I have found myself bouncing back and forth between two very different worlds over the last year. On one hand, I’m pursuing a Masters in Economics in a very traditional academic setting; on the other, I’m researching wikinomics in a very non-traditional type of company. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to apply some of the core economics principles to some of the wikinomics theories, and perhaps even more about how much better the formal education process would be if it integrated some of the wikinomics principles (but that’s a subject for another time).

It’s quite, quite rare that I come across words from the same person, in both “worlds”, on the same day - with one notable exception. That would be Hal Varian, the author of one of my microeconomics textbooks, and the Chief Economist for Google (who was recently interviewed on the Freakonomics blog).

Now I’m going to wager that more of you would be interested in what he said on the interview than how he explained the discrete version of the Slutsky equation, so I’ll focus on it. My favorite quote from the entire interview is his response to how one should think about picking a job:

If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on.

He also provides a clear and intuitive explanation of the role of monopolistic competition in the entertainment industry, makes the prediction of a continued swing-back to pay-per-view, provies commentary on the health care system, discusses game theory and pay-per-click auction, even the QWERTY system… I swear that he’s one of those rare economists out there that is interesting for non-economists to read. Moreover, his second last response should warm the hearts of wikinomics readers everywhere:

Q: PC or Mac?

A: Linux.