Thread by @Jon_Hartley_

In latest @CapAndFreedom ep, Steve Levitt talks his career & retiring as @UChicago prof while still leading RISC & Freakonomics. We talk applied economics, Chicago econ dept (price theory failure, macro success, personalities), Freakonomics origin & more podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ste…

Podcast episode full transcript: capitalismandfreedom.substack.com/p/episode-28-s…

On why he is retiring from academia: "It just didn't make sense to me to keep on puttering around, doing all this work, spending years to write papers that no one cared about when I had other ways of getting my ideas out. And really my interests were elsewhere. I didn't get any thrill. It'd be one thing. If I got a thrill from publishing, if I loved the act of publishing, and it made me feel great to see my nature in some journal, then it would be different. But I never cared about that. I just liked answering the problems and I realized there were better ways, there were better venues for me to answer your problem. And so really the question is, why am I retiring now? The question I should ask myself is why didn't I retire a long time ago? It made no sense. I've just been, I've thought, I've known for years, it's the wrong place for me to be. And it just took me a long time to figure out how to extricate myself from academics. And I'm so glad I'm doing it. It's good for everyone. It doesn't make any sense to, it feels to me awful to be in a place where I'm not excited and where I'm not contributing materially. So, for me, it feels like a breath of fresh air to be saying, "Hey, I'm not going to be an academic anymore. I'm going to be doing what I really love to do.""

Levitt on Heckman at @UChi_Economics: "An absolute genius, but a nightmare personality. He eventually decided that he and I were at war for the future of economics although I never saw it that way. And he did crazy things. I just tell you one crazy thing he did. At one point he started a new seminar series. So, an academic department to have the labor economic series, the macro-exemplary. He started a new seminar, and I'm not even joking. I'm literally telling you the truth. It was called the “Get Out the Sleaze” seminar. And the only thing you needed to be invited to speak was to be critical of me. So, it was an entire semester of some academics, a lot, some of them weren't even academic. You didn't have to be an academic. You just had to not like me and have publicly said you don't like me. And he invited, he invited guest after guest whose only agenda was to destroy me to come on campus to present their work. And then I think five, finally the department chair at the end of the semester, it was really awkward for the grad students because the grad students were being asked to organize this and were frightened of what Heckman's response would be if they didn't follow through. But I think they felt awkward being around me when they were doing this. And then we have these important exams that people take at Chicago. And Heckman would routinely put a question on the exam, which was my work, and asking the students to say, "What was terrible about my work?" And that's what you needed to get to progress on, and your PhD was said. So, it was a really, it was a really, I mean, I didn't, it didn't bother me that much because I didn't take it that seriously, but the extent, the extremes that he would go to try to make life difficult, not just for me, but for others, really, it's stunning. And you could never, in a business world, you just couldn't get away with that. But in academics, there's enough freedom that people can just do really anti-social things. And so, still get away with it. We all hoped that when he won the Nobel Prize, he would relax, but it was just the opposite. He said, "Oh, God, it's so bad." He would become-- kind of friendly with me, too, on and off. He'd say, "It's so awful. Now that I have the Nobel Prize, everybody thinks I'm washed up. I have to work three times harder to prove to them that I'm just as good as ever." He really had an unusual person. He has a really unusual personality.”"

Levitt on Prescott: “So Prescott, he was kind of, I was afraid of Prescott. I'm afraid a lot of people, I was afraid of Prescott. But one day, I happened to find myself sitting with him. And Prescott said, you know, I really like you. I really like you as an economist. I said, what? Why? He said, 'cause you have enough sense to not mess with theory, right? You know you're no good at anything theoretical. So, you just stick to point estimates, right? And I need point estimates, right? People who do what I do, we need point estimates to calibrate them out. You know, what I hate is I hate people like you who think you're good at theory and then you get everything confused. But you don't have that problem. You know you're bad at theory. It's pretty, it's right. I mean, it was a really, it was an insightful statement. Now, most of the Minnesota macro people hated me, despised me. And he was, he was one of the rare people who didn't, didn't mind. But you know, it's funny. Everybody, everyone in Chicago was always kind to me and Lars Hansen and I for a long time did a whole bunch of the providing of social goods within the department. I worked really closely with Lars on so many things, and intellectually we couldn't be further apart. I couldn't understand anything in Lars's papers, and Lars wouldn't have liked what I was doing. But there was a void, and there's nobody who was really doing much in the department, and so Lars and I would get together and try to make it a better place. No, I have to say it was an incredibly welcoming department and people were really it was okay to do your thing and I think the idea was as long as you were the best at what you were doing or perceived as being good at what you're doing, it was okay."

