Joel Mokyr: commitment

Transcript context

…How much of a burden on your life has your new Nobel Prize been or is it just fun? No, I mean, it is a lot of fun. It’s really a lot of warm glow. I’m still waking up every morning and say, “Am I dreaming this? What the hell am I doing?” It has, obviously, disrupted my life. I’m going to turn 80 this summer, so I’m sort of settled in my way, so to speak, and this has disrupted it to a great extent, and I’m still trying to cope with that. One of the things that’s working to make that worse is because I refuse to retire. Peter Howard, my friend and my colleague who’s almost exactly my age, retired 12 years ago from Brown. He’s living in a life of leisure, and I have to go to faculty meetings and supervise 10 graduate students and teach at another graduate course. That, plus all the other things that are demanded of me, has been, shall we say, disruptive. I sleep relatively poorly now because I wake up in the middle of the night and I go, “Oh, shit, I forgot to reply to that email and I haven’t yet committed to that invitation,” and I forget everything. These things happen. I hope that that will fade eventually, that I’ll settle into a new pattern, but it will be probably quite different from the previous pattern, Tyler. My wife is looking at me with some concern, shall we say, about how I’m having 10 balls in the air and, every once in a while, I drop one. We’re about out of time. Joel Mokyr, thank you very much. Again, I’m a big fan of your new book with Greif and Tabellini, Two Paths to Prosperity, comparing Europe and China.…

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