Professor Rogoff was a Badass

Tadas linked to a great longread you might’ve missed this week, the FT sits down with Professor Ken Rogoff for lunch at Bullshit Central Davos to talk about Europe and the Prof’s rebellious years…

Improbably, for a future Harvard professor, he was also a high school dropout. “A lot of my last years of high school, I essentially missed,” he says. “I just played chess, I did nothing else.”

His search for chess excellence led him to leave the US. “I moved to Sarajevo because Yugoslavia was the number two chess-playing country after the USSR – and going to the Soviet Union just wasn’t possible in those days. I was living kind of a bohemian lifestyle. I would be playing chess in top tournaments in five-star hotels and then sometimes sleeping in railway stations, because I wasn’t making much money. Or maybe just because I was stupid.”

Be sure to head over for the whole thing, Rogoff’s one of the few academics to have accurately nailed this entire balance sheet recession/sub-par recovery.

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Lunch with the FT: Kenneth Rogoff (FT)