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

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" If I'm a bank, and I'm making risky loans, I have an incentive, if I can, to make those loans using other people's money: in other words, to make highly leveraged loans. "

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

" 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. "

" It wasn't that Harvard was deliberately trying to overwork me, but I think I had a tendency to take on more things out of enthusiasm than were good for me. "

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

" 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? "

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

" I have a strong attachment to Harvard. "

" 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. "

" Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand. "

" When a bank calls in a loan, it obviously hurts the customer in question. But it also adversely affects other banks that have lent to this borrower. They are now less likely to be repaid and so can't as readily lend to their own customers. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Nobel Prize is not very important for the winners - they are usually pretty successful people already. But it is valuable as a way of drawing the public's attention to important work in economics. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed. "

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

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

" Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves. "