 As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns. |
| I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights. |
| I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are. |
| I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life. |
| Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation. |
| Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education. |
| The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy. |
| My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me, an approach to learning which was later reinforced by my experiences at Amherst. |
| Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom. |
| In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue - it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues. |
| But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs. |
| The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities. |
| I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced. |
| Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist. |
| Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them. |
| My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth. |
| There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists. |
| I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard. |
| If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future - and these markets clearly did not exist - what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system? |
| I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely. |
