■ There are too many tales, historically speaking, in which democracies wrote themselves out of existence. We’ve seen that happen in Hungary. We’ve seen it happen in Turkey. We saw it in Europe in the interwar period in half a dozen countries. Nothing says that America is immune to that. We are not there yet, but once we are on a trajectory, it will be hard to turn back.

■ Technology is going to make life far better in the future than we ever dared hope. One example is personalization. You go to a hospital, and you’ve got some disease. The doctor knows in 70 percent of cases this medication works best, so they give it to you. But they don’t know a hell of a lot about you. The same is true for students. In an ideal system, you tailor the education to that student. The amount of information you need for that is mind-boggling, but AI can handle it.

■ There’s something very deep about the cliché of the frog boiling. Psychologists have taught us that we actually respond much better to catastrophic events than to gradual movements. If it’s spread over a long time, people underestimate the seriousness of the risk. The great fear is that populist regimes, including our own, tend to denigrate experts. Who’s ever seen a bacterium? An expert tells you. If you start disbelieving experts, then you are the victim for charlatans like Bobby Kennedy. That scares the bejesus out of me, because then we may all boil.

■ In one of my books, I cite a Jewish sage called Rabbi Akiva. He lived in the early second century AD, and he famously said, “I learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most from my students.” I’ve learned an enormous amount from my students. One reason is because I don’t clone them by saying, “If you don’t use the patterns and models I use, it’s no good.” Some people are like that. I’m not.

■ Every time I study something carefully, by the time I reach the peak, I realize I’ve climbed just a hill. The mountain behind it is 10 times taller. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. History is very much like that. The more you delve into it, the more you realize it’s so much more complicated and variegated and diverse than you ever thought. Economic history is always multidimensional and nuanced. There’s only truth, with a capital T, in mathematics.

■ I don’t want to watch anything on television that makes huge intellectual demands on me. We watched a bunch of seasons of Bosch. It is just right. It’s well acted, it’s well written, and there’s enough action and intricacies that you actually enjoy it.

■ My wife was an experimental biologist at UIC. She’s a very practical person. She solves day-to-day problems with incredible efficiency. She manages all our finances and investments, even though I’m the economist. When we got the Nobel announcement on a Monday morning, I put down the phone and said, “They just told me I’m getting half [of the roughly $1.2 million prize] and the other two guys each get a quarter.” She looked at me and said, “Oh, that’s great. Now we can pay for the grandkids’ college.”