I was born in Denmark in 1968 and, although my parents could not possibly have known my personality, they named me Lykke, which means happiness in Danish. I am a very optimistic person, which is easy, since I have been blessed with so much good luck and wonderful experiences in my life. Of course my parents claim that they called me Lykke because the more accurate Ulykke (accident) was not acceptable.

As a young child I was always eager to learn, and I was lucky to have teachers who didn't kill that curiosity. When I was eight years old, we lived in a place where there was no public school nearby, so my parents put me in a private "free" school. "Free" meant that there were no class schedules, no tests, and no required classes (only music and gymnastics classes were compulsory). Basically the kids could do whatever they liked whenever they liked. I happened to like math, so I was doing math exercises eight hours every day, which of course gave me a tremendous advantage when I returned to normal public school a year later. Since the math books were specially designed to include lots of text and problems in many different areas, my skills in other areas didn't suffer at all. 

I now wonder what would have happened if I had continued that style of learning all my life, instead of going back to regular school with teachers telling me what to do and when to do it. It is amazing that we accept those kinds of constraints on our kids and ourselves. As it happened, I liked regular school also, breezing through the rest of primary school, and I had tremendous fun in high school.

Just before my finals in high school, I had a motorcycle accident in which I broke my right arm. I thus had to do most of my finals left-handed, which caused a dramatic fall in my otherwise good grades. Since access to university in Denmark is based exclusively on high school grade-point averages, I had no chance of entering my first choice field, which was Chinese studies. The Economics Department in Aarhus ended up accepting me, but I was not really prepared for that, so I decided to travel around the world with my boyfriend instead.

When I came back from that trip I had accumulated a lot of debt and had to start working. I got a job packing t-shirts and other promotional clothes and getting them ready for shipment. It turned out that I was very good at that, but after eight months of packing, I was debt free and extremely motivated to start studying again.

My university education all over the World

The motorcycle accident turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I was clearly born to be an economist. The Economics Department at Aarhus University became my home for the following eleven years while I did my M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. It was a magical time for me, not least because of all the extra-curricular activities I was involved in, and all the traveling it involved. I was elected for practically all possible non-political student positions in the department, such as Treasurer of the Economics Association, President of the Friday Bar, Member of the Canteen Committee, Member of the Student Housing Committee, and I did the maximum allowed amount of teaching assistance. In the evenings I worked as a bartender and I also had my own company doing programming, desktop publishing, accounting and other computer related services.

Although my university was a traditional brick-and-mortar university with traditional classes and traditional exams, I didn't treat it that way. The university encourages students to go abroad to learn other cultures and take advantage of distinguished teachers in the rest of the world. It even pays for it. While many students go abroad for six months, I took that offer to the extreme, and spent twelve months at the University of Southampton in England, six months at Kazakhstan Institute of Management and Public Policy, twelve months at UC San Diego, three months at the World Bank in Washington, six months at the Institute for Applied Economics Research in Rio de Janeiro, and six months at the Institute for Socio-Economic Research in La Paz, Bolivia. Apart from those extended stays, I took lots of shorter trips to conferences and seminars all over the world.

Racism in Denmark

I was happy in all the places of the world that I lived and I made friends with the most fascinating people, ranging from Andean Aymaras to an Uzbek Uygur. It was therefore a shock for me to come back to Denmark in the mid 1990s and find that my little paradise country had grown uncharacteristically racist and hostile to immigrants. It disgusted me and I decided to abandon the country in protest. I moved to Bolivia with my husband, changed my nationality, and decided to apply my excellent Danish education to the benefit of Bolivia rather than Denmark.

My professional life in Bolivia

Even though I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and had a 5-months-old baby, I immediately found a job at the Institute for Socio-Economic Research (IISEC) when I arrived in Bolivia. The Catholic University created the job particularly for me and let me define my own job profile. I considered it my responsibility to attract and lead international research projects with relevance for Bolivia’s development. For me this job had the triple advantage of a steady job that generated publications at the same time as it generated consulting experience for many of the major development banks and institutions operating in Latin America.

I had that job for almost 6 years and treasured it for the flexibility, independence and personal growth it allowed me. Several times I was offered promotion from Chief Economist to Director of the Institute, but every time I refused, because as Chief Economist I could do all the things I liked most and that I find most important for the Institute, whereas as Director I would be burdened with a lot of bureaucratic and non-constructive work. The University even tried to send me on a leadership course, which I must admit I found extremely interesting, especially after I had lead my group to solve a classic teamwork puzzle in record time (one second!). The course instructor told me I was a natural leader, but that remains to be verified.

In 2003, my husband and I started our own scientific consulting firm, Grupo Integral, together with two other partners. As Grupo Integral is competing directly with IISEC, I sadly had to quit my job at the University. 

My personal life in Bolivia

While Bolivia is both extremely poor and terribly corrupt, it is paradise for the well-educated minority. With three little daughters (Natasha, Kamila and Raphaela), there is nowhere in the world I would rather be. The surroundings are astonishing, it is reasonably safe (as long as you stay out of politics and drug trafficking), and the almost unlimited supply of poor, uneducated people means that you can hire any number of servants you like. The freedom from laundry, cleaning, cooking, shopping and constant babysitting makes it possible for me to manage a large household while at the same time having a full professional life and studying Karate in the morning and French in the evening. I would like to do an MBA also, but that just became too much for me.

While I benefit greatly from the poverty and inequality in Bolivia, it is my life’s goal to reduce both. The biggest challenge is to help people without creating perverse incentives in the long run.