S3E12: Daniel Chen, Political Economy, Toulouse

[Music] we are all in this together it's true us and them but me and you welcome to the mixtape with Scott I am Scott uh Scott cunning I'm a professor of Economics at Baylor University in Waco Texas uh and this week's guest is a professor of Economics at too uh he's had um a neat story a story that has taken him uh through a very curious kind of mindset as a Young Man uh ends up following him his whole career and has managed to take that kind of incessant curiosity uh and Broad general interest and really kind of strike out and make his own uh stamp his name is uh Daniel Chen and I think that if you look at Daniel's Vita uh which I'm going to place in the substack as well as the the um Spotify Apple kind of little spot there uh as well as YouTube you'll you'll know that you're going to recognize some of these papers the one that we're going to talk about uh has to do with a study he did um where there was a basically a workshop of Law and economics faculty that were basically training judges and uh he looks at the effect of that training on their on their Court decisions that's one of the things that you're going to hear with Daniel is um Daniel doesn't just collect data it he collects data that uh you know you wouldn't know what to do with it and it's a lot of textual data uh and he asks very very ambitious questions um drawn from that broad interest in philosophy law history psychology as well as econ uh that I think makes him such an interesting exciting person but I was going to also say Daniel fits in my like you know big picture stuff because not only is he you know part of the story of Economics he was uh he was a student of of the the Nobel laurates when he was at MIT his committee consisted of Michael Kramer bannery Esther defau and Josh angrist it was the you know the the Justice League uh of uh of of major impactful uh economists in the area of microeconomics and development and uh really dialed into the experimental design tradition so of course he he checks off so many boxes and um and just is a fascinating man uh and I wanted everybody to hear his story and I hope that you get a lot out of the story thank you so much for supporting the podcast thanks for tuning in uh I hope you enjoy it I'm going to turn it over to the the P the the previous Scott Cunningham that just existed uh an hour ago he's now dead I took his place and uh Dr Chen I hope you enjoy this byebye or see you in a minute all right well it is a pleasure to have someone that uh that I've already feel like I've known for a long time when we met recently and had breakfast together and talked um for the sake of the listener guest will you tell me your name your title and the name of the uh the The Firm that pays your pay bill your pays your bills sure all right so my name is Daniel Chen um a professor of Economics at the tulo School of economics and a te director of research at cnrs which is the French national research Association okay all right cool all right well here's do an icebreaker before we get started Susan ay told me that you're not supposed to ask people what's your favorite because their brains can't think in super relative so this is what we're going to say instead what's a vacation that you took growing up uh maybe it wasn't your favorite one but you've remembered it since then more than one time yeah um so I grew up in Texas I don't know if we talked about that when had weeks ago and um my family we just drove around almost the entire 48 states and the continental US yeah for years um um you know so like Grand Canya and Florida California like all that stuff is a Yellowstone yes we went when it was on fire um the 80s or 90s and oh wow so they're all they you know it's all wonderful experiences a big blur of sitting in the back seat with my older brother pushing the igloo to create more space yeah reading books so how do you pass time right so yeah I I love our country the when you see the country from the car on the road trips you realize well when you're with your family and you do the road trips it's so nice such a Bea and you go really far seeing those national parks even when they're on fire indeed all right so you grew up in Texas where in Texas did you grow up um we spent six years in Houston and four years in Dallas foorth okay okay what' your dad what' your mom and dad do for living yeah um so my mom um so she wanted to study medicine uh but her dad said no because she was a woman anyway um and uh when we came to the US or when they came to the US she was a stay-at-home mom and then eventually uh when I went to Maryland she went to work uh doing Library science at NIH um oh okay um my dad's side uh he's a statistics PhD and doing bio statistics and like Pharma Academia government moving around um in part because they constantly were looking for better schools so in some ways it's a standard immigrant story of um you know when they first moved they were uh bread and water for lunch every day you know no air conditioning the hot and cold Chicago weather um but yeah no I mean it's obviously they um wanted to give opportunities for me and my brother to have like a better life and um when we moved to Maryland I think it was in part because they knew about some of the math and science schools oh the DC suburbs and um that probably was a very formative experience for me okay so that y'all were in Houston and Dallas and and they're watching you age and they were like the these schools aren't going to work that's that's my understanding I think Young to you know just like reading all the books I skipped a gr or something and um yeah we went from like one year in a private school and then the rest in a public school and um but yeah it was uh it was I mean it was great obviously but in some ways going up as an immigrant it's also it's like a lot of suburbs you're just um in a car yeah so I don't know if it's that specifically different though I think I'm reflection and given today's topics of educational polarization and everything um I imagine things were relatively different in how history and social sciences are being taught but right right right right uh so how much what's the age Gap on you and your brother he is four and a half years older oh okay were y all close at all growing up yeah yeah yeah okay well so if I could have found you on a Saturday when you were like you know fourth or fifth grade what would I have you know it's like a random Saturday what would I have found you doing um my mom would be driving me to the different libraries oh yeah go to one Library check out a bunch of books then go to another Library check out a bunch of books another Library check out a bunch of books um yeah what books so what were you a big reader of what' you love met everything um fiction non-fiction um I wasn't introduced to like science fiction until seventh grade but so when I was younger it was just you know a mix of everything I do remember I would intentionally go