Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
=Transcript of the talk, from the video's captions. Auto-generated: speaker names in particular are unreliable.
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# Industrialization, Diffusion of Technology, and Meiji Japan — Réka Juhász (CEP podcast, S3 E7)

Authors:   
Discussant: None  
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIlnt5xHDTE&t=0s


## Talk (00:00:00 – 00:34:55)

[00:00:01] [music] >> Hello. Welcome to the Innovation and Diffusion podcast. I'm Roberta Gozan, and today we have a very important guest, Reka [music] Juhasz. Welcome  
[00:00:16] Reka, how are you doing? >> Hi Roberta, it's uh nice to be here.  
[00:00:19] Thanks for having me. >> It's great to have you here. So, let me introduce you to our audience. So, Reka is an associate professor of economics at the University of British Columbia.  
[00:00:27] She studies industrial policy, industrialization. She is a co-founder of the Industrial Policy Group and a 2025 DG Grow fellow at the European Commission. So, let's start with you first, Reka. I in general start with kind of personal questions to get to  
[00:00:42] know you as a researcher a bit better, and then we will switch to some industrialization process, why some countries could industrialize, why some failed to industrialize, and then we will go into cheesy questions and never have I ever questions. But, let's start  
[00:00:55] with you first. So, what are the main questions or big picture questions that you're after as a researcher?  
[00:01:01] >> Yes, so I guess at a very high level, the research question that I keep coming back to is how countries behind the technology frontier, how they grow and try to catch up. Looking back, I think  
[00:01:15] it's not accidental that this is the question that I got interested in because I'm originally from Hungary.  
[00:01:20] When I was at university, it was like a decade, 15 years after after the end of socialism, and there was this very widespread belief that now that Hungary had capitalism and democracy, we would converge to sort of Austrian living  
[00:01:34] standards very, very soon. And I think that very quickly turned out not to happen, and so so I think there was just this kind of intellectual curiosity as to why the catch-up process is actually a lot more difficult than it looks at  
[00:01:47] first blush. You know, if this is an Innovation and Diffusion podcast, when you when you sort of look at it naively, you can think innovation is kind of the hard thing that you do, and and once the once the technology is there, like it's actually quite easy for for technological follower countries or  
[00:02:01] technological follower firms to to just take that technology off the shelf and adopt it. I think what the research is showing is that actually technology adoption is is is a very difficult process and there are potential sort of  
[00:02:15] market frictions or there are potential barriers that make it really difficult for some countries or for firms to to take these off-the-shelf technologies.  
[00:02:26] And so, that's kind of what led me to to thinking about these questions. That naturally sort of um raises the question of industrialization and then because a lot of my research sort of thinks about about ways in which the market, left to its own devices, doesn't really solve  
[00:02:40] these problems, that sort of opens the window for for for policy intervention, which is how industrial policy comes into the >> Actually, this is a great story and it's it's these are really important questions because sometimes we do take technological production as kind of a  
[00:02:54] given, but then the adoption or diffusion of it is also a hard one, which is an important area to study. But who I mean, during your PhD or after it or even before, were there any role models like during this process that  
[00:03:07] kind of intellectually fed you a little? Could be an economist or a philosopher or a sociologist or politician, even someone from your family. Like was there someone intellectually kind of beneficial for you?  
[00:03:19] >> Yeah, there were there were many people along the way. I came across the idea of infant industry and industrial policy in a development economics class I took in Hungary as an undergrad. When I got to  
[00:03:32] the PhD at at LSE, I think like in like in many places, I took a course sequence in graduate international trade and macro and and it was it was sort of surprising to me that that that part of the literature was kind of just not  
[00:03:46] covered and it seemed like we were missing something and then I started to sort of look at the literature and I realized that there had been sort of very little work on infant industry and industrial policy and econ for a long time. As an as an undergrad, like from  
[00:04:01] my undergrad days, I had even in Hungary sort of followed Dani Rodrik's work. He was like a really inspirational figure to me. And when I started to get into the industrial policy question in my PhD, I read a lot  
[00:04:14] of the developmental state literature. Alice Amsden's book, The Rise of the Rest, was like really inspiring for me.  
[00:04:21] And actually, I think it was in her book. She had a footnote in her book about the Napoleonic blockade and how that was important for Europe's industrialization. That actually gave me the the the the idea for what became uh my PhD dissertation.  
