Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

Somehow, talking to young students brings you back to reality - it should, anyway.

In the longer run and for wide-reaching issues, more creative solutions tend to come from imaginative interdisciplinary collaboration.

A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.

Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery - people saying they can beat the market, and they really can't.

Can a controlled experiment explain why people like Kewpie dolls in one year, Beanie Babies in another, and American Girl dolls this year? Yet social scientists are asked to answer analogous questions. We economists and perhaps psychologists shouldn't overreact to the derision. That is, we shouldn't try to overlay a false sense of precision on our admittedly squooshy work.