In Jamaica, you're never very far away from people who don't have very much, and in Wilmette, pretty much everybody had a lot.

I think my wife would take objection to any characterization of me as perfect.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Disciplined governments do not engage in the economic equivalent of binge eating followed by crash dieting.

In Jamaica, you're never very far away from people who don't have very much, and in Wilmette, pretty much everybody had a lot.

Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.'

Good economic policy requires not so much the bravado to implement drastic change as the strength and wisdom to make reasonable trade-offs over the many years it takes to transform a country's standard of living.