to the 900 section of the Dey decimal to pull out um books with maps so I love Maps as a kid so like the history of something oh I was willing to history so seeing how like all the movements of countries and everything uh shifted over time yeah I also loved looking at weather maps um oh so fun fact is one year I clipped out the weather maps every day in the news paper so the end of the year I could flip through them and look for patterns oh um yeah anyway I I was uh uh what' your D what' your dad think seeing I did he him being a statistician working with data he did he start to you think he kind of noticed something you being like that um your mom or your mom yeah um yeah in fact One Summer he had me in this other High School kiden do statistics it was it was it was fine yeah um but yeah no I uh yeah no I I think oh we also had um you know kind of this emphasis on like schooling education um starting in second grade we had homeschool stuff during the summers oh okay that's when history [Music] um and social sciences really became sort of more living I guess in a way because you know you're getting exposed to the material in one perspective and then you get exposed to the material in a different perspective during the school year that um it just felt like you know all these different things fitting together um the math stuff was a little bit more just a bunch of exercises so didn't see so yeah my Saturdays were um maybe not as you know what wasn't the daoy type right right right so were you going to one of those big stem math you know math science high schools then in Maryland uh yes I so I went to Mami Blair um it's I guess it start in the 1980s with the intention of like busing kids around the county to create more of a uh demographic mix um know it was a great experience I think it was early exposure to like computer programming uh a lot of exposure to like the scientific method uh we had in nth grade uh we had to submit a proposal to run an experiment on a space shuttle and then in 10th Grade like do your own thing for a semester and then present to the to the class wow so we decided uh to like build transistors to measure signals that would then imagine it's like a satellite getting signals to triangulate where you are in space anyway um but yeah no I mean the but I think the most some of the and this maybe transitions a little bit into economics um you know the more formative classes were like AP European History AP English which psychological perspective um so even with all the math science and computer science it was definitely always the uh I guess the softer social sciences that um Drew my imagination or what would be the first thing you do um in terms of like homework assignments or something that I think um shaped what I do today did you maintain a big heavy reading hobby during all throughout High School I did um in fact all the way through the grad school where I would attend an economic seminar and then if I was feeling a little strange about it um the the Harvard University press bookstore had this discount section so everything like per off books from all the other disciplines outside economics uhuh point I would just like have this huge collection in my um uh yeah grad housing that my friends were just a little bit like little weird um yeah know I mean I think you know kind of dictate sort of where try to study if I went to a library i' get too distracted from pulling random stuff off the shelf uhhuh um but yeah know a um so I'm skipping ahead so yes in high school definitely still was reading books and then continued that habit what so if you know I mean I bet your teachers I don't I don't I don't actually want to put words in their mouth but like were you sort of I bet you were maybe um unique in a in a high school like that you know having such broad interests what do you think they thought about you well actually the high high school was um very nerdy in a way so I don't think I was that Irish just to give you um uh an example so the the largest team based off of the photograph in the yearbook was the physics team okay yeah a sense of folks found socializing socialization over academic stuff I mean maybe uh obviously I think you know I I don't I'm not in the minds of you know my teachers and counselors yeah um I I don't you know well on a scale of one my my friends were you know they're very uh some of them are prominent mathematicians today so okay I'm the the black sheep of um we didn't have any exposure to economics so law so it was it was all like math Sciences medicine and stuff oh okay on a scale of one to 10 then uh 10 being like the best high school experience you could have ever had what what would you rank that that High School experience was it like for you uh it was great no yeah IJ it a lot okay okay so then you you go to Harvard you graduated in 1999 that's when I graduated so we're both are you class of 94 for High School class of 95 95 but we're both Gen X correct yes okay we're both Gen X I stayed an additional year of because um I there was a big poetry contest uh that I missed in 98 when I should have when I was supposed to graduate so then I waited a year didn't take classes in the spring the fall took my classes in the spring and then won the Poetry Awards so I was uh graduated 99 but so you you get to Harvard and then you sort of sort into applaud math and econ and so I was just curious you know before we get into that what was it like what was it like for you stepping foot on that school I mean that must have been really cool yeah yeah no it was uh very cool um you know classmates that are uh really interesting ambitious you know in their own uh Paths of life um I think initially I had a little bit of some culture shock you know wasn't as math and sciencey for instance but um yeah no I mean the the LI Arts stuff was was great um you know being exposed to different ways of knowledge you know the the E10 sequence of course was um something that took as part of that distributional uh encouragement and then seeing it as like a combination of math history and psychology I think is further into economics that was Marty feldstein he was the one that taught you E10 yes oh so what was that like what was he like a professor yeah no so there's actually like three pillars to that class there's Martin felstein but then there's also all these other guest lecturers on specific topics so you get exposed to basically you know the the entire breath of Economics oh then your section so like a a graduate student is like teaching a lot of the the heavy Concepts and then of course the textbook I mean I I think the textbook was was bomb Blinder and it was uh you know again book where I'm confessing confessing but no it was a it was Pitch Turner is really interesting to see oh wait you know you can understand like people's motives and um also like what's soci uh optimal in some kind of social planner perspective so just kind of this spectrum of understanding humans uh explaining