Levitt on Kevin Murphy and Gary Becker: “Gary Becker was an amazing human being, a brilliant economist. The time that I got to spend with him and Kevin Murphy, there's no thinker on the planet like Kevin Murphy. Kevin is just a phenomenon. It almost I don't even know how to describe Kevin's insight and his, I'll tell you one story about Kevin. So, I was working on a paper with Paul Heaton and Roland Fryer and we were trying, so Kevin wasn't doing very much. Kevin never does very much. Kevin's just in the background doing his thing and you go tap him on the shoulder when you have a problem. So, we had a problem. We couldn't figure out how to do one particular thing. And so, we went and we sat with Kevin. We explained the problem to him, and Kevin said, "I don't know what to do. "I don't know how to answer that problem. "I don't know how to solve that." And I looked and said, "What?" "What, Kevin, what are you talking about? "I've never heard you say that before. "How about you just go to the board "and let's just see what happens?" So, Kevin went to the board and from scratch, it turns out, ended up deriving principal components analysis from the very basics, from the very basic principles. It was interesting because Paul Heaton, who was a graduate student at the time, now at Penn, he went back and he looked at it and he said, "Well, it's so strange." He actually went back in the textbooks and they don't teach that in the textbooks. What Kevin just derived was the initial way that the first people who came up with principal components, how they derived it, but he couldn't possibly have ever read that. He literally just invented it from scratch at the board. And that was what it was like being around Kevin. No matter what question you asked him, he could figure it out. And if he didn't know it, a lot of times he just knew it somehow, but then he could just figure it out. And if you're like me and you enjoy being around genius, it was just so amazing to spend time with Kevin."

Levitt on his days as a graduate student with @Austan_Goolsbee at @MITEcon: "So, I knew from day one I was the odd man out. I mean I'm not even exaggerating when I say that there was a group of people in the in-crowd. Austan Goolsbee, my good friend Austan Goolsbee was one of the in-crowds. And Austan told me that maybe a month into our first year at MIT, the in-crowd sat down and they made a list of the five people most likely to fail out. And I was on that list of five. And there's only one person of the in-crowd who thought I was actually might not be as bad as everyone else thought. And so, I was really in a strange place. And I couldn't really do the classwork a lot of times. So, I didn't worry about it. I just looked around and it's said to succeed in this profession, you have to write papers. And so instead of spending my time on classes, I really spent my time writing papers and started writing papers right away. And so, by the end of my second year, I probably had written four or five academic papers. I got a paper into the Journal of Political Economy in my second year of my grad program. And I was just doing something different. All I did really was go to seminars, try to learn as much as possible, do my own research and I didn't, I didn't teach at all. I didn't, I didn't, wasn't a research assistant for anyone. I just did my own thing.”

Levitt on how winning the John Bates Clark medal in 2003 led to @Freakonomics: "the only thing that did happen [after winning the Clark medal] was that the New York Times Magazine wanted to write a piece of on me and Stephen Dubner ended up being the reporter who was put on it. And then he wrote a piece about me which created, he hates it when I say this, but created this persona about me that was so far from the truth but was delicious and exciting to people. Me as this Indiana Jones of economics who you just answered a question and I say I'll off into space a little bit. I type at my computer and I deliver the answer. So, it couldn't have been further from the truth. But people loved the profile of me because I was, he painted the things that were weird about me, but he really made me heroic in my weirdness. And so, then the publishers were interested in me doing a book, but I categorically said no. And eventually, Stephen Dubner's agent called me up and said, hey, why don't you write a book with Steven Dubner?" And I said, "Number one, I have no interest in writing a popular book. Number two, I'm sure Dubner doesn't want to write a book with me because we honestly didn't get along that well when he came out to interview me the first time." But we agreed to talk and we shared, and we had a real commonality, which is that neither of us really wanted to write this book. Neither of us thought anybody would read a book if we did write it. But we both were kind of, prostitutes in some sense. And so, for the right amount of money, we were willing to write this book. And interestingly, the right amount of money turned out to be similar for both of us. And so much to our surprise, we got offered, I don't know, three times that amount of money to write the book. And then the only thing that stood in the way of us writing the book is we had to figure out how to divide the profits, the payments. And Dubner, I don't remember the exact numbers, but Dubner came to me and he said, "Hey, I know it's uncomfortable to talk about this, but we need to decide to split." And he said, "I was thinking 60/40." And I said, "I was actually thinking 2/3, 1/3." And he said, "Oh, I'm just not willing to write this book for 1/3." And I said, "No, no, I was thinking 2/3 for you and 1 /3 for me." And he said, I was thinking 60% for you and 40% for me. So, it's the easiest negotiation ever. We settled on 50/50, we both felt like we got a lot of surplus and we've had a great relationship ever since. So, we definitely did not enter this with some idea that we were on a mission to better the world. We were just, I mean, we really thought no one's gonna read this book. The only question we had was the immorality of taking all this money from the publisher for a book that no one was going to read. And it shocked everyone. I mean, from top to bottom, it shocked everyone that this book took off.”

