I had the joy of appearing of NPR Planet Money in the Summer School series hosted by Robert Smith to discuss spectrum auctions and auctions for fishing quotas.
NPR Planet Money: When the markets need a designer
Central bank digital currencies
Andrea, Hanna and I argue in Nature Human Behaviour that the public needs to pay attention to how much CBDCs might affect our privacy. Carissa Véliz, a colleague from Oxford’s philosophy department, wrote an amazing book called “Privacy is Power” which I highly recommend to anyone who uses the Internet or owns a smartphone.
Libranomics
Can we use prices to protect nature?
The infinitely eloquent and provoking George Monbiot wrote an article in which he said a bunch of silly things:
- “Through the market, we can avoid conflict and hard choices, laws and policies, by replacing political decisions with economic calculations.”
- “Unless something is redeemable for money, a pound or dollar sign placed in front of it is senseless: price represents an expectation of payment, in accordance with market rates. In pricing a river, a landscape or an ecosystem, either you are lining it up for sale, in which case the exercise is sinister, or you are not, in which case it is meaningless.”
- “The natural capital agenda is the definitive expression of our disengagement from the living world.”
We responded, less provokingly, in a letter to the Guardian. In short, we argue that “natural capital does not prepare nature for sale; it calls attention to the worth of what is lost.”
Economics of Love Island
This was a very fun piece to write and Medium liked it so much they made a podcast out of it for their subscribers. I also recently noticed that the mechanism to allocate contestants to “judge’s houses” on the X-Factor “Six Chair Challenge” (see. e.g. Series 14, Ep. 12ff) is also a very simple version of the Gale-Shapley algorithm.
Our article in Bloomberg View about refugee matching
Scott Kominers and I wrote a piece about refugee matching for Bloomberg View. For some media coverage of the work on refugee matching please visit Refugees’ Say.
Our article in The Economist about police violence
Our piece with John McDermott about Roland Fryer’s research appeared in the The Economist print edition.
My review of “Swimming with Sharks” in the Times Literary Supplement
My article in The Week on how food banks fell in love with markets
Cool story about four Chicago economists who helped design a market to allocate food to food banks.
My review of “Why Information Grows” by Cesar Hidalgo
Here’s a video of Cesar Hidalgo explaining his ideas. This is my dissenting review of the book on Free Exchange and this is an earlier review in the Books & Arts section.
