The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.
I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?
The need to encourage entrepreneurship and ensure that young people have the opportunity to start new businesses is acute.
At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.
My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.
I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.
There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.
In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a comparable lack of inclusion among North Africans. In much of Europe, there has been little attempt to include the Roma.
Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.
Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.
As a grandson of farmers in downstate Illinois, I have long admired the dedication of farmers to their work and have written about the role of agriculture in American innovation.
If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.
I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.
You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.
For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.
I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.
A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
