Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners

I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.

If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.