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I got into economics because I wanted to make things better for the average person.

Even though I didn't get a business degree, I enjoyed learning about economics.

I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein.

I had a degree in economics but also thought of myself as a musician.

I was never supposed to be a businessman. I was going to change the world. I was going to go back to Latin America and work on agrarian reform and equalize the differences between rich and poor.

I realized that, after tasting entrepreneurship, I had become unfit for the corporate world. There was no turning back. The only regret I had was having wasted my life in the corporate world for so long.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.