5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vernon Smith's journey, January 10, 2009
Vernon Smith is famous as a pioneer of experimental economics, and as an (Adam) 'Smithian' and (Hayekian) libertarian. On July 4, 2008 he was given the unique honor of unveiling the statue of Adam Smith which sits on Edinburgh's Royal Mile (prior to this admirers would trek across the graveyard of the nearby Canongate church to visit his grave.)
Anybody who has met Vernon Smith will instantly recognize his voice, his words, and his ideas in this memoir. It is like having a conversation with him. There is total candor, a great sense of humor, and an amazing life story.
It covers the period up until he left the University of Arizona.
It is not a conventional linear biography. It has been described as a 'collage.' A passage describing how experimental economics developed might be interrupted by a memory of life on the farm (how do you kill a chicken?) or the best vehicle for exploring Arizona canyons.
There is a discussion of Asperger's syndrome and the value of cognitive diversity, the dysfunction of most universities and how the Purdue economics department achieved amazing things, the events that led to his departure from the U of Arizona, the way that his own mind works when focused on a problem, and much much more.
'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he thinks.
What does it take to go where no other scientist has gone before? Read this book, then blaze your own path of discovery.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Subjects Had it Right, May 13, 2009
Vernon L. Smith, Discovery: A Memoire (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse 2008).
The Subjects Had it Right
Vernon Smith, 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, is one of those people who is larger than life. Indeed, he is larger than life than most larger than life people, at least in academia. I remember vividly, as a young Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, meeting with Vernon at the American Economic Association meetings in New Orleans to try to convince him not to leave UMass for UArizona. Vernon was dressed in a beautiful white Southern-style suit with a string tie and a stunning gold-embroidered vest. He was slim and gorgeous, with a big handlebar mustache. I had never met anyone like him in my life, and the experience was amplified by the fact that I and my Marxist friends, veterans of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles, dress uniformly in jeans and torn polo shirts with pictures of Ché on the back and the peace sign on the front. Vernon was pleasant, but he decline to return, and the rest is history (we reunited in conferences and research groups starting some twenty years later, and he wrote a nice blurb for my new book, The Bounds of Reason).
The first six chapters of this book stand practically alone as a gripping and detailed history of Vernon's family. The saga of the travails of this family through depression, war, industrial accidents, and relative financial security has historical value independent from Vernon Smith's later accomplishments, and indeed does not feature Vernon very much through the account. I cannot begin to comprehend how he came up with all the dates and places lend to this account its historical value.
I can imagine that the rest of Vernon Smith's memoire might be interesting to non-economists, but I suspect that most of the interest will come from economists. I attended Harvard Graduate School in Economics some fifteen years after Vernon, but I reveled in his description of the (quite famous) faculty, especially since two-thirds of them were still there when I went through the graduate program.
Vernon's discussion of the power of university administration to foster either excellence or mediocrity also strikes home, as my experience has been quite similar. Most deans prefer mediocrity, because it involves lower job pressure, you don't make enemies, and you can rise up the academic hierarchy by moving from university to university. Sticking your neck out with creative ideas may benefit the larger academic community, but it makes enemies and makes you persona non grata in the university administrative community. Examples of creative leadership are Dean Alfange, who brought a bunch of crazy radicals to the University of Massachusetts, Larry Summers, who tried to bring Harvard University in the Twenty-First Century and was fired for it, and Yehuda Elkana, my rector at Central European University, who has pioneered the development of an American style university in the heart of bureaucratic Europe with its ossified university systems (yes, European university are even worse that American, because there is virtually no inter-university competition, and the faculty is complicit with the administration in the repression of excellence).
Vernon Smith is a creative experimenter. But perhaps more important, he is one of the few experimenters who refuses to call subjects ignorant and/or irrational if they do not behave as the theory says they should. Rather, he single-mindedly focuses on the weaknesses of theory, and insistently demands that theory be revised in the light of empirical data (see the discussion on page 284ff). This is the sense in which "The Subjects Had It Right."
This is a memoire that every young, creative economist should read, and the deadwood in academia should shun at all costs.
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