badly and this might be a time when enough people in the middle of the distribution start talking about reform, then it might be possible to see change.” Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton, where she directs the Research Program in Development Studies. She’s received numerous awards for her work on the nexus between economic health and physical health, including the Kenneth J. Arrow Prize in Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association and the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and an affiliate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. Case is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

President Donald Trump pledged to bring jobs back to America during his campaign, appealing to a strong middle class base that’s been struggling with stagnant wages and few job opportunities. Since the 1990s, death rates among this demographic — specifically middle-aged white Americans without college degrees — have been on the rise thanks to opioid addiction, alcohol abuse and suicide. This same pattern isn’t seen in other parts of the world, reversing decades of progress. Economist Anne Case, whose landmark study with co-author Sir Angus Deaton first detected the rise in mortality rates, joins this episode to discuss why “deaths of despair” are plaguing middle-aged white Americans. Case, who has written extensively on health over the life course, is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She also serves as director of the Research Program in Development Studies. Case and Deaton’s research on midlife mobility and mortality has been cited in hundreds of media outlets around the world. For this work, she received the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Case also was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Prize in Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association or her work on the links between economic status and health status in childhood.

Between 1980 and 2000, the wealth of our nation grew enormously. Interest rates dropped, dot com businesses grew, and then the housing market was rocketing. We then went into a tricky period where overall net worth grew a bit until the dot com crash; the middle class was sustained to some degree by the housing boom, and then dropped sharply with the housing crash. Dr. H. Woody Brock, President and Founder of Strategic Economic Decisions and author of American Gridlock, joins Jason Hartman for an in-depth explanation of the financial health of our nation across social classes. Dr. Brock discusses the nation overall and then breaks it down into the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The distribution of wealth have left the poor worse off and the rich very well off, as well as shrinking the middle class, but as Dr. Brock explains, looking at the distribution of consumption, the poor and middle classes are in a better position than when looking at the distribution of income. Dr. Brock also expounds on QE3, the Federal Reserve actions, bank reserves, de-leveraging, and more. He wraps up on the subject of his book, American Gridlock: Why the Right and Left are Both Wrong.Founder of Strategic Economic Decisions (SED), Inc., Dr. Horace “Woody” Brock specializes in applications of the modern Economics of Uncertainty (originally developed and championed by Kenneth J. Arrow of Stanford University) to forecasting and risk assessment in the international economy and its asset markets. Holder of five academic degrees, Dr. Brock earned his B.A., M.B.A., and M.S. (mathematics) from Harvard University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University (mathematical economics and political philosophy). He was elected an Andrew Mellon Foundation Bicentennial Fellow of the Aspen Institute in 1976. Dr. Brock studied under Kenneth J. Arrow, Professor of Economics, and John C. Harsanyi, Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Dr. Brock founded SED in 1985, and in doing so was sponsored by Fidelity, GE Capital, IBM Pension Fund, and twenty other institutions looking for a much deeper level of analysis of interest rates and the economy. In its research, SED has focused on apprehending ongoing structural changes in the economy and markets to help clients avoid the pitfalls of illegitimately extrapolating the past into the future. In this regard, Dr. Brock has worked closely with Professor Mordecai Kurz of Stanford University in developing the new theory of Rational Beliefs that is now replacing the classical theory of “Efficient Markets”. This new theory explains for the first time the way in which history rhymes but does not repeat itself.

Dr. Kenneth J. Arrow and Dr. Timothy Bresnahan, co-Editors of the Annual Review of Economics, discuss economic issues related to healthcare and the environment, as well the bright future of young scholars and important new directions in the field of economics.