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.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

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.