[00:04:34] >> Oh, I see. Actually, I was going to ask you about if there was any kind of a favorite paper or book that you could recommend us, and I think that could be the one then.  
[00:04:41] >> Yes, that was a really great book for me to read. If it's an econ paper that you're asking about, I just as I was finishing my PhD, Luigi Pasquali's Window of Change paper on the effects of  
[00:04:54] globalization in that first era of globalization came out, and I I I I I think that's like a hugely inspirational, well-done paper. And I yeah, I highly recommend it.  
[00:05:04] >> Thank you very much. I'll put those into the description of the episode. So, if if anyone is interested, they can just go ahead and, you know, take a look at the link. You have really important work on you you know, on industrialization with historical data. The reason why I emphasize historical is that people in  
[00:05:19] general assume that policies, you know, cannot be or you know, may not be shaped by historical work. But, could you tell us how economic history shaped your thinking and your policy work?  
[00:05:31] >> Yeah, I mean, I think um I went down the econ history path because it was something that I found really interesting. My grandfather was a high school history teacher. So, it's kind of in the family. But, I think the more I  
[00:05:45] thought about this in my PhD, the more I sort of thought that if we're to kind of understand how countries got to where they are today, it's important to study both sort of how the successes that that we sort of  
[00:05:59] understand as successes today, how they became successful economies and what that historical trajectory looked like, but but but also the countries that that didn't succeed or weren't quite as successful. It would be important to study those. And I think it's actually  
[00:06:13] very often the case that in some of the sort of policy work that I've done, the historical episodes are sort of given weight because we have I guess we have sort of a clarity around them that it's  
[00:06:28] that it's that it's hard to get in real time. Like when you look back at something that happened 50 or 100 years ago, sort of the dust has settled around it. You can actually see what are the long-run outcomes of a particular policy intervention. If you want to understand  
[00:06:41] about technology adoption, like studying the AI boom is great, but we actually, you know, don't really know yet how that story's going to turn out. And so in lots of ways, it's kind of really hard to study these things contemporaneously.  
[00:06:53] And and that's the sense I think in which history can be sort of a very powerful laboratory.  
[00:06:58] >> Let's talk about industrialization because we talked about it, you know, we talked about Hungary and the countries.  
[00:07:02] But some countries, as you mentioned, have successfully achieved industrialization. And I especially want to focus on one of your recent papers titled Codification, Technology Absorption, and the Globalization of the  
[00:07:15] Industrial Revolution with Shogo Sakabe and David Weinstein. In that paper, you studied the global adoption of technology in the late 19th century using a rapid codification of technological knowledge in Meiji Japan.  
[00:07:28] So, first of all, just to take a step back, can you tell us, you know, what is the main tension of this paper? What is the main tension that this paper is trying to solve? Let's start with that.  
[00:07:38] >> Yeah. So, this paper sort of uh takes on, I think, one of the major sort of empirical challenges in this literature in the sense that there is  
[00:07:51] this really striking sort of puzzle as to why, with the exception of one country, which is Japan, no other country outside of what we would think of as the West, really sort of successfully started to industrialize  
[00:08:05] before the First World War. And, you know, I think I think a lot of people sort of know that, but the more we got into this question, the more it made us appreciate just how like fundamentally puzzling this challenge is. Let me give you one example. You know, the  
[00:08:19] Industrial Revolution starts in England somewhere in the late 18th century. And on the eve of World War I, you know, mechanized cotton spinning is the flagship industry. On the eve of World War I, the vast majority of installed  
[00:08:33] mechanized cotton spinning capacity is still located in Britain and the US. So, like, over 100 years after this technology is introduced, it's still mostly located in the pioneering countries. And the reason that that's  
[00:08:48] puzzling is that, of course, we know that there are these big differences in factor prices in particular that wages in what was then thought of as sort of the global periphery, wages are much, much lower.  
[00:08:59] This is a pretty labor-intensive industry, and so there's a very strong incentive from the side of factor prices to sort of move this industry out of these countries that are becoming increasingly high wage. Yet, we don't see that happening. And the question is,  
[00:09:11] why is technology so slow to spread to the global periphery? And sort of as a consequence, why is sort of this modern industry, this mechanized factory-based industry, so slow to take off in countries outside of Japan? And so,  
[00:09:25] Japan is sort of the country that bucks the trend here in the sense that they're the only non-Western economy that successfully sort of starts this transition towards industrialization in the closing decades of the 19th century.  
