[Rerun] Ariel Pakes, Professor and Economist, Harvard College

Welcome again to The Mixtape with Scott. I’m at present within the means of placing collectively a brand new slate of interviews, and whereas it’s not fairly prepared but, I didn’t need to go away you hanging. So within the meantime, I’m re-sharing some conversations from earlier seasons — episodes that I feel are value revisiting or maybe discovering for the primary time.

As we speak’s rerun is from Season Two, and it’s certainly one of my favourite interviews from that point: my dialog with Ariel Pakes, the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard College.

This was such a enjoyable and wealthy interview. Individuals both know Dr. Pakes very properly or solely by the letter “P”. He’s a towering determine in industrial group and structural econometrics, with landmark contributions each theoretical and utilized. Amongst many issues, he’s the “P” within the Berry-Levinsohn-Pakes mannequin — BLP — which stays one of the crucial influential instruments for estimating demand in differentiated product markets. That paper — Car Costs in Market Equilibrium — printed in Econometrica in 1995, has had a ripple impact not simply in economics, however properly past it.

However this interview wasn’t nearly strategies and fashions. Dr. Pakes and I talked about basketball, about rising up in a radical socialist youth group, about his early love of philosophy, and his personal path by Harvard as a younger man attempting to straddle economics and philosophy earlier than discovering his place. He spoke softly, with depth and reflection, and he provided a glimpse into how he works — by getting himself in method over his head after which slowly, patiently, working his method out. It’s a mind-set that hasn’t simply formed his personal work however has helped form the remainder of ours too.

I hope you get pleasure from this one as a lot as I did.