Self-control, openness, the ability to engage with others, to plan and to persist - these are the attributes that get people in the door and on the job, and lead to productive lives.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

I remember sitting there on my father's couch or my mother's couch, listening to this lecture about how there were two groups and we had to be separated. We've come a long way from this kind of open racism. And I think it's wonderful.

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.

My parents took an interest in nothing, at home no books, no records. My mother and my father are the emblem of indifference, dryness and bad taste. My father is also terribly stingy, in life as well as in feelings: I have never seen him filling up the bathtub.

Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.

I'm still friends with the girls I grew up with, and they're all on their second child. They're all like, 'Don't be in your 40s by the time you have kids,' and I'm like, 'Why not? There's nothing wrong with that.'

As a child singer, I never sang a single track for my father or uncle.