[00:09:38] >> Yeah, and there was also some specifications that you mentioned in the paper which I also want to, you know, state here like there are four kinds of high-income countries today: English-speaking, close to England, resource-rich, and Japan. So, what is  
[00:09:50] going on then? What's going on in Japan? What I mean, what makes it special? What were the What was the policy or, you know, we talk about made in Japan. So, there were some things changing, but what was changing? And when we talk about knowledge, I think you will also  
[00:10:04] go into codified knowledge. Can you tell us a bit about, you know, what was happening in Japan and you know, the knowledge types as well?  
[00:10:10] >> Yeah, so this was this was kind of a really rewarding project to work on because I think of it as like the most exciting way to write a paper in the sense that we started from like a genuine question that we've talked about and and we didn't sort of really have a  
[00:10:24] good answer for it. Like we didn't we didn't come in with any strong hypothesis for what was what was going on. And so, it was very much sort of us kind of reading the historical literature and trying to make sense of things. And so, as we read about what was happening in Japan at the time, one  
[00:10:39] of the things that struck us is this sort of major policy that the Japanese government started to pursue whereby state really got involved in sort of  
[00:10:52] actively trying to absorb western technical knowledge that would allow Japanese firms, Japanese entrepreneurs to adopt these industrial revolution  
[00:11:05] technologies. So, the friction that we have in mind in the paper is that outside of European languages because a lot of the technologies that the industrial revolution produced, because  
[00:11:19] knowledge about them was written down in predominantly English, French, and German, it was very difficult for speakers of other languages, and particularly speakers of Japanese who are linguistically very different, to access that knowledge. And there are  
[00:11:34] sort of two frictions that we identified as being quite important. In many languages, including Japanese, there was just a lack of words to describe a lot of these new technologies. So that there was no word in the Japanese language for  
[00:11:48] telegraph, for steam engine, etc., etc. And this is a classic coordination problem because if you're going to start translating books on how to build a mechanized cotton spinning mill, you actually need everyone to be translating  
[00:12:01] these words in the same way. And so one of the things that the Japanese government did is they had a very sort of deliberate and thoughtful approach to language creation. Uh we can we can talk about that a little bit more. So they're not transliterating, they're really  
[00:12:15] putting a concerted effort towards creating language that actually conveys meaning to the reader so that, you know, the first time you read the word telegraph in Japanese, which which comes from two Chinese glyphs, electric and message, you may not know what the  
[00:12:29] telegraph is, but given that it means electric message in Japanese, the reader from then on will have a very clear understanding of what this is. This is one important friction that this is sort of a coordination problem. And then the  
[00:12:41] other one is that codified knowledge has a lot of a lot of public good attributes in the sense that this is non-rival.  
[00:12:49] Once you write a book about how to build a mechanized cotton spinning mill, it's actually quite sort of difficult to stop people from accessing that book. So again, there is this public good provision aspect that the state might want to come in and solve. The Japanese  
[00:13:03] realized that if they want to industrialize, they sort of hone in on the fact that they need to absorb Western scientific and applied technical knowledge. And they really get involved in a way that at the time we don't  
[00:13:18] really know of any other country doing something in in a similar way. There's a complementary policy, which is, you know, you can create all the knowledge in the world if people are literate. So, this is complemented with a big push in the public education system and Japan is sort of an early pioneer in the  
[00:13:33] periphery in that sense. And this is really sort of the stated objective of the government to sort of try to ensure that a large proportion of the population can read and understand sort of a a technical text on how do you  
[00:13:47] repair a steam engine. So, >> Let me ask you. So, what kind of resources did they try to kind of transcribe and translate? Were they Are we talking about like patents which may not be, I don't know, useful for in you know, general public audience, but they also translated books maybe or what kind  
[00:14:02] what kind of things did the government kind of try to kind of translate?  
