My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.

I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression.

Each profession has its own toolkit.

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

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.