...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.

I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.

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.

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation.

Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.