[00:14:05] >> Yes, the best kind of historical examples that we're aware of is that they tried to translate sort of knowledge that would be easy to access for people. And so, you know, one of the things we get from the secondary  
[00:14:19] literature that historians of Japan have looked into is that they they go to Britain, they find what are the textbooks that are being used to educate people in Britain about these sort of first industrial revolution technologies, if you will, and they  
[00:14:32] translate those in a very sort of directed purposeful way. They are, I think, the way that we understand it is you're right. It's for for the most part what they're trying to make kind of widely available is not sort of a patent  
[00:14:46] text for example of British or American patents, but it's much more this kind of applied knowledge. And so, actually, the way we try to quantify this in the paper is we look at the number of sort of translated technical books and just the  
[00:15:01] number of books technical books published in the Japanese language. And we really see it sort of skyrocket af- after after this public good provision by the state.  
[00:15:10] >> I see. And to do this study, you've also collected and digitized an enormous amount of data. So, can you give us more details about what type of data sets you collected and maybe how long, you know, that took to kind of to build that data and build that data set.  
[00:15:24] >> Yeah, we this project took took a really long time to put together precisely because we needed both to collect a lot of data and sort of think about how to operationalize some of these things so that we could kind of put it in a  
[00:15:39] regression and try to estimate the effects. I think one of the things that we had to think about carefully is how do we try to take this idea that lives at the country level and and  
[00:15:52] operationalize it in a way that would allow us to kind of test this empirically. And so, the sort of idea that we landed on was that different industries are going to benefit differently from the arrival of this public good provision depending on how  
[00:16:06] much those industries rely on these first industrial revolution technologies. And so, the way we sort of quantify this is we digitized the British patent text. That's going to give us a way to capture what are the  
[00:16:19] important technologies that Britain comes up with in this time period. And then, we actually sort of hand-curated a list of technical manuals in the English language for every single industry  
[00:16:33] that's in our data. And then, the idea was that we're going to take the patent text and we're look going to look at the language similarity in these technical manuals and see where does the patent text overlap to a smaller or larger  
[00:16:47] extent with with the technical manuals with the idea being that if you share a lot of language with a British patent text you as an industry, then that's very reliant on these new technologies.  
[00:16:58] Whereas if you share less patent text, that's going to be less reliant on these new technologies. So, there was sort of a lot of us just figuring out what are appropriate technical manuals to be to be looking at. And then, once we have sort of a set of core results for Japan,  
[00:17:13] we sort of toying with the idea, as you alluded to the title of the paper, is about the globalization of the Industrial Revolution around the world.  
[00:17:20] We were sort of thinking about sort of, okay, why do we see these patterns in Japan and not elsewhere? And we had collected all this data on on technical books in Japanese libraries from this time period, and it sort of occurred to us that sort of a natural way to see  
[00:17:34] whether other languages had a similar amount of published technical books was to scrape their libraries. So, sort of we then undertook this big effort to scrape the catalogs of libraries for  
[00:17:47] most major languages to see whether Japan does look like an outlier in the global periphery in terms of how much technical knowledge it published.  
[00:17:57] >> Can you give us an example about the other languages that you mentioned just to be more specific?  
[00:18:01] >> Yeah, so, you know, there are there are a couple of there are a couple of languages that we looked at. What really sort of comes out very strongly from the data, I would say three things. One is that you really see sort of the achievements of the European  
[00:18:16] Enlightenment in kind of global perspective. So, as late, I think, as 1880, um I think the vast majority of technical books are published in three or four major languages: English,  
[00:18:30] French, German, and Italian. These are the languages of the Enlightenment, and any other language has as really sort of a a very, very tiny proportion of published technical books. The second sort of thing that stands out is that  
[00:18:44] Japan goes through this like really major codification effort, as as we call it, in the sense that as late as 1880, they look like any other country in the global periphery in the sense that they have very few published technical books.  
[00:18:58] And then, in the space of a very short amount of time, they publish all this technical knowledge and kind of catch up with Germany. Um they're sort of on par with Germany by by by sort of the closing decades of the 19th century. So, so that's what gives us kind of this  
[00:19:13] natural experiment in the sense that in a in a very short amount of time and you can do a before-after analysis here. You have Japan without codification and then Japan with codification and so we can compare sort of what is happening to industries  
[00:19:26] before and after in Japan. And then the third fact is that we see no other country in the global periphery doing anything similar and you can think of sort of major languages here that that that that produce, you know, great  
[00:19:40] literature and and and other things, you know, think Russian, Arabic. We we don't see similar amounts by any measure of technical knowledge in in these languages.  
