Advanced Transcript: Interview with Mohammad Arkbarpour

Each Monday before my Tuesday podcast is released, I post a transcript for my paying subscribers of the next day’s transcript. Today’s transcript is with Mohammad Arkbarpour, a professor of economics with a courtesy appointment in computer science at Stanford. This was one of my favorite interviews to date. Mohammad really shared his full life story, both as a young kid and college student growing up in Tehran, Iran, to taking you might say the long way from engineering to operations research and then economics — but also taking the long way to Stanford, as a PhD student, and then immediately staying at Stanford as a professor.

Mohammad works in applied game theory areas, notably matching markets, networks and mechanism design. And those are topics I am fascinated in. I am a longtime admirer or Alvin Roth and his work, as well as Matt Jackson, both of whom I’ve interviewed, and both of whom have been mentors and advisers to Mohammad. And as people know, I also love trying to piece together the knowledge graph of the history of economics with the actual relationships and the locations of who is where and doing what and when. But putting all that aside, Mohammad’s story is a story of resilience, and to be honest, also humility as he seemed driven the entire time, not so much by careerism, but his deep abiding love and joy in discovery. It was very exhilarating therefore to just hear his story, and I hope you enjoy this transcript. Tomorrow will be the podcast interview which I hope you find interesting too.

Thank you to all my subscribers. It means a lot to me that you support the substack and all these ventures I engage in.

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Scott Cunningham (00:00:47):

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott. I'm the host Scott Cunningham. I'm a professor in the economics department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where it is still piping hot outside, very uncomfortable and for those that are just turning in for the first time, this is a podcast that is devoted to the personal stories of living economists and tries to create an oral history of the last 50 years of the profession of economics. And this week's part of the way I do the oral history part is I kind of pick topics that I'm personally interested in and then I use that as a great way to select people that I otherwise would don't know very well, but I can justify it based on the grounds that I can say, Hey, I'm doing a thing on this kind of thing, and will you be on it?

(00:01:53):

And then they'll say, oh yeah, I'll definitely do it. And so the things I like to do a lot of the time, a time, what I like to do is I like to have as my hook a student of.dot. That's one of the ways I really enjoy kind of grouping people is to say, well these are the students of Gary Becker or these are the students of Josh Angrist or these are the students of David Card and that's one way to do it and that does kind of fit with this one a little bit, but another way I like to do it is by field. And so one of the things that I've been doing also but haven't been emphasizing it as much is microeconomic theory. And we've had some people in microeconomic theory that kind are not necessarily grouped themselves in the same sub area of micro theory, but there's been this particular person does fit with another person, another couple of people that we've had on it because I am also interested in departments, the story of economics as told through departments.

(00:03:15):

And so this is where this is going. So this week's guest is named Mohamed Apa. He's a professor of economics at Stanford University and he studies mechanism design, micro theory, social and economic networks and it's real easy to sort. First of all, I actually am genuinely super excited by everything Muhammad does. So that's part of it. I've been very fascinated also by him. He was Al Roth student as well as Roberts and Milgrom and also Matt Jackson and Matt Jackson had been on the show in the third season. And so thinking about, and also he's at Stanford and Stanford is such a special department. That's where Roth is, that's where Jackson is. That's where Milgram and Roberts are, that's where Susan Athey is. That's where Guido Imbens is. That's where Ed Lazear was. There's just a lot of great people there and they're spread over all these departments too.

(00:04:35):

So there's people in the business school, there's people in the economics department, there's people in operations research, computer science even. So it's just such a interesting university for how they've staffed these economists in all these different places and it kind of comes out a little bit in this interview with Mohamed that it also is probably part of its strengths. So many ways that new ideas get to be brought in to the field of economics when they're spread over or and computer science and all these other areas. So Mohammad has a fascinating story. I don't want to really take from it. I know people are wanting to hear it, but this was such a wonderful interview just to go through Mohammad’s life growing up in Iran and just, this is the word circuitous. I'm trying to think of how you just kind work your way to where you are the long way and it's in hindsight, it's like in real time when you get from point A to point B, it can feel like the long way. Why didn't I just study economics in college or why didn't I do it in high school? It's like Guido literally in high school was studying econometrics and he picked Erasmus to go to college and I believe he majored in econometrics, which you had to pick in high school. That's crazy.

(00:06:23):

I never took a single class in economics in college and it can sort of feel like sometimes you think, boy, I took the long way to get here. But in hindsight you look back and you think, oh, this was the way it was always supposed to be. This was actually the short way. The long way might've been for all to major in economics as an undergrad or picket you can see. And then with Muhammad's story, it's really wonderful to see how all of the other experiences that took him to economics last has probably been the real key to why he's done such really wonderful work and is such a neat part of the field. And so I want to thank him and I want to thank all of you for listening. We're still going to be doing these every other week. I hope that's okay.

