Vernon L. Smith
<i>Discovery</i> enters one child's homeland of hardship transformed by promise, where the obscure failed to mask a richly inspiring world of accomplishment. The power of that small world shaped this child's aspiration for knowledge beyond any presumed societal limitations.
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Vernon Smith, born in Wichita before the Great Depression amidst entrepreneurs, saw them defy that Depression, converting Kansas wheat fields into oil and aviation industries. Unemployment would force his family into temporary farm life, where he began public school in a rural one-room school house. The farm would be a crucible of learning that would generalize far beyond its constraining bounds.
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With nineteenth century blue-collar family roots in the railroad and petroleum industries, Smith swept past an unpromising academic high school record, graduating from Caltech, and then, devoid of any conscious vision of what might be accomplished; he switched from science to the study of economics at the University of Kansas and Harvard.
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Guided by an inner sense of 'knowing what to do next,' the young Purdue professor withstood the pressure of the economics profession to stick within its artificial boundaries. Unbeknownst or imagined to himself, Smith would become instrumental in launching economics into new space as an experimental science, overcoming the arch-conservative view that economics was inherently a non-experimental social science.
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His half-century of contributions were recognized in 2002 by the award of a Nobel Prize in economics.
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That capstone, however, is not the main message in this memoir. In <i>Discovery</i> you will learn about that intellectual journey, but mostly you will penetrate his personal voyage, learning about the inner workings of one mind, whether it's on horse back trips, making chili or probing the depths of human experience. Ultimately, learning "how things work" embraced spiritual as well as scientific values as both arise from unseen depths beyond immediate experience.
Vernon L. Smith is currently a Professor of Economics & Law in the Economics Science Institute at Chapman University. His most recent books include:
2008 Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2000 Bargaining and Market Behavior, Essays in Experimental Economics (Collected works). New York: Cambridge University Press.
1991 Papers in Experimental Economics (Collected works). New York: Cambridge University Press.
He has degrees from Caltech, University of Kansas and Harvard. He was born in Wichita, Kansas and attended public school there after beginning in a rural school house (1932-1933) on a farm near Milan, Kansas.
Max joined the Air Force about 1940 and became a pilot flying the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a very hot twin-engine, single-seat pursuit fighter. He became an exceptional P-38 pilot and was assigned a commission as an instructor during most of the war. Late in the war as the fighting intensified after the Allied invasion of Europe, Max was transferred to a fighting squadron. In preparation for action he needed a gunnery training update. He was killed on a domestic practice sortie when his aircraft encountered mechanical problems and he was unable to bail out. My mother's diary entries on February 15, 1945: "Word came yesterday that Max Clark was killed in training. Oh God! Will it never end?" On January 24, "Word has come that Dean Vetten was killed in Italy Dec. 20; as a navigator on B24." Dean was a childhood playmate, a fellow rubber gun maker.
I once visited the Smithsonian Air Museum near Dulles airport. I anticipated that the museum would have a Lockheed P-38 Lightning on display. No air museum worth its salt would be without one of those sleek, beautiful flying machines. In spite of that, I was unprepared for the tears that flowed as I stood, entranced, my eyes riveted on that P-38, acutely aware that Max had died in one exactly like it sixty years earlier. The plane was less sleek, less beautiful than I had anticipated. I just stood there, alone, isolated, wondering what Max's last minutes of terror were like, until the tears gradually receded and I was ready to move on, with trepidation, to see the B-29 on display, expecting to see one of the planes that I helped to make…
***…losing the farm to the mortgage bank confirmed my mother's political commitment to socialism, but my father, certainly disappointed, took it in stride. In the 1930s Dad flatly refused to apply for employment in the WPA (Works Project Administration). Grandpa Lomax always said that WPA meant "We piddle around," and that IWW meant "I won't work" not International Workers of the World. This from the railroad engineer who admired Gene Debs (who founded the IWW), but who had even greater admiration for a strong work ethic. Dad considered "working" for the WPA demeaning, a point of contention with my mother, who thought he was being completely unreasonable. Yet, in spite of all of her socialist rhetoric, she had the same ingrained work ethic. She was as fiercely independent and productivity oriented as she was collectivist minded, but she had no clue that collectivism completely destroys the freedom needed to nourish productivity.
***I have always had a brain task-switching problem. When I am thinking, writing, or composing, I pass into another world of experience, a world that is isolated from my surroundings…If I am interrupted, I lose that state of complexity, trying to identify and sort out some kind of order, test it against common sense, and relate it to what I remember from experience—experiments or other observations that may be relevant. Recovering that state of complex inquiry is difficult. I usually have the sense that I have recovered, at best, only something like it. Consequently, interruptions tend to leave a residue that takes the form of a gnawing and disturbing sense of irretrievable loss, especially if my brain is in the process of reporting out to my mind…I believe that this mental deficiency has produced a conditioned response: My brain stays on course and refuses to be distracted by the mind's attempt to reprogram and redirect the brain's attention somewhere that it does not want to go… The brain knows things that the mind does not understand, so why bother to retrain the mind?
***The crux of the socialist disease and its destruction of community were captured for me in 1978 in a taxicab from the Wellington airport to my hotel. I asked the driver, "Tell me about your country." He replied, "It's really wonderful. I don't like paying half my small income in taxes, but we receive so much that is free: health care benefits, prescriptions, free education through college and advanced graduate study. I am just a cab driver, but my son is going to be a medical doctor. He has finished his medical degree and internship and will begin practicing next year." In recognition of his obvious pride, I said, "How wonderful. You have every right to be proud. Is he going to practice in Wellington?" He replied, "Oh, no, he's going to Australia. You can't make any money here." The New Zealand economic crisis occurred two years later, and the socialist system was replaced by action of a Labor Government whose forebears had believed (in a 1930s flush of enthusiasm) that socialism would work so long as it was democratic.
