Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is February 23, 2012, and my guest is a manual

German of Columbia University. His latest book is Models Behaving Badly. A manual welcome

to Econ Talk. Thanks very much, I'm glad to be on. I want to start with your personal story.

You began your career as a physicist and then went to Wall Street. Tell us about that journey.

Yeah, I originally grew up in South Africa and I liked literature and the arts, but really

you had to specialize very young when you were in South Africa. It was like a British system.

So when you were 16 or 17, you went to college that was it. You did arts or science or medicine

or law or business. And so I liked physics and I went into physics and I got very attracted

to it and I was inspired by all the famous physicists, just like everybody else in spite

of all the famous physicists. You read about Einstein and Schrodinger and studied four

years of physics in South Africa and then I came to Columbia University where I actually

teach now, but I teach financial engineering, but I came to do a PhD in physics over there.

I did that. It took me a long time, seven years. I had the wrong kind of background. I had a very

classical physics background in Columbia. I was doing very obviously modern physics and quantum

mechanics. And then I worked as a, I did a thesis on weak interactions on theoretical physics

and I worked as a postdoc in an assistant professor for seven years during research and kind

of liking it, but I'm also getting a bit discouraged at times.

And why did you leave physics? And where did you go?

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