[00:19:51] >> That's amazing. So, by the way, I forgot to say, I mean, based on the data collection and everything, this paper is going to be published at the QJE, so even, you know, just the data collection, I think, signals that there is huge effort and it's very much uniqueness, you know, to the paper  
[00:20:06] itself and I think it's amazing. The fact that you don't see kind of changes in other countries is also interesting because then does it say that the government involvement in that case pushes, you know, the technological adoption and innovativeness in the long  
[00:20:20] run. So, is this the message of the paper then?  
[00:20:23] >> I think the way that that we have thought about it is that outside of the countries of the Enlightenment where there was, you know, what Joel Mokyr refers to as a culture of growth where sort of this codification is is produced  
[00:20:37] kind of organically. Outside of these countries, the market left to its own devices does not produce this body of technical knowledge precisely because of these coordination failures and the the public good nature of knowledge. This  
[00:20:51] lines up sort of with this evidence across countries that we've shown. We see that in Japan this knowledge is created and we see that there's government involvement there and that sort of lines up with the idea that there are sort of frictions that impede  
[00:21:05] the market from doing this by itself. >> Right, exactly. Maybe one more question about this research is that it's about the lessons for today. Still, we see that technological adoption is actually pretty slow. So, what would you say? I mean, what what do you think?  
[00:21:19] >> Yeah, I think I wouldn't take the findings of this paper and just sort of apply them to the world in 2026. The world in 2026 looks very different. The barriers to accessing knowledge in a different language are lower, the frictions to doing that are lower, and  
[00:21:34] we just have a much larger proportion of sort of non-English speakers, for example, that speak English that allow them to access the knowledge. So, I I think like one-for-one, I wouldn't take this and and and apply it to today. The way that I think I've really learned a  
[00:21:47] lot in this project in thinking about sort of what are effective policies to sort of facilitate industrialization or technology adoption is that a lot of I think a lot of the industrial policy debate centers around  
[00:22:02] what people tend to think of as vertical policies. You sort of decide you want to support this sector, you want to support that activity, and there's a lot of sort of active government involvement in figuring out who the winners are, what are the firms that get this policy. This  
[00:22:16] policy has a very different flavor in the sense that the government is very much actively involved in trying to steer the economy in a particular direction so that, you know, they're trying to get industrialization off the ground. The way they're going to do this is to absorb all this western knowledge,  
[00:22:30] but there's a lot less It's much more horizontal in the sense that there's no picking winners, there's no picking sectors here in this specific policy.  
[00:22:38] It's really a public good provision, and I think there's a lot of examples that one can come up with that the government or the state can get involved with in sort of a contemporary setting where it's a lot less about sort of these  
[00:22:52] vertical policies and much more about these complementary sort of public good type investments in knowledge provision that that creates sort of the basis for firms and entrepreneurs to thrive.  
[00:23:04] >> And since we started talking about the policy making, you've also done significant, you know, policy work. I think the when you think about an economist approach versus a politician approach, I think it the policies or the objectives may differ. At the beginning, you mentioned for example, infant  
[00:23:19] industries. And I think the first thing that an economist would say, oh, the infant industries should be protected by the government until they're competitive and then kind of phase out the, you know, the protection. But when you think about it from from the economist point  
[00:23:33] of view and the politician point of view, things may change. What are the main differences or issues there when it comes to policy making?  
[00:23:39] >> Yeah, so I think it's you know, it's a huge and important question that you ask particularly when it comes to industrial policy because I think one of the main challenges with industrial policy is  
[00:23:52] that it's very much a political project. In fact, I think one thing that maybe as economists we haven't appreciated enough is just how important sort of the political foundations of industrial  
[00:24:06] policy are. That is very much the case in the Meiji example that we're talking about. Something that's sort of floating here in the background that we haven't had a chance to talk about is that the whole sort of idea for this Western  
[00:24:18] technology absorption effort comes from basically a major national crisis that Japan is facing. Japan is forcibly opened up to trade by the imperial powers in the middle of the 19th century and Japan sort of realizes that like its  
[00:24:33] fate is going to go very similar to to other parts of the global periphery in the sense that it is facing basically colonization unless it can become sufficiently strong as a country to resist this kind of imperial pressure.  
[00:24:45] And so the the political project that is a dreamed up by the Japanese elite is that they will become better than the West at what the West does. They need to industrialize to become a strong nation to sort of withstand the threat of  
[00:25:00] colonization. And I sort of tell you this long story because at the core, this is actually a political project. It is sort of there is a political vision here and it is conveyed and it is articulated at the highest levels of the  
[00:25:13] Japanese government. And I think that's very important for a variety of reasons.  
