One thing I've learned over my career as an academic economist is that it's hard to

do good research.

I started out hoping to do important research, but I figured out quickly how I wasn't

doing good at important stuff.

So I settled for at least doing research that was interesting.

I've always admired economists to do important work, even if it's boring.

But the economists I admire the most are the ones who manage to do work that is both

interesting and important.

There are only a handful of those folks, and my guest today, Ted Miguel, is right at

the top of that list.

This kind of human capital investment could actually help break the intergenerational

transmission of poverty.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levin.

Edward Miguel, his friend's calm Ted, was an undergrad at MIT and did his PhD in economics

at Harvard, working with Nobel Prize winner Michael Kramer.

He spent the last 20 years in the economics department at the University of California

at Berkeley.

Unfortunately, my many attempts to convince him to come to the University of Chicago, they

all failed.

Ted has been one of the pioneers in bringing large-scale randomized experiments into economics,

and he's also remarkably creative in exploiting what economists call natural experiments.

My only concern today is that Ted can be quite serious and earnest.

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