My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.
Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.
One can spend too much of one's life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching, researching, until one is too old to enjoy life.
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.
The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany.
What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.
The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.
Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion.
Personally, I regard myself as an intellectual 'rebel,' kicking against the 'old colonialism-imperialism paradigm' which has landed Africa in a conundrum.
What people instinctively regard as cool is real power - consistency. Pathetic is not cool. Being locked in a tragedy, but not knowing it. That's lameness.
Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.
A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.
Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.
You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.
We're committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the - over his first term.
Tradition is the code that keeps change in lock. If you refuse change, you are likely to rust and guess the cause; that long held way of doing things.
An unlocked door means that, occasionally, you might get a devil come in, but a locked door means you have thousands of angels just walk by.
It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.