(00:07:32):

We might eventually go back to a weekly model, but I thought that doing it every other week would just give a little bit more of a nicer pace. I've had a lot of people say that it's drinking from a fire hose a little bit and they can't keep up because they're long. They're like an hour and a half hour an hour and a half. So I thought that that would be good, but we'll see. I can sort of track how the stats are and if it seems like it's going down, we can always go back. But I thought that that would be, might be we hit a hundred and we're on the fourth season, so maybe it's like we'll do whatever other sane podcast does except for the ones that do it every day and just do it every other week. So we'll see. Alright, well thanks so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoy this. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Like I said, I think it's really wonderful All thanks a lot. Bye. See you in a minute. Alright, well it is a pleasure to have a guest on the show actually only, we were just chatting and I said I've actually think we've only chatted on Twitter and Facebook before, so I really appreciate you agreeing to be on the show. Muhammad, can you tell us for the sake of the listener, your full name and your full title and who pays your paycheck?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:08:52):

Sure. I'm glad to be here, Scott. As you said, we've been hanging out a lot on social media, both of which I'm not active in them anymore, but for time being, my name is Muhammad Arkbarpour. Mohamad is the most common male name in the world as you know. Ur is my last name, which has two pieces, ABAR and poor. Abar is the name of my great grandfather and poor means son of in Farsi. So it's like pop in Turkish. So Abar becomes like alu in Turkish.

Scott Cunningham (00:09:27):

Oh, great grandfather. When was he alive?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:09:33):

He is still alive. I have not met him actually. This is the grandfather of my father and I have never met him. Oh yeah, he is, yeah, he was not alive in 1985 that I was born.

Scott Cunningham (00:09:47):

Oh wait, do you know much about him?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:09:51):

No, he cooked bread as part of his job. So his first name was actually the person who cooks bread. His last name was first the person who cooks bread and then it was changed to through his son, which is my grandfather who was a farmer actually in our small.

Scott Cunningham (00:10:15):

Wait, so when was he alive? When was he alive? 18 hundreds or early 19 hundreds.

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:10:21):

Yeah, early 19 hundreds. Oh,

Scott Cunningham (00:10:24):

Okay.

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:10:24):

So my grandfather would have been 95 if he was alive now, and his father was 20 years older.

Scott Cunningham (00:10:31):

Oh, okay. Okay. Tell me about where you grew up. Where

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:10:36):

Specifically? I'm from this small city in Iran called city of, it's a city in the middle of the very hot desserts.

It's a very small city. The most people's job is to be farmers of pistachio, so that's the job they have, which is an interesting marketplace because then there are these people who are the dealers who buy the pistachio and damage most of the money out of it.

Scott Cunningham (00:11:05):

The farmers don't make much money from the pistachios. It's the middle man?

So most of my childhood was there. We were here and there. I moved to Tehran when I was, I mean I grew up, I also spent a few years in a religious city called Go, which is the Vatican of Iran. So that was due to my father having moving around and then I came to Tehran when I was six and I went to elementary school in Tehran.

Scott Cunningham (00:11:37):

How are those two places? Pretty different. Is Tehran a big, big city?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:11:41):

Tehran is, think of Mexico City and Bueno Aires. That's like a city of 10 million plus people. It's crazy and amazing. I love Teran.

Scott Cunningham (00:11:52):

So where in the city did you live?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:11:56):

We moved, but mostly most of my time was in actually what you can call central Tehran, which is Tehran has the south side, which is more on the poor side of the city and the north side, which is on the rich side of the city. And then the center is more like a middle class part of the city, lived in the basically very close to the downtown area.

Scott Cunningham (00:12:23):

So you lived in the downtown part of the city?

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:12:26):

Most of my time, not in the first five years, but at age 13 until 23 when I came to us, I lived in downtown area, which is a bit old Tehran, if you like. All the history of Tehran is around those squares and streets.

Scott Cunningham (00:12:44):

Oh wow. Okay. So what did your mom and dad do for a living? What were they doing? Because you mentioned your dad moved around a lot.

Mohammad Arkbarpour (00:12:54):

Yeah, they were mostly moving around for studying, actually they didn't study before. My dad didn't have any college degree before I was born, so he was moving around for studying and mom, he was going to universities. He went to college when he was 27 basically I was born already my mom too, college. They studied law and Arabic language respectively and yeah, my dad continued practicing law and my mom became a teacher of Arabic language.