On the Career of a Microeconomist

For as long as I can remember — certainly by my early teens — my desire to be an economist was never in doubt. In retrospect I can see that this was no accident. Both my parents were self-educated immigrants, but educated they were, as few undergraduates are today. Literature, older or current, language, politics and economics were constantly discussed in our house in a most fascinating manner, and I was expected from childhood to participate fully in the discussions. My father with his lower class background (his parents had run a tavern in a small town in Poland) was driven by passionate concern for humanity, and emotion ruled his talk. My mother, by contrast, coming from a line of Jewish Lithuanian intellectuals, epitomised logic and careful reasoning in pursuit of the same objectives. Both parents, particularly my father, were avid Marxists. The combination was irresistible. I was infected by their interests and their concerns. My reading provided a sampling of Marx’s logical convolutions which, combined with tales of the adventure of the buccaneers of nineteenth-century business — Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller and others — sealed my fascination with the subject. Well before I entered college I had begun to read economic history, the works of the classical economists and the writings of Thorstein Veblen.