Levitt on how he "got converted to the power of Chicago thinking" despite initially planning to go back to @HarvardEcon or @MITEcon after 2 or 3 years as an assistant professor at @UChi_Economics: "What I remember was that I was going to Chicago for two or three years because I wanted to get to know the enemy. I didn't actually, I didn't want to change them. I just wanted to see how they thought so I could respond better to them and what attracted me to Chicago, to be honest, is the only time I had been on campus to give a seminar. It was a free for all and it was crazy and chaotic. Really unlike any seminar I've given before or since, but I was really stunned. I'll tell you, just, I won't tell you the details of what happened, but at the end, Sam Peltzman, who was not a young man, he must have been probably in his 60s or 70s, probably 60s, but then, as they were walking, as everyone was walking out of the seminar, he put his arm around one of the other older faculty at Chicago, and in his 60s, he put his arm around one of the older faculty could hear with the earshot of me, he says, "We haven't taken someone apart like that since George Stigler was here." And that was the kind of chaos that reigned at Chicago in those days, and I was attracted to it, and I really wanted to go, and people asked me different questions than I had ever heard before, and I liked that. So, I showed up at Chicago, let me say before I went there, everyone thought I was crazy to go to Chicago. So, one of my mentors at Harvard was Andrei Shleifer, who himself was from Chicago. And when I told Andrei that I was going to the Department of Economics in Chicago, he said something like, "If you do that, I will never talk to you again." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Because it shows that you are so fucking stupid that you're not worth talking to you. Only a moron would go to the University of Chicago Department of Economics." But I went and my goal was to be there a couple years and I would learn price theory. I really wanted to learn price theory and what was interesting is two things. First, I just absolutely got converted to the power of Chicago thinking. It really, as I heard people like Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy and everyone talking, it just made sense to me. It was a different version of the world. There's a more serious economic application. I wasn't an economist at MIT. I was a data scientist who was messing around with data. I loved it. It was fun. I'm not good at Chicago price theory. I never really learned it. There's nobody. If you talk to people like Kevin Murphy or if Gary Becker were alive and he said, "Hey, is Levitt any good at price theory?" They said, "No, no he's not, but he appreciates it." And that's the important thing. "And he asked the right questions and he lets us, and we help him with it." So, no one will confuse me for being good at it, but I liked it. And if you look at my research, once I got to Chicago, I began writing completely different kinds of papers. And it was very influential and I never left. I thought about leaving from time to time, but it really became an incredible intellectual home where I always felt challenged. I always had this optimism that someday I was really going to get good at price theory, but it's hard. It turns out that price theory is actually hard to learn, and some people seem to get it naturally, and I wasn't one of those people.”

