As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

If the President asked you to help, I don't think anybody could refuse, unless one felt that one couldn't be effective.

I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that's appropriate.

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 important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.

The war in Iraq has been very, very expensive - partly because the Administration tried to keep the apparent costs down. But the benefits have been elusive at best - partly because the ostensible reasons for going war were unconnected with reality - no weapons of mass destruction, no connections with 9/11.

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.