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I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.

I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.

I don't remember much about the specifics of the economics courses that I majored in - I apparently internalized the key concepts - but I still remember vividly the thrill of reading 'Don Quixote,' Epictetus, 'The Aeneid,' 'King Lear' and 'Candide,' and how contemporary the stories and ideas in these old and ancient texts struck me.

Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.

My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.

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.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.

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.