patterns in history and a little bit of of engineering and math at the end that you think that you almost could have gone into psychology or history because you're really interested in human behavior and you're really interested in history what was the you know a lot of people would hear econ guy interested in Psychology human behavior in history and then they'll hear you major in econ they can't figure it out what was the what's the Tipping Point what kept you out of those other two well I also I liked math I liked kind of the structure and and some ways I think because of the previous experience the the math stuff came a little bit uh relatively easier yeah I think I mean but yeah I can't emphasize enough how much I was also interested in lots of other things too so yeah choosing applied math you have to choose like a secondary like a like a field of specialization choosing between economics biology and meteorology oh so you just have like you're a renaissance man you just have so many broad interests is that is that affir has somebody ever called you that a renaissance man um no the other you're the first I believe I'm the first one yeah well you are you have so many broad interests is that they've said you're just a naturally curious person maybe yeah uh okay someone at my graduate advisor said I was like like a kid M CU and this that and that um but yeah that's not the same thing as when I on man just kind of like you're in a candy store with different well how does that make you feel what what you when you're curious like a kid is it driven by love and I love this material or is it like awe or what are the feelings you feel when you're sort of doing that kind of that kind of broad reading or just engaging um it's like trying to well there's the stories so that's that's that's pulling you in then there's this trying to understand like the broad patterns what are the rules um you know rules of human nature or rules of societal uh development and trying to uh con you know conceptualize that and whether that's either like a formal math thing or then the empirical Dimension I think is something that economics does much more so than um at least history yeah well what's a book what's a book from Harvard that the the days of college uh you know again not your maybe not your favorite book but like you think I've thought about this book even now you know you're like my age and you found yourself have thought about it a few times what's one of the what's a book like that that really seems to have left an impression on you uh so exit voice and loyalty what is that oh um so he's a like a economist political scientist and argued that a lot of like local public goods provisions and or you know schooling there can be uh pressure if people are voting with their feet to you know tiu theorem type stuff oh yeah yeah yeah uhuh then there's the Loyalty Dimension which is you know you might actually kind of want to stay and like try to improve things it it was kind of a um you know broad qual well was definitely more qualitative than mathematical um piece on trying to understand you know how governance uh Works in society oh governance that was that was interesting huh another book that was was uh the Bible as it was that was taught by James cougal his name um but just going through like lots of different stories on like how all these things that you might read about you know GR in Texas in the US South you know might have like different interpretations that were more economical oh though yeah yeah that governance thing though that had you always been interested in governance uh even back then in college well the idea that there could be a mathematical way to understand how to improve governance mechanism design Theory social Choice all that stuff I mean so that that stuff that vertical was interesting and attractive and I guess the other story on how I went to econ grad school so one is the uction economics but the other was this class um industrialization of East Asia by sociologist Again part of this Li Arty type distribution requirements and it really emphasized how economic ideas had consequences for shaping and improving development okay wait what's that what was that class uh industrialization of East Asia oh and and and they emphasize rather than just emphasizing technology or Capital they're emphasizing ideas economists technocrats oh so that sticks in your head so that sticks in my head yeah huh okay all right so if you had stopped in 1999 uh having spent that time in econ and applied math but then like uh didn't go on what were you thinking about instead of going on to become a professor what were you thinking about his other possible careers um well uh well so the the end of college I think I was already pretty set on going to graduate school and then I went to Oxford for a year to try to find out what I was interested in like research probably the early part of grad school I was you know still not sorry early part of undergrad I still was not sure you know maybe I want to go into the Sciences um so I you know interned at NIH for a summer and did stuff on Virtual broncoscopy of excuse me um yeah sort of more medical related but it didn't it didn't really resonate with me it did not wait so what kind of work was that uh medical yeah I was medical I was doing a lot of fortrend program we trans my first computer language um we're like modeling like the the data that's coming from a camera that's being stuck down your roscopy or esophagus one of um was that because you were thinking about med school I briefly did and you know as part of the Premed requirements I took um evolutionary biology mhm which was also very uh formative sort of thinking about not only like population biology but just what do we read um we read all this stuff uh like yamomo tribes like all the small scale societies and then tionary perspectives to explain what people were seeing economics right right right a theory that has some kind of mathematical structure on sure sure and change the idea that these things are endogenous like even things you're observing can change over time oh huh are you taking all this stuff are you like you know you're going to going and doing these internships because you really are someone who learns what your preferences are by by doing them or was there a p was there like a uh you know a plan um there no I think it was the more the former um so my second summer I spent part in um Scotland doing like some parallel Computing applied to I can't remember now but that tells you how was and then um I spent like a month in economic consulting or something because part of that was like a thing that folks might consider um you know with applied math economics but yeah I think yeah I think I was already pretty set on uh wanting to do you know research and economics research and you started feeling that you started feeling that towards the at some point you're like is this how it was at some point you're like these are