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Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.

I went into the sciences very early on, but to me, economics pervades so much more of our lives and our existence.

I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

Basic Economics 101. It's the most complicated simple subject there is.

Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.