[00:25:18] It allows this policy or different policies, you know, they experiment with things that work, they experiment with things that don't work, but because the vision is so strong and because it's conveyed there's this sort of elite consensus around this idea, um it can  
[00:25:31] survive sort of failures. So, I think this is sort of a long-winded way of saying that for a variety of reasons, like you say as economists, we're we're always sort of concerned about the political economy challenges to doing industrial policy. Well, you brought up  
[00:25:45] the infant industry example, you know, this is the classic example for you put a protective import tariff in place, it becomes really, really hard down the line to remove that tariff, whether the industry becomes competitive or not. And  
[00:25:58] so, I think our as a profession, our very sort of sensible guidance has been to insulate the process of policy making and and and and this applies for industrial policy making as well, to sort of insulate the process of policy  
[00:26:13] making from the day-to-day politics, to get away from the time inconsistency issues, to sort of help with with with with with all these political temptations. And I think that's that that's very true, but I think we also need to acknowledge that at the end of  
[00:26:27] the day, particularly industrial policy is very much a political project. And so, we can't fully, I think, remove the politicians. It's actually a very delicate balancing act.  
[00:26:38] >> Thank you very much. Um I think this was very enlightening. And at the beginning, I also introduced you as, you know, the co-founder of a DG Grow Fellow at the European Commission. So, can you tell us a bit about this type of work?  
[00:26:49] >> Yeah, so this This actually sort of a really rewarding thing to do. at the fellowship that I came to an end at the end of 2025, but it was I think it was for me kind of an ideal way to be an academic engaged with policy making in  
[00:27:02] the sense that I have been talking to to economists working for DG Grow and basically the idea of this is fellowship is to sort of provide expert guidance in in the economist field of specialization. The thing that actually  
[00:27:17] I was mostly involved with and this is something I'm still working on is that that that the output, the sort of major output that a DG Grow fellow is supposed to produce is is sort of a paper, some academic paper that comes out of things  
[00:27:31] that the DG things that DG Grow was interested in. So actually related to our conversation just before, I became really interested in sort of the the political foundations of industrial policy and the importance of political  
[00:27:44] vision for industrial policy and that was something sort of DG Grow was also thinking about. I'm actually sort of wrapping up a paper now that we're going to put out soon that came out of sort of this conversation with what are the policy makers interested in. It met with  
[00:27:58] something that sort of I was really interested in and so it was like a great opportunity for me to dive deeper into a into a topic that I'm not entirely sure I would have otherwise done and that at least well, you know, we'll see what they think of the finished product, but  
[00:28:12] at least at the outset they were interested in sort of understanding more about it.  
[00:28:16] >> So thank you very much, Rebecca, for the for the research part. Is there anything else that you'd like to add to the policy question or the research? If not, then we can maybe switch to the cheesy questions. So if you were allergic to  
[00:28:28] one food a like a food or a drink, what would it be? Sorry, what would you be absolutely devastated to give up?  
[00:28:36] >> Well, there's a there's this amazing Hungarian dish called Sekely Kapusta.  
[00:28:41] >> Tell me. >> You said Did you say Kapusta?  
[00:28:43] >> Kapusta, yes. >> Oh, Kapusta. Because there is a Turkish dish called kapuska, which is made from cabbage. So, I think there is >> I don't know.  
[00:28:51] >> It's entirely possible. Speaking of linguistics, it's entirely possible that kapusta is a word that we borrowed from the Turkish language.  
[00:28:58] >> I don't know who borrowed from who, but go ahead, explain. I mean, I don't know about that dish.  
[00:29:02] >> It's It's a really heavy dish. Lots of sour cream involved. It's kind of complicated to make, so we actually only make it like once a year, at least in my household. And my very anglicized children actually can't stand sour kraut, so >> I mean, I'll try it if I go to Hungary.  
[00:29:17] >> You try it if you go to Hungary, yes. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. If you had a magic wand, what would you change in academia or in economics?  
[00:29:25] >> Um I think it'd be great if academia in general and economics in particular were less insular. I think increasingly, even in sort of the I don't know, 10 plus years since I've been I've been an academic, I feel like we've the the way  
[00:29:39] the profession has evolved, there are sort of increasing barriers to entry in the sense that to get into a top PhD program or to get into strong PhD program, you really need to know that you want to be an academic economist  
[00:29:52] like early on in your undergrad. I'm not sure that a lot of undergrads have that have figured things out so early.  
