Young Einsteins and Bohrs may have been inspired to be more creative and harder workers by the dream of winning a Nobel Prize. Since there was no political economy Nobel award before 1968, that could not have been an operative motive for my generation of economists.

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1970

From one point of view my studying economics was the result of accidental blind chance. Prior to graduating from high school I was born again at 8:00 a.m., January 2, 1932, when I first walked into the University of Chicago lecture hall. That day's lecture was on Malthus's theory that human...