Levitt on how then-President @BillClinton, Janet Reno and @RahmEmanuel in the 1990s read one of his papers he wrote while a graduate student which found more police causes less crime (the late Alan Krueger acting as an intermediary): "I wrote a paper on the effective police on crime, and I found, unlike other people before me, that looked like more police reduced crime. Perhaps not surprising, but it was very surprising to the criminologists. And Alan Krueger, I think, was somehow involved. And I think, if I remember correctly, and I might be confusing my stories, I think Alan Krueger put together a binder of papers for Bill Clinton every week. And Alan said that Bill was an amazing thinker, and he would really look at these papers. And he said, in particular, because they're trying to get this crime bill passed that would add 100,000 police officers, Bill Clinton had gone over my paper, and he said you could see all the notes in the margin and had lots of questions and then Janet Reno apparently carried my paper around in a briefcase dozens of copies and gave it to anyone she could because she was trying to influence the senators and the representatives to vote on behalf of the Bill Clinton's crime bill and I say I got completely the wrong idea. I had this idea that like you said wow the power of research and anyone can do it and you do good research and people recognize and it effects policy, I mean, I was so confused. It took me years and years to understand that, number one, usually nobody cares at all about your research. No matter how much you love it, it never gets any attention. Number two, the quality of my research had nothing to do with it being passed around. It was being passed around Washington because it was the only paper that supported the position that they had already chosen. Right, the policy outcome they want chosen first and then they went for papers. And I'm sure they were disappointed that the only article they could find that it all supported them was by some grad student, but they took what they could. And what I read, the real lesson I learned over time is that I don't actually think that my research or even my writing, more popular writing, has ever really fundamentally changed the way any politician thought about anything and that it's just, I've come to a different conclusion which is that it is incredibly hard to influence any policy or anyone's beliefs by doing research. Now then, Rahm Emanuel called me up after this it all transpired, trying to get me to come and work for him. But unfortunately for Rahm, I by that time had a little bit of common sense and so I asked around, "Hey, what's it like to work for Rahm Emanuel?" And he said, well if you love being screamed at and working 24 hours a day, it's a really good job, and I didn't like to be screamed at and I didn't really want to work 24 hours a day. So, I politely declined Rahm Emanuel's offer.”

Levitt on his role in the credibility revolution: “So let me just be clear. I think I'm really a footnote to the credibility revolution. It was the generation before me, Angrist and Krueger and Imbens and maybe people like Heckman who you include but I really felt-- Yeah, I really felt like a follow-on to it. Those guys had set out some methods for thinking about the world, and I was just interested in questions and trying to answer them, and I was using their tools, and I was really mostly asking different questions and economists ask a lot of times about settings where markets weren't applicable like crime. In education various places and so I never honestly never felt very much like a real economist. I certainly didn't feel like I was leading any kind of a charge. I was never a leader. I really just enjoyed the act of doing research and just did as much as I could. I worked hard. I was productive because I loved it, but I wasn't a visionary in any way, shape, or form. Now, I think what changed, so at that time computing was hard. I was still getting started when, if you wanted to work in the sciences, you had a... get this old magnetic tape and spin the thing. I mean it's crazy what you had to do.”

Levitt on how as a graduate student at @MITEcon
he became an applied microeconomist after failing trying to become an economic theorist and then macroeconomist: "I think more in terms of status rather than numbers. So, at that time, it's different by school, but at MIT, the highest status people were probably the theorists because we had great, we had Jean Tirole and Drew Fudenberg and Oliver Hart. We had incredible theorists. And so, the best students wanted to be theorists. And if you weren't quite good enough to be a theorist, then you probably wanted to be a macroeconomist 'cause we had great macroeconomists. And it trickled down and honestly, the people who were doing what I was doing, we were at the bottom of the totem pole status wise. Now, just to be clear, I started out thinking, well, I'll try to be a theorist 'cause that's what the high-status people are doing. And I pretty much failed, I failed at that. And then I said, well, the next best thing is doing macro and I completely failed at that too. It wasn't that I said, hey, I'm going to be an applied micro person. It was that I ran out options and that's what was left and it turned out that that's what I was good at."

