If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
The idea of applying psychology or behavioural sciences to communication is not a new one. It's very old behavioural economics. If it gives you some additional insights - so be it.
I don't think most of Congress understands how economics works.
The idea that we're going to austerity ourselves into prosperity is so mistaken, and honestly, I feel like one of the big problems we have is that, because Democrats don't have a deep understanding of or degrees in economics, they allow Wall Street folks to roll in the door and think that they're giving them an education.
I walked into an international economics tutorial, and the professor said, 'I don't know how to teach a woman.' I said, 'It's the same as teaching a man.' I just sat down, and he had no choice but to start teaching. When I handed in my first paper, I think that shut him up.
The simple model of a bridge is great, and you could not build a bridge without understanding it well. But if you're actually building the bridge, you need to know the site. A lot of economics is like that: When prices go up, demand is gonna go down. You can't forget that and run your economy. But it's not the only thing you need to know.
Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.
Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.
I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.
