I am no Rushdie. The only people who think of silencing me are my students, on days when my lectures are more opaque than usual.
I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.
I was very lucky to be born into a very academic family. I was well-read, well-trained in mathematics. I had lots of advantages to start with.
Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.
The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.
I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.
