My guest today, Susan Athe, is not only a superstar academic economist who's on the short

list of likely future Nobel Prize winners, but also someone who's having a huge real

world impact.

I was familiarizing myself with not just one problem of the future, but like ten problems

of the future, and I was one of the first economists in the world to see it.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt.

Susan Athe is a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and

in 2007 was the first woman to win the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most promising

American economist under the age of 40.

She was chief economist at Microsoft for six years, played a key role in the U.S. government's

COVID vaccine strategy, and now is chief economist in the anti-trust division in the U.S.

Department of Justice, and separately is part of a nearly one billion dollar plan to accelerate

a market for pricing carbon.

You've made what I would say risky choices over and over, and the first one is that you

spent a number of years working closely with Microsoft, and nowadays it's pretty common

for top academic economists to work with private companies, but when you did that back

in the mid-2000s, it was surprising and unusual what were you thinking at the time?

So it was actually a moment when I was looking to pivot, and in fact, I had made the decision

that I wanted to start thinking about health, and I was thinking hard about doing a shift

to something that would have a big impact on the world, and that I could use all the skills

I had developed to date.

But then along came this bizarre, completely out of the blue opportunity where I get this

...