[...]
PAUL MILGROM: Economics, oh, I was – actually, I was a bit of a
rebel when I graduated from college, I was a math student in
the 1960's, graduated in 1970 and decided to go try my hand at
various things in San Francisco and eventually went to grad
school intending just to get a business degree just to earn a
living. And I came across the work of William Vickrey, who
had written an article in 1961 about auctions, and it was
startling to me to see mathematics used to characterize
human behavior and how a social mechanism would work. And I
started reading more and I got really very excited because it
was completely outside of anything I expected to be
possible and I guess, that was my first inspiration.
The faculty at Stanford where I was studying were – sort of saw
what was happening to me and encouraged me along, and called
me in and told me I was in the wrong program, I should switch
into a doctoral program and begin doing research. And I
thought about it and thought to work on stuff I'm really
interested in that I really loved doing that was exciting
so that's how I got going.
I remember when my parents bought me a chemistry set, very
simple things. Maybe, it was probably something as simple as
vinegar and baking soda. I don't remember exactly but just
the idea that you could create a reaction that way,
that was pretty exciting.
Well, I get to work on things that I think are important and
that I find interesting and I have the freedom to, in my
particular case, both to do research in these areas and
actually to take the ideas out and put them into practice in
the world. The lecture I'm going to give today about radio
spectrum policy; my ideas influenced the first radio
spectrum auctions to allocate spectrum efficiently in the
United States 15, 16 years ago, 17 years ago, and to work on
what I want and what excites me. In this case it comes from
William Vickrey, whose work was on auctions that excited me and
carried that forward and invent new things and have them work?
Very exciting.
Oh, my goodness, you have to be able to put up with
disappointments, there's so many failures. Whether you're doing
experimental work or theoretical work or whatever you're doing
you bang your head against – if you're really challenging
yourself and you bang your head against a hard problem for a
long time. Sometimes I have to put the thing I'm most
interested in on the back burner and do other things for a while,
but you have to stick with it. You have to be patient;
you have to be able to put up with the failures along
the way to success.
Well, I'm going to be talking today in the lecture I give here
about radio spectrum policy will be as a result of the kinds of
inventions I'll be talking about. We'll be able to use
radio spectrum better, to raise revenue for the federal
government to help mitigate the deficit, to improve competition
in the industry by allocating things well. There's a whole
series of benefits that come from using radio spectrum well,
and I think that's the most immediate benefits of my
research. Of course, my students also, I love teaching, too, and
being able to understand the economy more deeply and be able
to transmit that knowledge to my students at Stanford,
that's fantastic.
Oh, it's actually not the person I named. William Vickery was
sort of first and he was big for sure but, actually a colleague
of mine at Northwestern University during my first job,
Roger Myerson, who's also a Nobel Laureate, is just a font
of ideas and also an inspiration and also a challenge to me
personally because we were young professors together, and I
wanted to be as effective as Roger and he influenced my
thinking and my work habits and he was a constant inspiration,
so I'd name Roger Myerson, I think.
I think a lot of my colleagues even would be surprised at the
degree to which I have been able and the people around me have
been able to use micro-economic theory and put it into direct
practice. I think most economists think that it's the
applied researchers, the people who are doing the empirical
work, that are estimating the effects of taxes or the effects
of various policies that are most important for creating
influential policy. But the idea that you can take pure
theory and design new ways of running economic mechanisms from
that, running auctions, for example, from that, I think
would surprise not only the people in the general public,
people like I was before I studied this, but even many
of my colleagues within economics.
It's got to be the photograph of the night my wife and I met.
Sorry, it's as simple as that. We actually met at the 1996
Nobel Prize dinner and were there with James Mirrlees, who
was one of the laureates that year. That's sitting right on
the center of my desk and that's the first thing.
Well, that's actually easy. My son is a musician, he plays the
bass, he plays jazz, he has a Hip Hop group as well, and if –
while I often play old music, and I play the Beatles and
stuff, the thing I play most often is the – my son's jazz or
his Star People which is his Hip Hop band's album. That's what I
listen to most frequently.