Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate - these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases.

It must be awfully frustrating to get a small raise at work and then have it all eaten by a higher cost of commuting.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.