Writing on the blog, you want to get attention and make strong claims. In academic work, that often doesn't pay, so sometimes it's a little bit difficult going back and forth to navigate these differences.

If China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now.

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult.

College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don't help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for subsidies that do nothing to encourage innovation and economic growth.

The first thing you learn when you're blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you've got to get to the point, you can't waste people's time, you've got to give them some value for their limited attention span.

Well-roundedness comes not from sitting in a classroom but from experiencing the larger world.