Advanced Access: Interview Transcript with Al Roth

Mixtape: the Podcast transcript

Advanced Access is just for paying members! Here is the transcript of the interview with Al Roth from this week’s episode of Mixtape: the Podcast. The podcast episode will be released on all major platforms Thursday morning, June 30th, but in the meantime here you go!

Scott Cunningham:

In this week's episode of the Mixtape Podcast, I had the pleasure of meeting one of my intellectual heroes, Alvin Roth, a 2012 Nobel prize winner in economics. He's been a big inspiration to me ever since I read his book on Two-Sided Matching with Sotomayor back in graduate school. Really ended up changing how I thought about the world. He is one of the most interesting people, but also the most pleasant people that you'll meet in economics. And it was my pleasure to get to talk to him. Hope you enjoy it.

Scott Cunningham:

Well, it's my pleasure to have professor Al Roth here on the podcast. Al, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me for this time.

Alvin Roth:

I'm always glad to talk to you.

Scott Cunningham:

Before we get started. I just wanted to get a little bit of background. Where did you grow up?

Alvin Roth:

I grew up in New York City.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah? Where in New York city did you grow up?

Alvin Roth:

In Queens. That's why I speak the Queens English.

Scott Cunningham:

What were you like as a kid?

Alvin Roth:

Well, I was pretty good until I got to high school and then I was a little unhappy.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah?

Alvin Roth:

But mostly I was fine. I had an unremarkable, peaceful childhood.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah. You didn't enjoy your high school years? I wasn't crazy about mine either.

Alvin Roth:

Yeah. No, I wasn't wild about high school, but before and after it was just fine, so...

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah. Yeah. High school's too... Yeah. High school's a weird invention, [inaudible 00:01:57] and not great for all of us. Well, so in terms of college, I'm curious before we kind of get started. Was there ever any... Like some of your earliest experiences where you read of scientist or you read a thinker or you heard of someone and you just thought, "This person's had a profound effect on me," Or, "Really changed my life." Was there ever some people like that for you that you really looked up to?

Alvin Roth:

Well, I think probably those people come a little later in my career than college. But a formative experience in college is I had a civil service job in the summer for an army laboratory and I was in the operations research group of an army laboratory. And I thought, "What a cool idea to use modern mathematics of various sorts to try to solve practical problems?" And so I came back and decided to be an Operations Research Major at Columbia.

Scott Cunningham:

Had you ever heard of that field before?

Alvin Roth:

I never had.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Tell me a little bit about what was operations research like? That would've been, I guess the late sixties, right?

Alvin Roth:

That's right. So operations research was... I conceived it as being all the parts of applied mathematics that had been invented in World War II or later. I later came to understand that the field understood it to be all the parts of applied mathematics that had been invented during World War II. And so for a long time, the field didn't modernize itself quite as much as it now and now is and in particular, that was important for Game theory. When I began to study it looked to me like Game theory was going to be essentially located in operations research, but it turned out that if you were a game theorist, you were an economist. However... Whatever you'd studied.

Alvin Roth:

But basically, there were lots of optimization techniques, things like linear programming and integer programming and scheduling and queuing, those were all things that had become very important in the logistical and some of the military efforts in World War II. And the name Applied Mathematics had sort of accrued to an earlier kind of applied mathematics. So a lot of differential equations and things like that. So operation research was going to be a collection of modern tools and I hadn't quite understood the slow schedule on which the modern tools would be updated.