Benjamin Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…But in your career — was it a professor or a friend of the family who said, “Ben, you seem like you’d be great at economics.” How did that happen? No, I came into economics, I wouldn’t say by accident. As of the time when I graduated from college, I had no intention whatsoever of being an economist. I assumed that I was going to go to law school. When I was a senior in college, the only two graduate schools that I applied to were two law schools, and that was the end of it. But it so happened that I won one of these fellowships to study abroad for a few years. This was in Britain. Once I got there, I had to study something. Since I had been doing economics as an undergraduate, and I had found it interesting, I kept going with economics. By the time I’d done economics at a graduate level for a couple of years in England, then I said, “Well, this is really more interesting than what I think my lawyer friends do, and so I’m going to stick with it. ” It wasn’t that anybody particularly steered me into economics. It was more by happenstance. When you look at graduate students, what non-obvious qualities do you look for as markers of their talent? Smarts, hard work, of course, but non-obvious qualities.…

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