I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the '90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren't as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier year...
As a little kid, I used to lock myself in my room and put on my Whitney Houston CD's and pretend to be her and try and hit every single note that she hit. I used to dream that one day that would be me.
I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.
Engineers do engineering, i.e. they build bridges. So engineering needs engineers. The economy does NOT need economists. Economists do not make economy, but they try it and that is why we have so much problems with some financial models.
One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn't do is really focus on the fact that 'I want this person to like me.' That's going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can't help but focus on t...
People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don't know. We don't know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you're not buying, it's staring you in the face. Psychologists call this 'salience.'
It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.
I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you've got two kids, to start a coffee shop.
A while back, I came across a line attributed to IBM founder Thomas Watson. If you want to achieve excellence, he said, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America.
Everybody who labels themselves a 'nerd' isn't some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who's never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.
Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nomi...
Hopefully my fan base doesn't lock me into 'Twilight,' you lose yourself. You should do things for you, and I have been really lucky to have things that really rock me and really move me falling into my lap.
We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of tho...
In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible. What you have is gigantic bubbles, the NASDAQ in 2000, then the housing bubble and then commodities in 2008 when oil went from $78 to $147 before plunging to $32...
The reason I am so negative about the Federal Reserve's policies is that they only target core inflation and argue that they can't identify bubbles, but when each bubble bursts, they flood the system with liquidity that brings about unintended conseq...
When people talk about people who are optimistic about gold, they call them 'gold bugs.' A bug is an insect. I don't call equity bugs 'cockroaches.' Do you understand? There is already a negative connotation with the expression of 'gold bug.'