Levitt on the evolution of applied economics in recent decades and how in his academic work, he transitioned from writing mostly idiosyncratic natural experiment papers to using the success of @Freakonomics to get access to better data and opportunities to run randomized experiments alongside John List (@Econ_4_Everyone): "There's a formula for writing almost any academic paper and there's a very simple formula for writing a good natural experiment paper the kind of papers that I was writing as a grad student and once the profession understands the formula and that's formulaic then the problem is you can't get a job. You can't get a good job doing that anymore. Because when you're on the job market, when you're young academic, you have to convince the faculty who are hiring you, that you have, somehow the idea is that technique, knowing how to do hard things, technical skills is really valuable. Or that you have, you know the formula for writing some difficult kind of paper. But as soon as it's easy, as soon as anybody could write a natural experiment paper, then you couldn't get a job writing natural experiment papers. You could still get them published but so it's very quickly and that's why I say I was in the right place at the right time very quickly. A matter of three or four years after I came out of grad school people were being discouraged from writing those kinds of papers because you couldn't get good jobs doing it. So, there was this thought that you should do what a kind of some more structural work right so think more applied theory so a mix of empirical work and applied theory. And eventually, two things happened over time. So, three things happened. First, the technology changed. So, as you said, data and computing, that all changed radically and led it to be both easier to write these kinds of papers, but also opened up to do them much more interesting questions than maybe you could have in the first place. The second thing that happened was the true experimental revolution. So, my colleague John List and others actually incredibly late in the game brought experimental economics where you actually did randomizations into the mainstream. And that also I think really put a dampened people's enthusiasm for the kind of more idiosyncratic work that I was doing. And the third thing was that really, I think the outside options for applied economists got much better. So, people who were sensible, who were applied, suddenly business was really interested in their skills. And a lot of those people exited and what was left behind were the more technical theory-driven folks. And I think that's really warped our profession away from the simple - causal, idea-driven estimates of things towards a much more demanding view of what an academic paper should offer. And all those things, honestly, really worked against my importance and my interest in what was going on in academic economics. Now, let me answer, you had a couple questions. Let me answer another one, which is winning the Clark Medal was amazing for me because it opened so many doors and in particular it led to me writing the book Freakonomics. And it was stunning to everyone including me that that book took off and it was a best-seller sold a bunch of copies and the doors just opened to so many things and within academics what I realized is that my comparative advantage had become getting access to data. After writing Freakonomics, I could send a signed copy of the book to just about anybody, and they'd sit down with me, and they'd talk to me, and often they would give me data. And so really, I changed my research, and much of my later research, if you trace my history, goes from being about super clever identification, trying to answer questions by natural experiments to just putting my hands on interesting data that other people couldn't get and trying in often in straightforward ways to answer questions that I could do. And I always, actually one of the smartest things I ever did in economics was to understand that that was my comparative advantage and to really work at that. But the other thing I did discover after I wrote Freakonomics and I had these opportunities was how much fun the real world could be if you were allowed to do interesting things and if you had a certain amount of prestige and people would invite you to participate and in solving real problems and so for me that really is sadly I mean I loved academics when I was doing it actively but it really was part of the death knell for my interest in academics is that as much as I loved writing papers I loved doing other things more. And so, I started allocating my time differently.”

Levitt on his friendship with and admiration for John List (@Econ_4_Everyone): “So, I think John List is amazing. He's amazing in two regards. First, he came out of nowhere, right? He came from the lowest-ranked institutions like the University of Central Florida, and he had a boldness of thinking about the power of experiments. It's embarrassing to talk about it now, but somehow in my mind in my training I just had the idea that you weren't allowed to generate your own data, that somehow as an economist, you were supposed to take data that were out there and analyze them. And then John came along and just started creating his own data sets, and they were in silly things about baseball card buying, something baseball cards or pins, decorative pins and I remember when I first ran into John's work, thinking, "Well, you're not allowed to do that." And then I thought, "Wait, wait, of course you are. Why did I think you weren't allowed to do that? Well, who put that idea in my head that we couldn't be data creators?" And it was, it was a blindness. It was an interesting blindness to a real truth. And so, John, bringing John to Chicago, I really worked hard, had to fight a lot of resistance to bring him. It was one of the best things I ever could have done for Chicago because he has just been a force of nature his entire life. And our years, maybe we had seven, 10 years where we collaborated on a bunch of papers, it's so much fun, so exciting. It was interesting for me because I really, just like I thought I'd be a Chicago price theorist, I thought I would be good at doing field experiments, and interest, it turned out I wasn't. I was never very good at coming up with these great ideas about how to use randomization to answer questions. John was good at that, and I wasn't. So honestly, I think I give 90% of the credit to John there because John has just been the most forceful. John has been unbelievable in the way that he has transformed the way people think about the world. And along the way, John did a real service to the profession by making people think harder about lab experiments, because there's real reliance on lab experiments, which I think don't turn out to be all that useful in our context, and bringing the idea that you can do these randomized experiments. Now, John was the first one to do these field experiments, but I think he did them in ways that opened people's eyes to the power. Yeah, so there was a moment there, you know, where Michael Greenstone, who went away and came back, Mark Duggan, Roland Fryer, there was just a group of us around that were some of my closest friends and all awesome economists. And it was so much fun. Those were really, if I look back on my career, those are the years I remember as being the golden years where I just loved going into work every day and you never knew what you'd be working on the next day because ideas were flying so fast.”

