Thursday, March 08, 2007

Sometimes learning is costly...but always worthwhile!

This is about a nice interview with Economics Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, in the WSJ Editorial Page. I think the way the interviewer introduces Scholes is just great:

You know him better as a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. You may also recall him as a principal of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), which went belly-up in the late 1990s. Indeed, to the authors of a certain type of financial potboiler, he'll always be the mad scientist who almost blew up the world.

A better description would be a lifelong student of risk, and why we humans need risk, how we manage it and why we'd be unhappy without it.

And two great general "life" quotes among Scholes's answers:

In life, it would be kind of boring if there was no risk. On the other hand if there's too much risk, too much uncertainty, too much chaos, we can't handle it either. We simultaneously want order and disorder, simultaneously want risk and quiescence

...

In life you pay tuition, right? Sometimes you pay too much tuition. Sometimes learning is costly.


Read the whole interview. Link via Greg Mankiw.

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