One hypothesis about the delay for the award is that the prize committee realizes that recipients tend to shirk once they get the prize. This conside… - Robert Barro

My recent work on macroeconomics has stressed long-term issues, including the determinants of long-run economic growth. From the standpoint of fighting world poverty, nothing is more important than figuring out which policies differentiate the fast-growing countries from the slow-growing ones.

Mundell’s models allowed a significant role for fiscal policy, especially under fixed exchange rates. However, the treatment was entirely Keynesian—an increased budget deficit operated solely by raising the aggregate demand for goods. Moreover, increases in government spending and cuts in taxes had pretty much the same effect on the economy.

Things would have worked out a lot better if we had bought our first television set a year earlier, in 1950, so that I could have watched DiMaggio while he was still great. Then I could have shared with my father and other people the vision of the eternal baseball star. It might even have helped me to have more appreciation for some of my elders in the economics profession. But maybe I should be worrying instead about what the young hot shots in economics are thinking of me.