 It made me really curious as to why there were such vast differences around the world. I'm David Beckworth and I'm a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. My story begins in Africa. My family spent six years there when I was a child, and we came back when I was approximately in fifth grade, and when I came back I became very aware of the differences between my former home in Africa and what I had in the United States. I was very cognizant of the standard of living differences, what was going on, and I continued to think about my friends back in Africa and I would read newspaper accounts, what was going on there, and it made me really curious as to why there were such vast differences around the world. Well, I go on through life, I go on to college, and that seed that had been planted by living in Africa got nourished a little bit more when I took some economics courses, where I learned a systematic way of thinking about the world, resources, standards of living, economic growth, all those issues that I didn't realize back in fifth grade I was thinking about. And then later on I went to get a PhD and that interest kind of came to fruition because I became a macroeconomist. And then in 2007 I just happened to start blogging during the Great Recession, one of the most severe downturns we've seen in the United States. And I became a part of the conversation, a national conversation on what went wrong. And this led to my eventual appointment here at the Mercatus Center in the Monetary Policy Program. And Mercatus has been a great place to really take that interest and that curiosity to the next level. We have a great program here on monetary policy and we tackle some of these big questions. And I'm grateful for that opportunity.