Sid Gundapaneni

Here's a link to a new paper with "An 'Austrian' Model of Global Value Chains": scholar.harvard.edu/files/antras/f… It builds on this 1978 paper (journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…) by the late Ron Findlay, with whom I would have loved to discuss these ideas. Slides are here: scholar.harvard.edu/files/antras/f…

Since we are all talking about Tyler Cowen my favourite contribution of his is EconGoat. It made me think about economics totally differently, especially in how we (fail to) think about Hayek and what is good about competition and capitalism. mercatusgoat.s3.amazonaws.com/GOAT_Who-is-th…

How can you help to protect your local central banker? If you really want to protect your local central banker, you should probably consider voting for representatives and senators who want to cut deficits. Marching for Fed independence won’t cut it. My new post on the two cents blog I started with @RWacziarg open.substack.com/pub/thetwocent…

Thoughts on the Cowen debate: 1) I think Cowen looked at the world in the aughts and realized “I can be a normal economist or the world’s most influential blogger” and he clearly chose the latter. This was a good choice, and has led him to great heights. 2) Breadth is its own sort of depth, and the world has great need of generalists who actually do the reading 3) One reason #2 matters: most public intellectuals of a certain stature—the stature where they are invited to dinner parties with fancy people—are reduced to publicly recycling the opinions of the other dinner guests. There are lots of reasons why that happens but one obvious one is that the pundits in question don’t actually have the breadth of experience or reading to reflect on dinner party opinion. Tyler is this one of the few public intellectuals whose opinions are reliably made better because of his access to the high and mighty. 4) There is probably no academic in America who has a larger number of mentees; I cannot think of any academic who has jump-started more careers than Cowen has. It was only possible because of reasons 1-3. This is a significant achievement. It will be his greatest legacy. Full disclosure: I have received grants from Cowen myself so I am biased in the ways you would expect.