Levitt on the legacy of the Chicago School of Economics, including how "Every macro department feels a lot like heavily influenced by Chicago", "Chicago price theory really has lost" and a phone call with Friedman in the 1990s with Friedman being very upset about the decline of price theory:
"Go back to the '70s, there's a real gap between how Chicago thought about macro and how Chicago thought about micro compared to the rest of the world. And interestingly, the Chicago view essentially won in macro and our students placed well and influenced... Every macro department feels a lot like heavily influenced by Chicago. And I think for better or worse that has been a success story for the Chicago way of thinking. I think just really the opposite for Chicago micro; we have not had very many students who've gone out and been influential, maybe Ed Glaeser being a clear counter-example to that. And I think in the marketplace for ideas, I gotta say that the Chicago price theory really has lost. And it hasn't caught people's imagination. And I remember I was on a call with Milton Friedman as long after he left. He left Chicago in 1978, but this must have been 20-something years later where he was upset that Chicago price theory was not doing well, that it wasn't being appreciated. And I remember Casey Mulligan saying, "Hey, Milton, I thought you believed in markets. Let's just face it, price theory is losing in the market for ideas." And Milton Friedman got so upset about that. He believed in markets until it applied to Chicago price theory where he thought that it was the right way, so markets shouldn't have any bearing on it. But I think that's just the truth. That the people who you think of as being the logical heirs to Chicago price theory, the two that come to mind really are Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro, they're not at Chicago. And with Kevin [Muprhy] retiring, there isn't, when Kevin Murphy retiring, there just isn't anybody around now really, other than Casey Mulligan, who could really keep the torch going. And the movement in terms of textbooks and what people are taught is just so away from what I think of Chicago price theory, which is not as mathematical, it's more about how you take the simple tools the very old tools you know tools that go back to people like Marshall and how you use them. It's really the skill that I see in Chicago price theory (one that I don't have) is how do you look at a problem and understand it to the lens of the right tool. And it's not complicated. It's usually very simple. Once you can see it, it's usually not much more than intermediate micro is what gets applied. And it's more artistic. And I really feel like our field has moved towards technicality. Harder proofs. More mathematical. And I don't see any going back. I think it is essentially lost to posterity at this point.”

Levitt on the unique hiring strategy at @UChi_Economics and how the department, once known for its unique Chicago School approach, is now indistinguishable from other top departments: "I think the other thing that really worked at Chicago, as I look back, is that when it came to new hires, we looked at what they were doing, and everybody, even if it was far from their field, tried to understand it, and we tried to come to our own decisions. And sometimes that was disastrous, and sometimes it worked well but it meant that we weren't just following the crowd and we weren't Harvard or MIT or Stanford. Those were always places I think that were more attractive to mainstream economists. So, we had to make bets on weird people and odd people that that wouldn't necessarily be attractive to those places. And we and John list to be a great example, right? John List with it the University of Maryland econ department when we found them and those were the kind of higher hires and the thinking that made Chicago different. Now, honestly, I'd say Chicago is almost exactly like the other departments. You'd be hard-pressed, I think. If you blinded everything and you took Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, MIT, Harvard, it would be hard to find a real individuality that's so different at Chicago than anywhere else."

Levitt on how the environment at Chicago has changed and how the "toxic" experience for graduate students at @UChi_Economics was far worse than at @MITEcon: "it has changed. And for better and for worse, but I really, I do think it wasn't really a good equilibrium, where Chicago was, to try to be an elite department made up of a kind of iconoclast. It's just a hard thing to replicate and maintain. And I'll be totally honest, the environment in Chicago was toxic. It was back in the day. It was mean-spirited. There was, by virtue of everybody being an iconoclast, there was a lot of bad personalities. And especially for the grad students, I really don't, I'm totally with you, that a virtue of letting in a lot of people and then flunking them out is that some people who wouldn't have had a chance, got a chance, but the toxicity of the environment. And I compare it to when I went to MIT and MIT, they brought you in as a PhD student and they made you think, they made you believe you were the future of the discipline and they treated you like you mattered and you practiced, you acted like you mattered, you acted like you were going to be a future economist. Really, we [Chicago] beat the stuffing out of our grad students so badly that most of them left the program, shells of their former self. So honestly, I think what might be ideal would be if we had a kinder, gentler Chicago that still had a little bit more of the iconoclast flavor, but I'm just not sure. I'm not sure that we could have accomplished both, but... but I definitely think that we've moved in the direction of saving people's mental health, their sanity from the chaos that was reigning when I got there, which is why Andrei Shleifer said don't go there, because it was crazy. It was completely out of control, and maybe that was good for scholarship, but it was destructive as well."