If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail.

This may just be me, but I feel like everyone's dream is to live as an American high school student. There are so many teen films set in America that you live vicariously through them, anyway.

There was kind of a pivotal moment in my life in junior high school when my English teacher told me I should be a part of the public speaking competition.

I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn't like guitar lessons and I got quite bored. My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons, and one day I offered him a liquorice toffee, but he didn't answer. So I threw it at him, it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up.

I wasn't really that interested in playing. I had gone through some hard times not playing in high school, but my coach had it in his mind that basketball was the way I would get an education.