Currently reading @drodrik.bsky.social’s new book, releasing in a few weeks.

Join us for a launch discussion with Dani Rodrik, @chatibbasri.bsky.social, Rebecca Henderson, & @johncassidysays.bsky.social, on October 29, at Harvard Kennedy School.

Register here: www.hks.harvard.edu/events/share...

Absolutely no one:

Me: here are my best 10 movies of the 21st century:

(And 5 more: The Lobster, The Squid and the Whale, No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight, LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring)

Folks in the Boston area, we (@harvardrte.bsky.social) are hosting a panel discussion tomorrow with regional leaders at the forefront of building tech ecosystems in Colorado and Wyoming, Chicago, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sign up here: www.hks.harvard.edu/events/ameri...

From @ifp.bsky.social's Brian Potter: where do Nobel Prize winners come from? | would be interesting to unpack how these trends correlate with public R&D investments, especially during and post WWII in the US www.construction-physics.com/p/who-wins-n...

[email protected], @raffasadun.bsky.social, et al study 776 P&G employees & find large effects of #AI on collaboration & expertise: individuals w/ AI match the performance of teams without AI, produce more balanced solutions, & report positive emotions on the job papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Finally, today's institutions and rules are an accretion of over 150 years of innovations and updates to policies. We trace this history - from the creation of land grant colleges in the 1860s to New Market Tax Credits, Empowerment Zones, Opportunity Zones, & Bidenomics in the last couple of decades

- regional admin capacity varies greatly, adversely affecting the redistributional elements of place-based policies
- over time, many policies have expanded their focus, diluting their ability to target *distress*
- federal funding fluctuations/variability have huge & long-lasting downstream effects

We discuss supply chains for 6 domains: strategy and planning, business recruitment and retention, small business support, community redevelopment, workforce development, and technological innovation. Across all of these domains, policies are implemented via a range of local intermediaries

The "supply chain" framing allows us to unpack the process, the rules, intermediary institutions through which "horizontally-differentiated policy actions" are designed, funded, and implemented within "vertically structured policy domains"

Gordon Hanson, @drodrik.bsky.social, & my chapter for @nber.org's upcoming volume on place-based policy. We discuss the history of innovations in place-based policies in the US & unpack the "supply chains" through which these policies are implemented in different domains | www.nber.org/papers/w33511

@menakadoshi.bsky.social on a new place-based industrial strategy in India, to build 20 new cities: "Three features stand out in India’s $6.59 billion plan to build new industrial cities – they are scattered across the hinterland, mostly small and slow to build" | www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

@drodrik.bsky.social, with Aigner and Greenspon: Economists from developing countries are less likely to be published in top journals and receive significantly fewer citations than authors in advanced economies (especially the US) | drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/schola...

My new rule this year was to read fiction based in every place I traveled. My favorites: *Paradais* (Fernanda Melchor) and *Every Man Dies Alone* (Hans Fallada), which I'm so glad to have stumbled upon during my trips to Mexico City and Berlin respectively. Every Man Dies Alone is an all-timer!

My non-fiction choices for this year are fairly self-explanatory. I particularly liked *The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory* (Tim Alberta) and *The Fall of Roe* (Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer), both exceptional narrative non-fiction.

My favorite fiction of this year included *My Friends* (Hisham Matar), *James* (Percival Everett), and *The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store* (James McBride) — the first meditative and poignant, and the latter two bursting with action and adventure.

🧵 It’s the end of the year, which means I have some thoughts on the books I read this year (alongside my annual lamentation about not reading as much as I’d have liked to): (1/n)

Full house for the Harvard Reimagining the Economy Project’s annual “economics and beyond” panel discussion featuring Amy Kapczynski and Sam Bowles in conversation with @drodrik.bsky.social on the failures of contemporary economics and what a new paradigm might look like

Says a lot that the Department of Government Efficiency fetishizes input and process (work 80+ hours a week).