I'm an economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Culture Transplant, which explains how migrants tend to make the economies they move to a lot like the economies they came from. I am the author of three books--my Singapore Trilogy--with Stanford University Press. The other two are Hive Mind, on why being around smart people is more important than being smart yourself, and 10% Less Democracy, on why democracy is excellent but that doesn't mean you can't have too much of a good thing. In the past, I've worked as an economic adviser in the United States Senate, both for Senator Orrin Hatch and (for a summer) on the Joint Economic Committee. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I studied history and sociology; I later studied public administration at Cornell and earned an MA in political science at Berkeley. In 2000 I received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego, where I had studied macroeconomics and applied time series econometrics. I've also passed the introductory sommelier examination through the Court of Master Sommeliers.
