Background Information

What first attracted you to study economics and become an economist?

I graduated from college in 1932. As a college student I had majored jointly

in economics and mathematics and when I graduated I was offered two

postgraduate scholarships. At that time there weren’t any such things as our

current generous fellowships; graduate scholarships consisted of somebody

offering to pay for your tuition, period. I was offered one in mathematics at

Brown and one in economics at Chicago. Now put yourself in 1932 with a

quarter of the population unemployed. What was the important urgent problem?

It was obviously economics and so there was never any hesitation on

my part to study economics. When I first started in college I was very

ignorant about these matters because I grew up in a rather low-income family

which had no particular understanding of the broader world. I was very much

interested in and pretty good at mathematics. So I looked around to see if

there was any way I could earn a living by mathematics. The only way I

could find before I went to college was to become an actuary, and so my

original ambition when entering college was to become an actuary. I did take

some of the actuarial exams in my first two years at college, but I never

continued after that.