Tech policy reading list

What follows is a syllabus of sorts. It is a blend of papers, lecture notes, and resources that I find helpful or were illuminating when I began policy work. Policy spans countless disciplines including economics, law, political science, sociology, philosophy and increasingly the physical sciences. If you want to be successful, you need to read widely.

Do the Work, Do the Readings

Do the readings. Always read the article or the law. Always read the footnotes. Always read about the assumptions of the model. Do the work.

Start with “The Butler Did It.” It is short, less than a page, and it cuts right to the point:

Everyone knows the Butler did it. But in graduate school, you don’t have time to enjoy the whole mystery. You have to be able to very quickly take in who did it, how they did it, why they did it, when and where they did it, and who else knew about it. This method will help you get the answers that you need quickly and confidently and allow you to survive graduate school reading without undue stress.

The more you do this, the more you will see patterns in writing. It will help you tear through material. The more you read, the quicker you’ll become.

But just as important as doing the readings, you need to seek out good writers. Unless you had incredible teachers, most of the written material that you have encountered in your life is just bad prose. Take notice of how they write and how they construct stories and ideas, then steal those ideas. Early in his career, the writer Hunter S. Thompson hand-typed the entirety of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms to find the cadence of these writers. ?uestlove, one of the most influential drummers currently alive, did the same in his sessions with D’Angelo, replaying entire albums from the greats to commit to muscle memory their cadence.

Here are some of my favorites:

Also consider reading some of the classics on writing well:

Finally, follow the advice of Northrop Frye: “I realized early in my critical life that evaluation was a minor and subordinate function of the critical process, at best an incidental by-product, which should never be allowed to take priority over scholarship.” Start with scholarship, criticism will naturally follow.

Study the Classics (in Policy)

Learn the Basics of Congress, Regulation, and the Courts

Not enough people understand congressional rules and procedures.

Study the Classics (in Tech Policy and Philosophy)

Study the Classics (in Economics)

  • Even if you have had formal economic training, I’d suggest reading Peter Klein’s introduction to “New Institutional Economics,” (NIE) which is critical for policy analysts. NIE has been incredibly influential in policy as it is an interdisciplinary study that spans “economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand social, political and commercial institutions.” Many scholars in this field have won Nobels for their work on understanding institutions, which is ultimately what policy aims to shape.
  • Frederic Bastiat’s classic “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” laid out the goalposts for economists long ago. “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one,” he said. “The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”
  • Hayek opens his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” with one of the big questions in economics, “What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?”
  • When Ronald Coase was granted the Nobel in Economics, the committee singled out his papers “The Nature of the Firm,” and “The Problem of Social Cost” for establishing the study of law and economics. “The Nature of the Firm” aims “to discover why a firm emerges at all in a specialised exchange economy.” In other words, why do we have companies in the first place? Why don’t we just contract in the marketplace for everything? “The Problem of Social Cost” was the first comprehensive paper dealing with the economic problem of externalities. I’d also read “The Federal Communications Commission,” which argued for spectrum auctions, an idea that was eventually adopted by the FCC 35 years later.
  • Armen A. Alchian and Harold Demsetz’s “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization” is “credited with introducing the modern theory of the firm, the article looked at how problems associated with team production, such as shirking while leaving others to do the work, affect the organizational arrangements used by firms.”
  • Alchian “Information Costs, Pricing, and Resource Unemployment”
  • Demsetz “Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint”
  • There is this pernicious belief that companies are seeking to maximize profits. But this isn’t exactly right. As Armen Alchian’s “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory” (1950) explains, firms are looking for positive returns. They are seeking alpha.
  • Deirdre McCloskey opens If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise with a bold charge, “It is pretty clear that an economist, like a poet, uses metaphors. They are called ‘models.’ The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is ‘just like’ a curve on a blackboard. No one has so far seen a literal demand curve floating in the sky above Manhattan.”
  • The Ronald Coase Institute has an extended list of readings in new institutional economics.
  • Adam R Brown’s “Wikisum: Summaries of political science research” contains a detailed list of summaries of key political science and economics papers.
  • George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” pioneered the concept of regulatory capture and the economic theory of regulation. I wrote about it here.
  • Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action explains why small, concentrated interest groups often win over diffuse public interests.

More Advanced Economics

Over the years, I’ve collected a number of papers and lecture notes for quick reference. They are technical, but they can be powerful resources:

Law And Economics (+ Antitrust)

Economic analysis of the law, known generally as law and economics, uses microeconomic theory to understand legal concepts.

  • Law’s Order by David Friedman is a classic text to understand the basics of the law and economics. For a slightly more advanced version, Law and Economics by Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen is worth picking up.
  • Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law helped to establish the discipline.
  • As Judge Frank Easterbrook first laid out in “The Limits of Antitrust,” antitrust enforcement is imperfect because judges and juries often lack the economic knowledge to accurately evaluate complex business practices.
  • Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism is all about transaction cost economics and their application to contract theory.
  • Avery Katz’s Foundations of the Economic Approach to Law surveys articles in the field of law and economics. The selections focus on economics' distinctive contributions as a way of thinking, discussing problems of incentive, strategic behaviour, risk and insurance, imperfect information and bounded rationality.
  • In the introduction for In Defense of Monopoly by Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee make clear the goal of the book: “First, economists’ conventional, widely accepted, and parroted static model of monopoly greatly exaggerates the economic harm done by real-world monopolies in real-world markets, which are necessarily evolutionary, dynamic, creative processes that do not square well with the static, noncreative nature of economists’ monopoly model. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom among economists (for reasons that are explored at length in this book), some degree of monopoly presence in an economy is ‘good’ because without some monopoly presence no economy can ever hope to maximize human welfare improvement over time.”
  • Gary Becker’s “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” (1968) applies rational choice theory to understand criminal behavior and optimal deterrence. The fundamental idea is that if the expected value of unlawful behavior net of legal sanctions is positive, then the market will produce it.

Innovation

Discounting and Time

Standard economic models see risk taking and time discounting as two independent dimensions of decision making. However, there is a lot of evidence that risk taking and time discounting are twinned.

Platform Economics

Multi-sided platforms create value by bringing different economic agents together. They’ve been around for decades in industries like video games, credit cards, newspapers, and radio stations. The Twin Cities’ Mall of America is as much a platform as Google is. The Internet has only facilitated the creation of such platforms. However, the economics of platforms isn’t like traditional economics and is worth studying:

The Economics of Information

Nobel Prize-winner George J. Stigler, “The Economics of Information” (1961) by George J. Stigler explains the importance of information, and information-sharing devices like advertising, in bringing the market towards equilibrium in this seminal article.

Property Rights

Privacy

The Attention Economy

Herbert Simon’s “Designing organizations for an information-rich world” remains one of my top reads for these lines: “[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

In applying this logic to individuals, Simon was the first to name and describe the attention economy. And in applying this logic to organizations, Simon brought attention to the processes that condense information for groups and organizations, which are being “withheld from the attention of other parts of the system.”

For a current review of the literature on the attention economy, see:

Freedom of Speech

A Smattering of Everything Else

And now, here is everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else but is still important to read: