"I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey."
"At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics."
"I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department."
"Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves."
"Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate."
"The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory."
"What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed."
"Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed."
"Economic forecasting has actually got pretty good over the years, though admittedly, we don't always get it right."
"If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning."
"I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating."
"I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem."
"I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me."
"In various countries around the world, assets that had previously been in the hands of governments were sold off to the private sector in the hope that this would lead to a more efficient allocation, that these assets would be put to better use."
"A properly designed tax system can strike a balance between helping the poor and, at the same time, giving people the incentive to work."
"Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting."
"Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise."
"Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are."
"I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely."
"There are some things that we value as a public good that the markets can't deliver, like clean air."
"The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem."
"Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem."
"It wasn't that Harvard was deliberately trying to overwork me, but I think I had a tendency to take on more things out of enthusiasm than were good for me."
"I have a strong attachment to Harvard."
"I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one."
