Show Notes
What if the smartest thing you can do with data is to admit how much of it you have to build yourself? Diego Vallarino has spent a career at the sharp edge of risk, from Equifax and Scotiabank to Coface, where he and Bob first met, and now as a counselor to the board of the Inter-American Development Bank. He is also a prolific researcher who treats curiosity like a daily discipline. In this conversation, Diego breaks down how he builds models on open and synthetic data, why the source of your data matters far less for public policy than for a credit score, and how you can turn a thousand real observations into ten million and still trust the result. Then it takes a turn. He walks through his study of why people abandon a Netflix series, built with the very same survival model he once used on startups. Running through all of it is one human advantage no machine can copy. Listen now.
Timestamped Highlights [00:02:02] The board seat that puts one economist in the room with 47 countries [00:04:58] From a soccer ball in Uruguay to econometrics, and the pandemic model that changed everything [00:08:32] Why economists quietly resist open data, and what finally changed their minds [00:10:24] Clean government data you can’t trust versus messy open data you can: which risk is worse [00:16:08] Synthetic data, explained: turning 1,000 real records into 10 million without breaking the model [00:19:52] Designing a public policy and testing it before you ever roll it out [00:24:53] Porándu: the Guaraní word for wonder that Bob just calls curiosity [00:28:34] The startup metric everyone asks about that has almost nothing to do with survival [00:36:38] The same risk model, now aimed at why you quit a Netflix series halfway through [00:47:29] The question that isn’t in any book, and why only humans can ask it
Mentioned Resources Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Coface Equifax and Scotiabank
About the Guest Diego Vallarino is a Uruguayan quantitative researcher and Counselor to the Board of Directors at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and IDB Invest in Washington, D.C. He leads Sandpile Economics, an independent research program that applies self-organized criticality, network geometry, and complexity economics to understand how financial, productive, and institutional systems become fragile, and how small shocks turn into large crises. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Computational Economics, the Journal of Complex Networks, and Nonlinear Science. Before joining the IDB, he spent roughly a decade in risk management at Equifax, Scotiabank, and Coface, working with hundreds of Chief Risk Officers on how organizations measure and reduce risk.
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Curious Data is an original production hosted by Bob Lytle. Brought to you by Centri Analytics. Production and editing by Podcast Your Brand.
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