I think one of the things we learned from the physicists and also the theoretical biologists is the idea that when you're dealing with very complex systems you're going to get a large variety of behavior which can be interpreted as hill climbing, but hill climbing with a lot of modifications, hill climbing with big jumps occasionally.

I don't believe that unemployment is all voluntary, by anticipation of future wage movements or this sort of thing. I know you can modify the models by taking into account the indivisibilities, but I don't really think that people are voluntarily unemployed.

From the time I first understood economic principles, I was always concerned also that any system be operated on an efficient basis, which meant decentralization because knowledge is not concentrated anywhere. It's based on motivation, and so these are the advantages of, say, the cautious case for capitalism, that the market system is efficient.

In my [Impossibility] theorem I'm assuming that the information is a ranking. Each voter can say of any two candidates, I prefer this one to this one. So then we have essentially a ranking. It's a list saying this is my first choice. This is my second choice. Each voter, in principle, could be asked to give that entire piece of information. In the ordinary Plurality Voting, say as used in electing Congressmen, we generally only ask for the first choice. But, in principle, we could ask for more choices.

The health care provisions are presumably for individuals. And whoever pays for them, whether it's paid by the individual, state, whatever, the value is an individually based value. It has nothing to do with employment.

Usefulness depends on tractability.

There are all sorts of institutions in the economic world which depart from the simple price/market model which I worked on in an earlier incarnation and which has been sort of the mainstream of economic theories since Adam Smith and David Ricardo. There are all sorts of contractual relations between firms and individuals which do not conform to the simple price theory - profit-sharing schemes and so forth - and the explanation for these suddenly became clear. We now understand why these emerged and that they are based on differences in information in the economy.