Yummy and Inexpensive Food in Torino, Friends in Torino and my Mixtape Revision Summer Plans

I copied and pasted this entire substack into Dall-E3 and described what I looked like and twice said I do not have a beard, but rather a 5:00 shadow. I did that because Cosmos basically refuses to believe me and I usually have to do it a few times. Of all that I put in the substack, I guess Cosmos heard me talking about food being inexpensive and just surrounded me with groceries and food. This is actually not so different than what happened today, though.

Well I have an outline, I think, of the new Mixtape. It’s a revision. It’s not a sequel, so much as it’s a revision and an updating. So much so that I have toyed with the idea of naming it “Causal Inference: the Remix” but I think it’s a mistake to let go of the Mixtape branding, so I’m not. I’m just going to call it hopefully “Causal Inference: the Mixtape” and once a draft is in hand, my editor at Yale and me can discuss what to make of it (for instance, does it need to be something like “Volume II”?). But before I show it to you (below, behind a paywall), let me show the free stuff of me eating food and paying very little for it.

Torino pictures

But now on to pictures! First when I come to Torino, I literally cannot believe the prices. Here’s some evidence. Today I had all this food (this little sandwich, two macaroons and three cappuccinos) when I wrote from 11 to 5 at this coffeeshop. 11 euros. Cappuccinos are 1.50 euros. I’m not kidding. I feel like I stepped into a Time Machine to 1950 where cappuccinos are 1.50 euros. I’m going to run down the street and see if I can catch a movie later for a quarter.

Delicious inexpensive food, Torino Italy June 2 2024

Those little sandwich things top left are to die for. But here’s another place close to where I live that’s also cheap though their cappuccinos are 2 euros.

More delicious and inexpensive breakfast

Yesterday I went grocery shopping for the week. I’m trying just to keep my food costs down and my portions in control otherwise I’m going to regret it later. 25 euros for a weeks worth of groceries. I had the gnocchi and pesto for dinner. I wish I could just be on some constant pesto intravenous drip. I love it so much. Also have some pictures of my little apartment from the ground.

More yummy inexpensive food

Then I have some random pictures of Torino as I walked last night to get dinner with someone. I ate a pasta dish last night that I may be thinking about even into the next life. No joke. I’m going to go again and I’ll show you.

I ate two dinners last night ironically. One was with a friend at that place I’ll dream about forever, and then other was a dinner party with my good friend Marina Della Guista here at Torino. I’m not entirely sure the etiquette of posting pictures of others on substacks without asking first, so I won’t, but wow does Marina ever have the most gorgeous house I’ve ever seen. She has such a sleek eye for stunning interior design. I wanted to just stand in every room and look at everything. We had the most amazing meat ravioli and fresh fruit salad but then midnight hit and I had to leave early as I was absolutely exhausted. I’m no spring chicken anymore. Marina is the author of the best theory paper on the economics of sex work I’ve ever read (with Maria Laura di Tommaso and Steinar Strøm, entitled “Who is Watching? The Market for Prostitution Services”. It incorporates stigma in a market for commercial sex, but interestingly, the stigma is endogenous to the size of the market and adjusts as the market grows and shrinks causing various feedbacks. Thus the price of sex contains this stigma cost which interestingly declines as the market grows and vice versa. I’ve always thought this is probably more general than it seems, and is in fact a more general theory of stigma as an endogenous cost whose average cost falls as more and more people are “stigmatized”. I mean if you think about it — if everyone is stigmatized by some activity they engage in, don’t you suspect it can no longer be actually stigmatizing? Almost like to be effective it must be used sparingly. That is not entirely what the paper is about, as it’s narrowly focused on the sex market, but the theory is so simple and the model so interesting that I think it really invites you to think about how societal forces can mitigate or inflame the cost of stigma simply by increasing or shrinking the market through various factors (like legalizing sex work or criminalizing it). This was always in my mind in my paper with Manisha Shah examining Rhode Island legalizing indoor sex work — what may start as stigmatizing may as the market grows be marginally less so and Marina’s model provides a very intuitive framework for thinking about that. I always thought this paper should’ve been in a Top 5. Here is an interview I did with Marina, for those interested, as well as a long description about her and her work.

S2E20: Interview with Marina Della Giusta, Labor Economist and Professor

And I actually ran into Maria Laura di Tommaso yesterday too while walking around the city. They will both be my colleagues this month as I try to hammer out this book.

And tomorrow, I’ll be teaching a week long course on unconfoundedness and RDD (the two big “selection on observable” methods), so I’m excited about that as well. Looking forward to meeting the students. And in a few weeks, I may be going to Bologna to present my research. It has been so much fun that I wrote my daughter Willow a couple hours ago and said “maybe we should reconsider and I just bring you out here for a week”. I’ll keep you posted if she says yes. It’s her last summer in Waco with her friends and I’m hesitant to push too hard.

But now let me show you the outline of the new book. I worked on something else today for around 6 hours, so I’ve broken my rule to write two hours on it today, but I did write for 6 hours so maybe I didn’t technically break the rule. Regardless, here’s the plan. Each each bullet below is a chapter of the table of contents, with sub-bullets and so to be little headings and so forth.