"Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors."
"How I Became an Economist"
by Paul A. Samuelson
1970 Laureate in Economics
5 September 2003
Later in the same essay:
"One comes to understand the importance of biography in a scholar's research contributions. Before university, I never opened the copy of Adam Smith on my father's bookshelf. But I did experience first hand, in my virtual infancy, the disappearance of the horse economy, the arrival of indoor plumbing and electric lighting. After that radio waves through the air or TV pictures left one blasé.
More important it was to see with my own eyes the First War's induced boom in the U.S. Steel-planned Gary, Indiana: East European workers were overjoyed to be able to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I saw, too, and my family learned the hard way, how recession follows the boom the way sparrows used to follow the horse. Also, when I was age 10 and we lived in Miami Beach, Florida, I experienced first hand what a real estate mania was like. And what it was like when the bubble burst."
Ask me at Thursday JimLab meeting if you don't get the line about the sparrow and the horse.
Later in the same essay:
"One comes to understand the importance of biography in a scholar's research contributions. Before university, I never opened the copy of Adam Smith on my father's bookshelf. But I did experience first hand, in my virtual infancy, the disappearance of the horse economy, the arrival of indoor plumbing and electric lighting. After that radio waves through the air or TV pictures left one blasé.
More important it was to see with my own eyes the First War's induced boom in the U.S. Steel-planned Gary, Indiana: East European workers were overjoyed to be able to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I saw, too, and my family learned the hard way, how recession follows the boom the way sparrows used to follow the horse. Also, when I was age 10 and we lived in Miami Beach, Florida, I experienced first hand what a real estate mania was like. And what it was like when the bubble burst."
Ask me at Thursday JimLab meeting if you don't get the line about the sparrow and the horse.
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