T.C.: Most of all, I am excited to see economists turn at least a small portion of their attention to the economics of science. Each year I follow the new job market papers, and for the last few years I've been seeing a batch in this area. In my perspective, at least ten percent of the discipline of economics should be "the economics of science"! As you know, and have written yourself, science is an important driver of productivity growth. And yet we study science so little.Pierre Azoulay is one of the better-established names in this area, if you are looking for someplace to start.My hope and dream is that every year there will be a significant field conference, focusing on the economics of science. I think it is only a matter of time.N.S.: Yes, let me second the recommendation of Azoulay; he is really awesome. Nick Bloom is now doing a lot of good stuff in this area as well! And Matt Clancy's Substack has a lot of very readable writeups of a lot of these papers. 

Elsewhere, I have critiqued this ideology on the grounds that there are other stakeholders besides shareholders who, through the provision of capital or labor, make contributions to the business enterprise that help to generate future returns but without a guaranteed share of these returns.101 Through government investments and subsidies, taxpayers regularly pro-vide finance to companies without a guaranteed return. As risk bearers, therefore, taxpayers have a claim on corporate profits if and when they are generated. In addition, through the exercise of skill and effort beyond those levels required to lay claim to their current pay, workers regularly make productive contributions to the companies for which they work without a guaranteed return, but with an expectation of future profits in the forms of higher wages and benefits, more secure employment, and better work conditions. Confronting agency theory with what I call “in-novation theory,” I argue that sharing corporate profits with these other risk-bearers (taxpayers and workers) is essential not only for equitable distribution, but also for sustainable productivity gains that make higher standards of living possible.1

employment generated by ongo-ing government spending, particularly on higher education, healthcare, advanced technology, and physical infrastructure (for example, the inter-state highway system), complemented the employment opportunities provided by the business sector.

What should people know before they make the decision to go into private investing?Read and watch everything by Andy Rachleff. One of his rubrics, which I see in the wild all the time now, is that since everyone is smart in VC, judgment trumps intellect, but judgment itself can be trumped by network and access.

You seem to be consistently interested in social hierarchies and status strife. I would assume from the title Vanity Fair that this subject is likely to continue for you. I consider it such a fundamental analytical tool, really. It's one of the first things I always look for. It's also an amazingly taboo subject. If I were going to stay here a little longer, I'd love to have someone make me a social map of this town. I've done this many times. What you do is you get an actual map of the town. The first thing you do is shade in the area where the wealthiest, young, middle-aged doctors live—let's say, the doctors in their early 40s, maybe early 50s. Usually this will be the most prestigious new area in town. Often you'll find there's a prestigious old area which is made up of these large houses left over from families who made their money before World War I. This old section will tend to be towards the center of town. And it may often be very close to what is now a very bad section. I don't know—that's just an example. Then you shade in with another colored crayon the worst section. This is usually the black slum. Then you shade in the old, white working-class neighborhood. Sometimes it's literally across a set of railroad tracks; it might not be. By this time you've got sort of the high and low ends of the hierarchy. Then you start figuring in the rest.

I had never written a full-length book before, and at first I decided I would treat each chapter as if it were a magazine article—because I had done that before. So I would set an artificial deadline, and 1'd make myself meet it. And I did that for three chapters. But, as in the case of most magazine pieces that I've written. I usually ended up staying up all night one or two nights in the last week that I wrote. It's horrible.The WD Interview: Author George Saunders Talks Structure, Outlining and Lincoln in the BardoOh, that is horrible. And as you get older, it's more horrible. After you finish, you're wiped out for a week almost, because your system just can't take it. I know mine can't. But if you're writing an article, as far as you're concerned that's the only thing you're ever going to write. You're writing that article and it absorbs your whole attention, and you can do that sort of thing and survive. But after I had done this three times and then I looked ahead and I saw that there were 25 more times I was going to have to do this, I couldn't face it anymore. I said, "I cannot do this, even one more time, because there's no end to it." So I completely changed my system, and I set up a quota for myself—of 10 typewritten pages a day. At 200 words a page that's 2,000 words, which is not, you know, an overwhelming amount. It's a good clip, but it's not overwhelming. And I found this worked much better. I had my outline done, and sometimes 10 pages would get me hardly an eighth-of-an-inch along the outline. It didn't bother me. Just like working in a factory—end of 10 pages I'd close my lunch pail.

I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I’d never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn’t do it. Well, Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you’re not thinking about style, you’re just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep. About four that afternoon I got a call from him telling me, Well, we’re knocking the “Dear Byron” off the top of your memo, and we’re running the piece. That was a tremendous release for me. I think there are not many editors who would have done that, but Esquire at that time was a very experimental magazine. Byron Dobell was and remains a brilliant editor, and it worked out

I found that there are people who take art more seriously than politics. Everyone seems to understand that underneath it all, politics is a game. But art really is religion to some people. Creativity is the new godhead and the artist is a receptor of emanations from the gods. It is the fulfillment of a prophecy made by Max Weber, who said that in the twentieth century, aesthetics would replace ethics as the standard for moral conduct. I think we see a lot of that now.

One learns that every modern religion, from Hinduism to Buddhism and Christianity on to the present, started with a primary group, a small circle of disciples, as they’re called in Christianity, who have an overwhelming experience that is psychological, not neurological – a feeling, an overwhelming ecstasy that they have interpreted in a religious way and that they want to enable the rest of the world to have so it can understand the truth and the mystery that has been discovered. The Pranksters were no exception. Their neurological experience had come through LSD, but that wasn’t so unusual either. The Zoroastrians were always high on something called haoma; to this day no one knows what it was, but it was obviously a drug. By the time I met Kesey, he was already starting to promulgate the concept beyond acid: the idea that LSD could only take you to a certain level of understanding and awareness, but that you couldn’t become dependent on it. Having reached the plateau, you must move on without it. He announced this new truth to the movement and was much criticized for it, because by this time, 1966, the rest of the movement was having a helluva good time still getting high. They didn’t want to hear this. But this is exactly what Zoroaster ended up doing. He said, now boys, we’ve got to start doing it without this haoma stuff. A little astral projection if you please, maestro!

The Left no longer exists in America. There are leftists, but they have no terrain. There is a swing away from the political fashion of the Sixties. It doesn’t mean anything more than that. The disappearance of the Left is something that deserves book treatment, and I don’t pretend to know exactly how it happened, but it happened in one year, in 1970. In May 1970, the Left reached a peak of power with the shootings at Kent State.