really fascinating but I keep thinking of these application to Human Society rather than just like biology and things like that is that was that what was in your head yeah yeah okay so you apply for you don't you don't spend a ton of time outside of between school I mean you go to Oxford but you apply and you get in and then you end up going to MIT that must have also again I mean just what you've said being really interested in history and the stories was being at MIT sort of like I that's like one of the most storied departments in the world that what did that feel like going stepping foot into the you know one of the most excit you know one of the being at Paul samuelson's Department what was that like um you know it was great I mean obviously that's uh you know it's a privilege for people to attend and sort of get the kinds of like teaching you know every paper sort of thinking about how it can be improved and what are the next couple ideas or uh from from each of the classes um the lunches and seminars were uh it's like learning by listening um so sort of me coming in having all these you know Curiosities but then how to go from those Curiosities into a paper I think the biggest learning experience in the first um year and a half and you start writing papers did you start did your curiosity that it always been a consumer are you like Translating that into being a a producer pretty quickly um sort of um so for my secondary conom metrics paper I was interested in the idea of Paradigm shifts yeah uh you know uh back then scraping wasn't really a thing so it's what was it you build spiders or web crawlers collecting you know aconic papers and trying to here's a biological analge analogy where you imagine like on the walls of the Museum of Natural Science like a pH genetic tree and then you pass the doorway there's a mass extinction event and then the Future Part of the tree comes out of the small part of the previous tree and I wanted to operationalize that statistically so I was like collecting lots of data and um yeah and that had some uh trade-offs with cour work uhhuh yeah um so uh macro first year macro is like starting in the spring of your first year and then fallowing to the fall I think my last macro I was not so good a student but um as a kudos to me taking the exam a second time the professor's work actually then applied to sort of questions I was interested in in terms of like on development so like you know incentives underlying things that we now view as human rights violations and stuff I don't think he was intending his macroeconomic model to be applied in that direction but you know that's that's what I did just kind of turn lemonade to Lemonade but um also absorb things and just apply it to the things that I saw around me c so you end up working I mean with like an Allstar committee you've got Esther defo bannery Michael Kramer and Josh angrist as your advisers who who's kind of your your main advisor of those of that committee uh Esther Esther is well so so before I ask about that you know had bannery written his hurting paper by the time that you're like doing that and M so were were you interested in these kinds of like th those kinds of theory papers you know also as opposed to just like did you imagine I mean a person with an applied micro I mean sorry with an applied math background interested in he Theory Evol I mean interested in things like stories and evolution of society if you I could imagine so easily that you would have been uh you would have gone into this like writing a herting paper or just doing sort of these very Innovative theoretical papers was that ever on your on your topic that that's where you were going to go um I did indeed go to gr School thinking I would do like Theory or applied Theory um there was something well firstly I you know a positive way to view my research um Genesis here is that all the earlier exposure to the scientific method experiments programming which obviously is very relevant for data um that I think is like the 70% of right what I was doing I'd say 30% is there was some kind of Dyslexia between like math and words let leave it at that so it's not um like economic theory and like these papers you know it's constantly you have to go back and forth between the math and the words and very different from kind of more applied math engineering math um so yeah anyway I mean well so this is like what like early 2000s you're going to you start sorting into those relationships with those four peoples and especially Esther to Flo that that would been like 02 01 or something yes so how do you and her end up matching how did that happen well I I mean so I mentioned I was interested in development issues development questions that Drew me into economics so I took develop um also um not sure exactly the the Genesis of what came first or not so I mentioned Paradigm shifts as the second year project but then my market paper turn out to be about religious fundamentalism ideas and beliefs and incommensurability um but I was using Indonesia and its financial crisis as the natural experiment and since she had you know used uh the Indonesian uh school expansion as a natural experiment and was in some ways kind of a in terms of methods and and setting oh okay okay how'd you get interested in that in that question of the religious fundamentalism um and which country did you say it was Indonesia Indonesia okay what religion fundamentalism are we talking about uh this was Islamic Resurgence m crisis and then 911 had you know just happened oh got it a lot of you know interest and trying to understand um you know what drives these beliefs slash you know governance with the lower case G and um that was trying to show you know just economic distress increase religious intensity in the first place and then form of social insurance that you know people have you know different um shocks all the time and so you could collectively agree to be insuring each other but then what made religion special is that it could be expost insurance so you get hit hard you can decide to join and then what keeps it self-sustaining is that there can be sanctions against people who are leaving or in another group that's kind of how it all sort of fit together but it was is that drawing on Larry yanuk con's sort of sacrifices and stigma Concepts yes it was drawing on AA cone Ellie burman's work yeah uhuh those some of the theoretical models of of uh gr Geno at Georgetown and uhuh some other macro bolks that had been writing about stuff at the same time right right but you're applying it to governance questions is that because of 911 you're applying it to these governance questions about the these sort of these sort of religious groups are sort of like what's the governance exactly how how do I think that um what makes an organization that's uh like a religious sect or you know a a group work and bring make self sustaining so if people can get Negative shocks and then join the group then