Scott Sumner: commitment

Transcript context

…Strengths also, right? There’s plenty of people who never bloom. My parents probably should have held me back one year even to go to kindergarten. I wasn’t a particularly good student, or I was an uneven student all along the way. I wasn’t particularly ambitious. I’m not sure why. Yes, it’s kind of weird. I got into blogging 15 years ago, and it put me into a different world where I was interacting with a lot of people, mainly electronically interacting, but I’d been much more of a loner for most of my life. When I look back on that earlier period of life, it almost feels like a different person now. I can’t analyze exactly why I was a late bloomer, but it was clearly an aspect of my personality. It wasn’t like I was held back by something artificial. I just wasn’t applying myself as aggressively or forcefully as I could have, but when I would get under the gun, I would at the last minute somehow get things done that I need. I almost didn’t even stay at Bentley. Then I did my dissertation very quickly right before they were going to fire me. I went in ABD. Then, a few years later, I actually got turned down for tenure for lack of publications. Then quickly got a few publications, including the JPE article I mentioned. I got tenure by reapplying under different circumstances. I was treated actually very well; many schools, I wouldn’t have even survived at. Then, unlike a lot of faculty, I did most of my research after getting tenure, almost none before. I had a very odd career that didn’t fit the normal mold. I didn’t pursue topics that were trendy. I just pursued things I was interested in. Even my dissertation — Lucas was my chair at Chicago, and I did currency hoarding. That’s an odd thing for someone to do studying under Lucas, who’s known for rational expectations theory and so on. I just pursued what interested me. For decades, I pursued work on the Great Depression. I think my book on the Great Depression is the one book I’m proud of. I think there’s some useful academic contributions in that book. The other books I wrote are more just popularizing my blog posts. That book, I did a lot of real research on. It’s been, I guess, kind of an unusual career in that sense, not following the conventional path. Final question. What will you do next?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.