[My family] was probably more prone to analyze restaurant menus and why some things are more expensive than others than your average family. I'm sure most 4-year-olds are not led to ponder what would happen if they produced more of a particular kind of Beanie Baby.

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When I [became president of] Harvard, I was asked what was different about being secretary of the Treasury and being president [of a university]. I gave an answer that was, in retrospect, breathtaking in its naiveté. I said, 'Washington is so political.'

If one's goal is to bring about real change, I think a university presidency is the most difficult job. There are so few levers with which to have influence in an institution where all the important people have lifetime jobs.

There is probably no higher return on investment in the developing world than primary and secondary education for girls.

When we launched the Mexican support program [in 1995], 80 percent of the American people opposed it. Immediately after it was launched, it looked like it was failing. And because I had been a driver of the decision to do the program, I went to [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Bob Rubin and said that I would resign. And he said two things that have stuck with me. The first was, 'We're all in this together.' And the second was that either way, the Earth would still be turning a century from now and that I would make my best contribution if I got some sleep.

I think I would have gotten a lot of pleasure out of being a professional tennis player. But I don’t think that would have happened, even if I had abandoned economics at a very young age.

What's happening in Asia is, in economic history, an event of equal or greater significance than the Industrial Revolution.

• Read more of Summers’s Epiphanies, including the key to being influential, here.