2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

With the start of NYU's fall 2024 semester, I thought I should offer an update here on the public sessions at our 2024 Tax Policy Colloquium.

All sessions will meet on Tuesdays, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm, in Furman 310, and most or all will be followed with small group dinners that generally include the speakers.

Here is our schedule:

1) Tuesday, September 10 – Ellora Derenoncourt, Princeton University Economics Department. Wealth of Two Nations: The US Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.

2) Tuesday, September 24 – Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia Law School. The Federal Architecture of Income Inequality.

3) Tuesday, October 8 – Manasi Deshpande, University of Chicago Economics Department. The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment.

4) Tuesday, October 22 – Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School. Optimal Income Taxation and Charitable Giving.

5) Tuesday, November 12 – Alex Zhang, Emory University School of Law. Fiscal Citizenship and Taxpayer Privacy.

6) Tuesday, November 26 – Natasha Sarin, Yale Law School. Broken Budgeting.

An exciting change for this year, compared to the last couple of years, is that the sessions will be on Zoom, and Zoom attendees will be able to participate live. The key change here is that New York State has changed its rules for live class attendance such that a class isn't disqualified as live instruction just because a remote participant asks a question.

I had stopped putting the sessions on Zoom, because that rule made the whole thing just too crazy and hard to manage. Under the prior regime, all that Zoom attendees could do was post a comment that I would then have to read for them. That I found just too difficult while also running a live queue, but I can certainly handle combining my live queue with Zoom attendees raising their hands to ask questions.

Chat GPT's progress over the last year and a half

About 18 months ago (I remember the time because I was visiting at U Va Law School), I briefly got interested in how Chat GPT makes things up. E.g., I asked it what my novel Getting It is about. It confabulated in response that it's about the need for broad-based tax reform, etcetera. (Which, needless to say, it is not - the program generalized from superficial knowledge of my other work.)

Since I gather that Chat GPT improves exponentially over time, I decided just now to give it another try. Here is what I got regarding Getting It:

"Getting It" by Daniel Shaviro is a satirical novel that delves into the life of a Wall Street tax lawyer named Bill Doberman. The story explores themes of ambition, greed, and the pursuit of success in a corporate world where ethics often take a backseat to self-interest.

"Bill Doberman is the novel’s protagonist, a middle-aged lawyer working for a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Despite his outward success, Bill is deeply dissatisfied with his life. He feels stuck in a career that he once thought would bring him fulfillment, but instead, he finds it hollow and unfulfilling. The novel follows his journey as he navigates the cutthroat world of corporate law, where manipulation and deceit are commonplace, and personal and professional lives intertwine in complex and often damaging ways.

"As Bill struggles with his own moral compass, he becomes increasingly aware of the compromises he has made to "get it"—success, wealth, and status. The novel critiques the American Dream by portraying how its pursuit can lead to moral and personal decay.

"Shaviro uses sharp wit and dark humor to portray the absurdity of the corporate world, making "Getting It" not only a commentary on the legal profession but also a broader critique of contemporary society's values."

[Back to me] Okay, this comes closer than before. But a few quibbles: (a) Doberman is a DC, not a Wall Street lawyer, (b) he is not a tax lawyer, (c) he is young not middle-aged, and (d) he does not become dissatisfied with the cutthroat world he inhabits. That may come later, the ending hints, but only due to the limited nature of what he has won. And related to this last point, hopefully it's less cliched in the actual novel to have us, but not him, understand how hollow and unfulfilling his "triumphs" are.

So evidently Chat GPT is still fantasizing and filling in the gaps, but it's coming closer than it did before.