Alan Deardorff’s path into international economics began, as he puts it, “because I was a terrible student in physics.” After struggling through his undergraduate years at Stanford, Deardorff shifted fields almost by accident—motivated partly by the Vietnam draft and partly by curiosity. “I needed to go to graduate school because back then if I didn’t, I would have been drafted,” he recalls. “I had a few courses in economics and done reasonably well in them… so I chose econom
Terrance Odean’s path into finance is anything but typical. He dropped out of college, raised a family, hitchhiked across Afghanistan, worked with statistical analysis software, and eventually returned to UC Berkeley at 38. “There are advantages and disadvantages to having sort of a gap in your education,” he says. While the gap made returning to school difficult, it also gave him a broader worldview. Experiencing financial struggles firsthand helped him understand why so man
Paul Seabright’s career reads less like a straight line and more like an open network—precisely the kind he studies. An economist by training, a naturalist by instinct, and a social scientist by curiosity, he has spent his life following the threads that connect markets to minds, and cooperation to evolution. Raised in the U.K. and educated at Oxford, Seabright began in the traditional world of economics, but his questions soon outgrew its boundaries. Why do strangers trust
