A lot of my colleagues have been people with broad interests in economics, not just narrowly focused interests.

I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.

If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.

Early on, in discussions of financial oversight, people would say, 'Well, this is a very complicated problem, therefore it requires a complicated solution.' And at that step, I would say, 'Well, wait a minute. Just because it's a complicated problem doesn't mean the best course of action immediately is one that's complicated.'

While teaching, I also worked undercover in the lower courts by saying I was a young law teacher wanting experience in criminal law. The judges were happy to assist me but what I learned was how corrupt the lower courts were. Judges were accepting money right in the courtroom.

People who put money in the church basket and people who go to church and pay the pastor: that isn't real philanthropy; that's just like you belong to a country club. You pay your dues to belong to that church, so you pay your tithing or whatever it is.

We used to tie-dye T-shirts and sell them to classmates. We used to make egg rolls and sell them at street fairs. I worked at the mall. My parents probably spent more money on the gas driving me to different jobs than I made.

Spending money is much more difficult than making money.