At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

The people who were against the Vietnam War thought I was attacking the Army. The guys in the Army thought I was representing their experiences. I was on both sides, and I survived.

My own view of this, by the way, is, if the war on terrorism is successful over time, in its own way it's going to box Saddam in in a way that's going to make it much more difficult for him to maintain his power, and that he's going to become increasingly isolated. I think that's going to take time.

Peace congresses often start by dealing with some of the less important questions in excessive detail, so at the end there is no time to discuss the most important problems.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.