As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.