I think the development of the venture capital system has been an example of something which is a successful improvement in risk-bearing. It doesn't exactly remove the risks at the beginning, but at least creates greater rewards at a slightly later stage and therefore encourages, say, small companies to engage in technologically risky enterprises.

I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding.

I am not really inclined to think there is any very effective regulation of the derivative securities markets that would be useful. People who go into it essentially ought to know what risks they're taking and I don't see any useful regulation.

Evolutionary theory tends to explain quite well in retrospect how various species emerged. It's not very good on prediction. Nevertheless, one cannot say that there isn't a lot of knowledge that's been obtained in this field. In the same way, with these complex physical phenomena between solid state physics, you can say a lot of things without necessarily knowing the next step.

One thing I learned from meteorology is that being an actual science was no guarantee of exactness.

Some people say Russia is running at 50 percent of its gross domestic product under that during the Communist period. In fact, none of the countries seems to have recovered the level that they had under communism, although the other countries in Eastern Europe are doing better than Russia and particularly the Czech Republic seems to be doing modestly well. East Germany I can't count because they have a rich uncle. You have economic benefits which have nothing to do with the workings of the system.

The intrinsic social structure, the family structure and so forth, is certainly in a very bad state. And I think that this is showing up in productivity. I think part of the reason, and I can't prove this, we're seeing a decline in some places is the breakup of the family, which is partly the result of an extreme form of individualism.