There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.

Nationalization of private debts undermines prudential lender behavior and is a government intervention in the market.

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.

The analysis in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was that government was interfering with the efficiency of the economy through protectionism, government subsidies, and government ownership. Once the government "got out of the way," private markets would allocate resources efficiently and generate robust growth. Development would simply come.

The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.

I trace the inequality to a particular set of decisions that we took when we lowered the tax rate from 91% down to very low levels at the top, where we stripped away regulations. So the result of that was not a more dynamic economy, but a more unequal society. We tried the experiment of trickle-down. A third of a century later, we can say fairly definitively that it was a failure.

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.