you could always leave afterwards so then you don't get like that um physical selfing Dimension oh I see I see it's is that a is that framed as a free writing problem or is that framed as like a the need for to survive and like over a multi-time period that's not exactly the free writing kind of stuff yanak con's talking about right uh it's it's related so you know he talks about um strict clubs or something so it's like a you know you have all these extra cost that are you know imposed and that makes the club kind of more economically optimal I then had applied that framework as a postto to thinking about why the religious F tends to be against the welfare state in the US um because if you know offer or you know government's there to provide Alternative forms of insurance then it competes against a constituency that's what so did you end up publish in that yeah um so the Indonesia paper was published in the jpe oh that's fantastic that must have felt great was that shortly after you graduated no that was um my first experience at a journal it took two years uhhuh was um yeah I guess a negative draw in terms of how long it took now I ended up publishing it 2010 I grad oh okay okay yeah well so you graduate and when you graduate you do not immediately go into Academia you decide to get a JD at in uh in you decid to go to La law school at Harvard what what did you feel like well okay I'm going to put words in your mouth and then you tell me that Scott that's inaccurate but one interpretation would be you felt like something was missing that like you know you you are uh missing some piece of human capital but is that accurate what was the reasons for you to go to to law school um I don't know if that's the right framing so so as a postto I found my work moving the direction of Law and development as opposed to Pure Economic Development and then I was always interested in like Devol Law Courts and affecting social change you know changing you know people's beliefs about what's fair just and and so forth rights you know rights revolutions um given that neither law development or this law Norms um work was that bread and butter for economic development much less you know economics I you know thought well uh law school is very inter disciplinary maybe there's some more substantive overlap with um the stuff that people work on yeah when I went to law school was definitely with the idea of you know I'm interested in still interested in like you know research and um having more of a exchange with the the legal uh scholarship but that found I guess both the development folks there were not so interested in economics second sort of um a huge new like search SL data in terms of you know every day you're discussing like the judges normative commitments what they thought was fair and just and you're hearing your classmates sort of say oh look I disagree and this is why and how could it have been better and um to part of this when into well um you know judges are randomly assigned and 2006 was like the first paper and I was told in 2007 you know these circuit judges are me assign and I thought okay we're spending all this time in class and reading these opinions hypothesis about the potential effects of the rulings but no data and so obviously you know influenced by du flow in ban angist and also Kramer with in terms of how can we get better evidence for policy makers I thought well could we do something also for the judges and that led to a stream of work um and then um I went to a conference in at the max P Institute in 2008 they asked to present that Paradigm Shift paper they did so it's still out there this Paradigm Shift paper around crazy um but yeah anyway it was but it was like with experimental philosophers also at the conference oh totally opened my mind a whole new set of um you know research questions and how we could and you I I went to the behavioral summer camp you know in grad school and you know so but just sort of being able to bridge the behavioral experimental economics approach to asking these types of questions I think then uh led to um yeah subsequent years of work of trying to get a better reveal preference measurements of what people think is and just or their deontological you know commitments their their moral uh more views um and yeah I uh I I feel like I'm skipping ahead while no no no you know it's funny it's funny I'm thinking of this kid going to all these libraries getting all these books and it's like I'm listening to an adult doing the same thing uh jump you know going into so you've just continued to be very very curious and make it work for you I mean you know because I I could imagine I could imagine someone at some point in your life saying you need to focus more and and you've always it seems like you've just known a little bit about who you are is that right you've known what you're what you've got to do to be your to be your best self um I've known what questions are interesting to me and um and yeah for sure I'm not answering them in a kind of linear sort of methodical way it's often I think this is a little bit of the influence of U you know Michael Michael Cramer and his earlier work of things that are kind of unex unexpected synapses that then i' let me kind of return and answer some of those questions even if at the at the moment there's no specific way to answer them oh but yeah no I uh was definitely told to focus yeah um so H but well I mean sometimes that that advice is the right advice and sometimes it's not the right advice why do you think it's been the why why do you think it's the that that's not the right advice per se globally for you what what is it about your personality that that that your brain needs to be doing this kind of thing to be why why is that in your production function I mean uh to be sure like when you're on a project on a paper when one F so and you know whether there's like not letting go drilling into every single rabbit hole and like really really wanting to know and and so forth I think that that's that's still there end is uh reflected in some papers and presentations that I give where there's so many buttons and uh um excuse me um and then I think also it's kind of like retrospective opportunities where you look back and you say oh this kind of all fits together in a way even if I didn't have that specific label yeah so excuse me one second yeah so when I was at Chicago during my post talk I think Steve levit once said oh you know one way to characterize your over is you know how Market forces interact with normative commit normative commitments I think that was a good way to kind of capture and then also bring the foundations for the subsequent work that I was then going to do yeah so I think every now and then um you know doing that to yourself uh whether it's like you're applying for Grants or whether you're writing I think Lis kapo at Harvard Law was giving kind of like oh you know every five years or every two years he just kind of