Models of My Life

Ever since, I think I have included that among my own selection criteria; intelligence shines through the eyes.

As long as I looked at the whole of Carnegie first, and its parts second, I could be useful. I think I have usually been able to do this, but I would be surprised if there have not been some lapses.

You start every class by giving students the opportunity (or better, the obligation) to ask questions about their reading, about previous sessions, or about anything. You take each question seriously, and answer it without making a jackass of the student who asked it (no matter how foolish the question).

My training as an economist has been of help in one important way: It convinced me that the only information that is of value in a financial market is information that other people don’t have. This means that I don’t have to pay daily, or even monthly, attention to the stock market, since it tells me nothing about whether I should buy or sell. Henc

Innovating means not simply generating ideas but disseminating them.

The important lesson I learned from this analysis was that my conclusions depended at least as much on certain assumptions about boundary conditions as on the central assumptions of economic rationality that lie at the core of neoclassical theory. By boundary conditions I mean the assumptions that have to be made about which indirect effects of a c

Work that too far anticipates its appropriate zeitgeist tends to be ignored, while work that fits the contemporary zeitgeist is recognized promptly.

At first I did not recognize that when you are in a position of authority you cannot debate freely with people in your organization without some of them believing that they may endanger their careers if they disagree with you too vigorously. Perhaps they are right—I like to think not in my case, but self-deception is easy. People who agree with you

Bracketing satisficing with Darwinian may appear contradictory, for evolutionists sometimes talk about survival of the fittest. But in fact, natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.