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.

I can go on.

But if one takes the African-American experience panoramically and one ways 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 he's a healthy dose of stuff that's pretty bad.

Disappointment and failure intermingled with success.

So Curwen Charles is such an interesting character.

He's a top economist, he's the dean of the Yale School of Management.

And most interesting to me, he's done all this when he was born in a small town in Guyana.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levin.

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

Somehow Curwen can see what's important.

And that's what he does in his research, he's studied things as varied as the black

white 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 Curwen gives me the best advice.

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

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

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