Student reading list
The seen and the unseen
- Dissoi Logoi is a rhetorical exercise of unknown authorship, most likely dating to just after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) based on comments within the exercise’s text. A core text of the Sophists, it is was this kind of argumentation that Plato was responding to in his work.
Discounting and time
- Searching for Safety by Aaron Wildavsky
- “Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective” by Robort Solow
- “On hyperbolic discounting and uncertain hazard rates” by P. D. Sozou
- “RISK IN TIME: The Intertwined Nature of Risk Taking and Time Discounting” by Thomas F. Epper and Helga Fehr-Duda
Information and firms
- “Designing organizations for an information-rich world” by Herbert Simon
- “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox” by Paul A. David
Economics of AI or workers and robots
- “The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software)” by Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein
- “Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics” by Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein
- “Technology and jobs: A systematic literature review” by Kerstin Hötte, Melline Somers, & Angelos Theodorakopoulos
- “Are Workers Losing to Robots?” By Sylvain Leduc & Zheng Liu
- “Measuring the Gig Economy: Current Knowledge and Open Issues” by Katharine G. Abraham, John C. Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky & James R. Spletzer
Platform economics and zero priced goods
- “The Economics of Two-Sided Markets” Marc Rysman
- “Controllability of complex networks” by Yang-Yu Liu, Jean-Jacques Slotine & Albert-László Barabási (2011)
- “The Specialness of Zero” by Joshua Gans (2020)
- “The Economics of Information” by George J. Stigler
Public policy and wicked problems
- “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” by Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber
- “Congress is a ‘They,’ not an ‘It’: Legislative intent as oxymoron” by Kenneth A. Shepsle
- Ethan Mollick is a big fan of this paper “because I think it is some of the tightest, wisdom-packed writing on managing complex systems ever. And almost every system is a complex system today, which is why cascading failures are swirling around us.”
The economics of privacy
- “The Economics of Privacy” (1981) by Richard A. Posner
- “Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising” by Avi Goldfarb and Catherine E. Tucker
- “Privacy Regulation and Market Structure” (2011) by James Campbell, Avi Goldfarb, and Catherine Tucker
Economics of efficiency
- The concept of “efficiency” as used in economics is multi-faceted, as is shown in the chart below. This lecture helps to clarify it.
Freedom of speech
- “Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking About You” by Eugene Volokh
Economic resources
- Power Laws in Economics: An Introduction
- Market Efficiency and Market Failures by Jon Steinsson
- Political Economy Lecture Notes by Daron Acemoglu
- Regional Impact Models" by William A. Schaffer; A critique of input-output models
- Scott H. Irwin’s Personal Collection of Hidden Academic Treasures. “My collection of academic papers that are not well known today but I think are significant and worth preserving.” Mostly on the topic of agricultural economics
- “Introduction fo Microeconomics” Dr Dilts
The ultimate resource
- The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
Political economy
- “Some Economics of Property Rights” by Armen Alchian
Machine learning and data science
- Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science
- Landmark papers in Machine Learning
- Software engineering books to read and reread | Hacker News
Miscellaneous resources
DARPA
- “The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”
- “Why does DARPA work?” by Ben Reinhardt
NASA and space
- “SLS: Is cancellation too good?” by Casey Handler
Stats
- “Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations.” by Sander Greenland, Stephen J. Senn, Kenneth J. Rothman, John B. Carlin, Charles Poole, Steven N. Goodman, and Douglas G. Altman
- “The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?”
- A great explainer on the problem of bias.
The limits of knowledge in machine learning
- “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning” by Pedro Domingos (2012) alternate version
- “Data mining fool’s gold” by Gary Smith
CRS Reports
Reading lists:
- “Reading List in Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics” (2014)
- “New Institutional Economics: Reading List, Introductory”
- “Democracy in a Digital Age” Papacharissi
- “Seminar in Media Studies” Papacharissi
Great writing
- Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
First published Jan 16, 2023