“Have you ever been to an academic conference? I have been to many (though nowhere near as many as these academics) and, if I am brutally honest, they are pretty boring, especially for an outsider.

…This one was completely different. There were no prepared papers; no printed documents to read from… We were broken up into groups, given a broad topic area to think about, and then we had to … talk. Debate. Argue. Agree. Disagree. Come up with a few shared conclusions.

…It was exciting to feel that we are, just maybe, at the start of a new approach, a new way of thinking about seemingly unsolvable social ills. If we can identify and disentangle the incentives that have led us to our current state, and if we build a set of tools that allow us to shift incentives in a more positive direction, we might just be able to make transformative changes that have, so far, felt stubbornly impossible.”

— Adam Davidson, Co-founder of Planet Money