writes himself this is like a a document that characterizes or focuses himself and I think in a way that is how I work but not everyone you know works works that way also I should emphasize that sometimes it's teaching opportunities that give the ability to to to do this self-structure but non-structure if you know what I mean um yeah and so whether it's like theorizing cultural differences the economics of fundamentalism that I was doing at Chicago or um hermom metrics which is like hermeneutics and econometrics oh did you make that up I've never heard of that as far as I know I think it's a neologism um but yeah it was some was teaching when I was a at harvy law to the undergrad econ students oh wait what is that what is what is Herman metrics hermom metrics well okay so first human hermeneutics is like interpretation uhhuh ecometrics is like measurement so uhhuh a play on words but then also um I went through different ways of thinking about the economics of interpretation so like like different ways of you know interpret you know interpretation as we saw it whether from religious or legal texts oh another would be like did you say wait did you say hermeneutics responding to incentives did you just say that yes oh I've never thought of that huh wait so give me an example so the um the the political economy of beliefs project that I mentioned just a few minutes ago is one example um so that explains the patterns in the US but I saying well but you know it depends if there's a large religious constituent for the leits to kind of care about if you anyway it was about like church State separation so if you have separate church and state then the government is competitive against the religious constituency but if you don't then you'd be more Pro welfare what are the Elite incentives to separate church and state and that's like a separate piece but oh additional interpretations that also is you know interpretations of the Gazoo oh wow wow how far did you end up going with that what what's the econometrics you're doing what's the what's on the leftand side and the right hand side of that sure um so another part was let's do the ROM assignment of interpreters oh yeah so um know I know you're interested in like the the the genealogy of econometric s ideas um so my co-author and I so she was a Harvard PhD at the time and we took our first application this is back in 2008 on um what is the effects of sexual harassment law on gender inequality and because you know accan it's you know there's law on econ perspectives on it's just a mandated benefit Andor legal regulation but there is also alternative theories of like Insider Outsider involuntary unemployment and so forth anyway so she presented guo inin was you know in the in the audience and was like why are you just using political party and gender you have lots of other biographical characteristics and that's how the paper with Chris Hansen Victor chukov and Alex balani um came into being of like here's like a high-dimensional set of instrumental variables that are possibly feasible get out of here and then yeah that's where it was born that's where that that was that's where that like Ivy lasso kind of stuff was born out of that they were they were working on stuff theoretically you know mathematically uhuh but you know Chris was a a close classmate and you continued to bounce ideas and um we and so you know I just used that I just used your paper in a paper that I just published at jhr where we used Ivy lasso uh because we had a lot of uh randomized clinicians at booking and we were looking at the effect of the um being classified mentally ill on about amongst these inmates but I was meant to tell you that I um wow that is so fascinating huh how me how far did you end up doing uh work on this hermeneutic econometrics I mean did you ever show this to people like in I mean like people in law would probably find that Fascinating People in literature would find it f even in religion um I mean anecdotes uh did a talk uh I was yeah Tyler Cohen thought it was um an interesting neologism and alen Kagan also um no I I you know I have it I have to I taught it twice uh but it's like it kind of gets into the idea that the text is uh living because literally it's endogenous to these people who are responding to incentives in some way is that right yeah yeah wow that's an original idea huh that's pretty crazy um what data set do you need to do something with like that what do you what what is the ideal data set sure um so uh you know I started to collect all the court cases court cases yeah in the US um in part to you know first it's building off the the shoulders of others of course there was like this 5% random sample that NSF sponsored um like data collection of and then I was like well let's see what happens if we get the 100% there were uh you know we have this paper that looks at the effects of you know economics training on federal judges and then the subsequent decision making their writing the habits of mind sentencing disparities sentencing harshness so introducing judges to a paradigm right right that's a great segue that that's the paper I wanted to talk about um that's the ideas have consequences paper with Elliot Ash and Sur Nadu okay so you can you just sort of give um the elevator pitch of that for the sake of the reader that that I think actually people have heard of this paper but it they're going to be excited to hear that hear it again here what what's this paper about sure um so starting the 1970s there was this um training program for us judges about like 20 every summer um part of the controversy around this was the training program was funded by large corporate donors almost all of whom would be litigating at some point in front of these judges um and nevertheless it was uh presented as like a you know objective here we are teaching you economic ideas micro 101 um but also like the Chicago sort of Law and economics view of the world so it's not started it's not started by like Chicago it's started by what what what's the group that's starting it it actually it was started by a former Chicago Law faculty Oh Henry Manny um and you know he was uh on the spectrum of economic ideas was a little bit more out there um for instance saying that insider trading is economically efficient and you know profit is like the only uh Dimension through which one should you know consider social Walker right um but yeah no it was in the south of Miami you know seemed like it was like a resort type of hobnobbing for the judges but you know there's also a lot of rigorous like teaching like 6 days a week 9:00 a.m. 7 P.M getting homework assignments um and there's lots of testimonials from the judges saying how much they really appreciated um the teaching and are they getting paid are the judges getting paid to be in this thing they're not aware they're not maybe it was like um the travel foundations would be covered oh but they hold it in a super nice place so they're like