Lester Thurow lecture-circuit economics

$30,000-per-lecture in 1988 as benchmark for what top lecturers earn — and an argument that they don't use PowerPoint.

I use this as — now that you're getting your PowerPoints ready for your presentations — PowerPoint is a great crutch for people to present their outline, or to read from it. The best lecturers, the ones who make lots of money like Lester Thurow making thirty thousand dollars a lecture in 1988, or Tufte making a hundred thousand dollars for a day's teaching — they don't use PowerPoints. I've talked to you about that before. You really want the audience to focus on you and what you're saying, rather than up there looking and trying to figure out what the graph means. In fact even Tufte, who thinks the graph of Napoleon's march to Moscow and back is one of the greatest graphs, he wouldn't expect it to be a useful thing to just put up. Because just like Catherine said, what's this? It's too complex. But once you actually get a little bit of an explanation — oh gee, that's pretty neat. All of a sudden you have a visual image of how many people got lost and where. And then he shows you some of those lines where they were crossing a river that was frozen, and people fell in and froze.

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