[00:30:00] And I think particularly for students who come from different life experiences, different backgrounds, it makes it a lot more challenging. I advise a lot of, you know, undergrads who come to me in their third or fourth year and they say like, this is actually  
[00:30:13] like now that we're doing like 400 level econ, this is I've realized that this is actually what I'm interested in, but I haven't taken the math, I haven't taken all the coding, I haven't done all these things that would set me up for success.  
[00:30:25] I now need to do like a two-year pre-doc, I need to take, you know, night classes in math. And so, I think given the sort of somewhat circuitous route that I took to figuring out that I wanted to be an academic economist, I'm not sure I would I'm not sure I would have ended up >> I see.  
[00:30:39] >> if if I started like 10 years later. >> I see, I think that's an important point. That's kind of like a kind of a struggle for for students. If you had not become an economist in a parallel universe, what career path would you choose and why?  
[00:30:51] >> Um so I think for a while I toyed with the idea of being a therapist. I think I think there's there's good reasons why that's sort of something one toys with as an academic in the sense that you know, everything we work on takes forever. It's like you work on things  
[00:31:06] for years. Like it's you know, at the end of the week it's really hard to I sometimes find it really hard to see like what I've done this week that has moved sort of my research forward or like what is it that I'm contributing to How is any of this useful? Um I think  
[00:31:20] therapy sort of appealed to me as in being sort of much more practically useful. I realized that I actually enjoy long periods of thinking on my own so I don't think I would have been a good therapist.  
[00:31:31] >> [laughter] >> Probably worked out for the best.  
[00:31:34] >> Or maybe your friends or your colleagues, maybe they see you I don't know. Maybe they come and you're the person that they come and talk to you.  
[00:31:40] >> I am the person. That's why exactly. I'm the friend. I'm the person. I'm the listener. I'm the advice giver. And so I always thought that would be something that I'd be good at.  
[00:31:50] >> I see. Then yeah, that yeah, it makes sense.  
[00:31:52] >> Yeah, yeah. I see. Okay, so never have I ever questions. Never have I ever had a referee completely misunderstand my paper. Have you ever had a referee like [laughter] that?  
[00:32:03] >> I'm sorry if I've I've had my fair share of wild referee experiences, but I don't think they've ever completely misunderstood my paper. To be fair.  
[00:32:10] >> But but they partly What is your policy? So maybe that should be the question.  
[00:32:14] Like say, you know, a referee, you know, partly misunderstood the paper. Do you Like how do you manage that? What is the policy there? And you got an R&R. I mean >> You got There I think uh I think my approach with an R&R has  
[00:32:29] always been to take what I see as the most constructive reading of what the referee is asking and do a really good faith effort in trying to engage with with what they have in mind, what  
[00:32:43] they're asking for. And you know, sometimes, and I'm sure I do this on the other side as a referee, sometimes I just get it wrong. Like I misunderstand or sometimes the referee's just wrong and there's I think a polite and and constructive way just to sort of say,  
[00:32:57] "Actually, you know, here's the specification and this is why this is why actually it's not a concern." >> I see. Never have I ever attended a conference for its location.  
[00:33:07] >> [laughter] >> Um that is not true. Before I had kids, uh I did think of conference location. It did move the needle, I will say. I don't  
[00:33:21] think I ever I ever went just for the location, but yeah, before I had kids and I I was a young young AP with more free time, I was I could be convinced.  
[00:33:31] >> I see. Yeah, it's it's uh intriguing. Never have I ever started reading a paper and immediately jumped to the results section.  
[00:33:42] >> I actually I'm probably like one of the few people who really enjoy reading the context section. You know, to give us an econ history paper, I want to read the historical background first. So I [music] I don't think I ever jumped to the results section. I I I might jump to  
[00:33:56] the historical context. >> I see. Yeah, that's a that's a good one.  
[00:33:59] Thank you very much, Reka. It was really nice to talk to you and I mean, thanks for participating in our podcast. And I I hope our listeners also enjoyed the talk. Thank you very much again and see you in the next episode, everyone. Bye.  
[00:34:21] >> [music] >> Shh.  
[00:34:53] Shh.