You are in fact talking to a black person who is the Dean of the Yale School of Management.

That's a fact.

Who is your colleague at Chicago?

We have friends who are deans at similar places or prominent faculty at other places and I can go on.

But if one takes the African American experience panoramically and one weighs these obvious and undeniable aspects of success with the bad things

one would have to say that there are ways in which our hopes have been realized and there's a healthy

dose of stuff that's pretty bad. Disappointed and failure intermingled with

success.

So Kerwin-Charls is such an interesting character.

He is a top economist. He's the dean of the Yale School of Management and most interesting to me is he's done all this when he was born in a small town in Guyana.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Kerwin has a way of understanding that's not academic but intuitive.

Somehow Kerwin can see what's important and that's what he does in his research.

She's studied things as varied as the black whitewhite income and wealth gap and how video games might be the reason

why young males are no longer working in the labor market and how we beat

tuberculosis. And I have to say of all the

economists I know, I think Cohen gives me the best advice.

It is such a pleasure to be talking today with Kirwin Charles, a good friend and a deep

thinker who teaches me and clarifies my thinking every time we talk.

So you sit today at the pinnacle of academic success,

but I gotta say from where you started,

it has to be an incredibly unlikely outcome.

...