they're swimming and stuff in the Caribbean or whatever I don't know there's no pictures of that the journalists didn't talk about that but um but yeah I mean just reading like the older court cases you can really see how much they are potentially struggling with economic Concepts oh like I mean example what what what's what's an example they're struggling with um well so a lot of these cases have like economic ideas floating in the background and then you have to you know whether it's like antitrust you know what is uh what is competitive what does it mean what is competitive Behavior ah right so that definitely had some Paradigm shifts over the last century in terms of what are the right is what Judes to think about any Trust but uh the yeah but the examples of like economic ideas and so forth that I use when I teach or present the paper is um comes from contract law where um you know when you have a contract you know people typically think there's a duty to keep a promise you know we you know we shouldn't be allowed to breach um but there is this economic concept called efficient breach Theory yeah so two parties uh one who's that associated with uh there was a 1977 law rview article uh don't remember exactly the author but Richard Posner wrote it into this 1985 or so circuit ruling oh okay okay is poser one of the people teaching at this thing he was not so or that we see from the fory request um like predominantly economics professors W hron Molton Freedman um do you have in the data how much these guys are getting paid to do this I do not huh what what have you heard anecdotally is it altruism Milton fredman's just wanting to spread the gospel of Economics or is it like they're getting paid don't know but um I mean I could imagine it's altruism that would be easy to imagine we can probably ask some of those instr instructors I think I was teaching at the very end so it goes on for how many years it goes on until 1998 so you know the names and it's judges right it's judges that are going right and so you know their names and so you can match them with their pre-treatment court rulings post treatment court rulings is that right how how how much how labor since it was it to get all that data the court rulings or the court rulings yeah the court rulings um it was pretty labor intensive um uhhuh so at least at the time you know uh you know people hadn't released public stuff and so we um followed a NSF sponsored approach of clicking and saving that's that's what NF says you can click and save um right that's right um so like the NSF team posted like the state court data like okay I'm going to Zur now there's a research fund and now have folks clicking and saving but then beyond that you need to start cleaning it yeah and that took a very long time um and then we're building off of that 5% sample so we like all right these are a bunch of variables that um previous research thought relevant so that's also so try to get that and as we're doing the regular string expression parsing we're just make sure that we're matching that 5% sound is it a lot of regular Expressions when you're doing this kind of thing or is it is it something really exotic um this is back in 2013 2014 so it was regular string expression parsing oh huh so what do you so you have how do you you get like a dictionary ahead of time that's like measuring something kind of important or what's the deal we are you know one window you have the original HTML one window you're looking at what your code is outputting and you're just manually checking constantly that's yeah but I mean like if you're running a probit or something and you're like you know what's the probability you're going to say this you're going to talk about some Coan idea it would seem like you've got to have some prior things you're trying to categorize oh okay okay all right all right so moving to the economic uh analysis yes so we um this you know we use like word embeddings the you I guess nowadays the usual approach of you learn a word from its context to understand uh you know how economic you know is um and we used a set of words that previous well we did two things one is we took like J store we have all the economics articles oh yeah other is like 10 or so phrases that legal Scholars had identified as representing law and economics Concepts like what's one cost benefit ah they didn't say that that that's that was not a common way a judge would talk in terms of why why what's what's that mean because that's like making some sort of it's not just making some sort of normative statement it's a quantifying normative statement is that the is that the idea it's a I think of as so jargon is not the right term but it's like a a parsimonious way to think about a more complex concept and bring that parsimony into your head not only can you describe it in a more precise manner yeah catchy because just just fear words but so is is that like the point of the paper is the point of the paper like they're using econ words or is the point of the paper like their judgment are shifting judgments are shifting we can see so over like this 80e time period that the NSF data set collected you can see like a huge shift in increasing conservativeness in terms and especially in economics cases what's conservativism mean in this context like what voting against government voting against government voting against government regulation voting for you know Pro business you know type things or you know like child labor type of rules do you vote you know it's not what if you what if you stratify the data and you have it like uh Democrats versus Republican elected judges is it still there um so these are not elected judges these are 10 appointed judges oh I see okay you know their Baseline political affiliation though you have the party of appointment so they president app you know approve by Senate and stuff and yes this is all surviving uh controls for like Republican everybody's shifting Republicans you can actually see that Democrats are also going to this progam oh Elizabeth pop Burman I interviewed Elizabeth pop Burman on her new book uh two years ago about the economic way of thinking in DC kind of being she she was pretty critical you know kind of corruptive a little bit but I mean I is this sort of part of a broader kind of change in governance that like the economists are having a lot of influence um probably I mean this is a period of so the 1970s like stack flation you know molt freed has TV show I mean this I think around the time that Noel PR started I mean there's a lot of reasons to think economics was having its moment and like improve Society you know structure the world and so forth um and but you know that said you know we are looking at the exact date of the judges going and that there's you know there's no it's not like there's a pent up demand that we see reflected in either the writings or decision patterns we even see the decisions flipping in the direction of on like labor