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" At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics. "

Eric Maskin

Eyes

Who

Teachers

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" The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods. "

" I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem. "

" The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory. "

" I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department. "

" Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist. "

" I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me. "

Eric Maskin

Work

Much

" In various countries around the world, assets that had previously been in the hands of governments were sold off to the private sector in the hope that this would lead to a more efficient allocation, that these assets would be put to better use. "

" How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences? "

" If banks anticipate government will come to the rescue should the credit market go badly awry, they may make loans that would otherwise be imprudent, e.g. subprime loans with little prospect of repayment. "

Eric Maskin

Rescue

Will

" I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely. "

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

" This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division? "

" Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don't always get it right. "

" Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods. "

" 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. "

" Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed. "

" Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise. "

Eric Maskin

Say

Storm

" I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one. "

" I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating. "

" Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are. "

" There are some things that we value as a public good that the markets can't deliver, like clean air. "

Eric Maskin

Good

Clean

" If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods. "

Eric Maskin

Pretty

Car

" I have a strong attachment to Harvard. "

" Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem. "

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

" The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem. "

" Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick. "

" A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense. "

" There is universal consensus among experts that the earth's atmosphere is heating up - and that we are responsible for it by putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We also know that the consequences of global warming are catastrophic. But how do we make sure that all countries reduce greenhouse gases? "

" Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones. "