Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant.\u00a0 It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s been a long time\u2014years now\u2014since he did any serious research. Could he, still? \u201cI\u2019d like to get back to it,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven\u2019t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that\u2019s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson\u2014the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won\u2019t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that\u2019s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you\u2019re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren\u2019t doing all this other stuff, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. <\/strong>There\u2019s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don\u2019t get now. And that\u2019s life.\u201d
\nFor someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. \u201cI think he\u2019s happy,\u201d<\/strong> his friend Craig Murphy says. \u201cA much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he\u2019s done good things, and they\u2019re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood\u2014that we probably can\u2019t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.\u201d \u2666<\/strong>
\nvia How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n