and environment and you can labor and labor and environment ends up getting dinged a little bit there so it's not like they're already having like a decision preference and then they get ideas that help them justify their decisions it's like the ideas from those seminars seem to have changed how they think about these regulations and you can see tons of quotations from the economists who are teaching um about Labor environmental regulations in a way that you think today is um yeah a little startling to read but so I just wanted to give the final punch line on this so we can explain between 25 to 40% of the secular Trend in and judges votes this PR Market orientation just from the training program even thinking about spillovers so that's comparing the treatment and control we get those you know reduced form estimates that it's such and such effect size but the control you get randomly assigned to an economic chain judge that also affects you in addition you need to site president that is now infused with economics so once you take into account that well that's the next project oh wow wow has this been a fun project have you enjoyed it yes yeah yeah it what makes you really love a project when you sort of look back and you say I really had a great time on that project um I think in some ways if there's like a rich a rich way to analyze or answer that question within the this within this within the the data scope or something so um so there are like many different ways to analyze okay so that okay so that's one answer another answer is obviously like being able to explain historical change and all the stuff that we talked at the beginning of the the um and that data rat like perspective you know there's just tons and tons of data and then um and then being to yeah there's like a psychological aspect to this too right so why are the judges being you know affected um yeah I mean it in some ways so this project has its the it's its own um legs and stuff because it's it creates that richness that you can kind of get lost while you're doing the study and another one that is an example is um I was looking at the the the the death penalty during World War I sentence 3,000 soldiers but only executed about 10% so and you know easy kind of analysis is like well what's the cause or effect of execution on subsequent desertion within the oh deterrent type stuff deterr type stuff but I had the names of all the soldiers so you can have Irish versus non-irish at least approximation and you can see that you're spurring so it's like reducing legitimacy if you execute an Irish Soldier but that's just like the the tldr it's like all the data that was um you know then digitized oh there's desertion you can either just use death tenant data oh that's just a Sprat that's too that's not too hard oh but now there are these police gazettes published in the UK newspaper archives War Diaries from like you know someone taking a picture of handwriting all the casualties data all the like geolocation of like units moving around and so Maps right and oh yeah all the officers that were like moving from you know one one place to another this is just this richness to kind of analyze that setting that um you know made it kind of you're you're losing track of time it's not just like it's not just that you have diverse ideas a big part of it is this this what you call it a data rat you you collect the way that people collect stamps you you're collecting data and you're using a variety of data sources in these projects just just way more than probably normal like than in a typical Ecom paper is that accurate that's accurate and then another hat we haven't really talked about is like giving people the tools to collect their own data yeah right o Tree project that was the experimental philosophy measuring Norm equipments and then a toolkit for others to reduce 90% of the time you know you have a thought experiment on what you want to you know measure and then having data on your hands um so what was O Tre again what's o Tre for the sake of the listener sure um so otri is a open source programming language for researchers economists Bal scientists sociologists even psychologists um to collect data in typically in strategic interaction settings that was its original sort of comparative advantage because relative to the status quo you had some kind of like C++ type language that close source and this is like python it's online line it's modular Etc made it much easier to ask new questions because the code was much more flexible yeah you know copy pasting like 300 lines of code to do like a simple thing it's now like maybe 10 lines of code got it and so I like to maybe even Bridges back to my original sets of Interest which is like now if we have a tool that helps people better understand other people you know we can increase recognition respect so yeah but but also it's um yeah it's a it's it's a it's a tool for studying decision-making testing like different theories um and in the last couple years there's a whole another Zoom call probably which is pivoting O tree to like supporting decision- making so we've started to do like O2 justice so oh all this analysis of digal analytics and biases and you know machine learning on judges uh writings and decisions how can we you know now build tools that can support them and so forth going forward yeah yeah that's great um well I've kept you a little bit longer um I I want to kind of just uh imagine for a minute you know you're you could go back in time and you meet your young younger self and uh you know you could go back and tell them anything that's one way of asking this question but another way of asking the question is you meet someone now young person like you and they just really remind you of yourself when you were younger you know uh maybe they're in college or maybe they're early in the uh MIT but maybe for some reason they don't have as much confidence about you know where to go or or how to become the economist that you sort of know is in them what kind of advice do you do you think those people need to hear um uh well you know keep keep those questions in mind I mean this is a little bit boilerplate but you know whether it's uh on paper or digital we just keep a keep elaborate things that you might eventually you know want to pursue um and even if you have to put on the back burner for a little bit or 20 years maybe eventually there's like uh some technology whether it's someone solved a new theorem or the or the programming or the collaborator or counterpart or whatever like any of these um can help you know bring those earlier ideas into to fruition yep and and then just keep pushing through I guess yeah well thanks so much Daniel uh for being on the show it's been such a delight uh for us we met uh two or three weeks ago and I'm looking forward to us becoming friends I hope that happens uh it's really nice to have you on the the podcast of course thank you so it's great to see your guys