Vernon L. Smith Quotes
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In the 9th grade I began my first wage work for the West Side Drug store delivering prescriptions and sundries on my bicycle to customers who called in orders.
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I can still memory - taste the fresh buttermilk pancakes and hot buttermilk biscuits - both made with lard! - that were cooked on the top, or in the oven, of that ancient iron stove.
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I still have my original social security card signed when I was 13.
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After my stellar first grade academic achievements, I continued to perform well in the city primary schools - except for penmanship, which was not my forte.
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After graduating in engineering I went to the University of Kansas to get an MA in economics as a vehicle for allowing me to decide if I wanted to continue in economics.
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Yes, long hours and a hard life for my parents, but for a six to seven year old every new day dawned with fresh excitement when you have not a care in the world, and so much to learn and witness.
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I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.
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Caltech was a meat grinder like I could never have imagined.
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Rules emerge as a spontaneous order–they are found–not deliberately designed by one calculating mind. Initially constructivist institutions undergo evolutionary change adapting beyond the circumstances that gave them birth. What emerges is a form of 'social mind' that solves complex organization problems without conscious cognition.
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In 1941 I finished at Allison Intermediate School (grades 7-9), and started at North High School, commuting by bicycle about 5 miles from home to school.
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Complexity. In general individual decision makers must be assumed to have multidimensional values which attach nonmonetary subjective cost or value to (1) the process of making and executing individual or group decisions, (2) the end result of such decisions, and (3) the rewards (and perhaps behavior) of other individuals involved in the decision process.
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Three precepts are offered to constitute a foundation for the use of laboratory experimental methods in testing hypotheses about the behavior of allocation mechanisms.
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In economics the tendency of theory to lag behind observation seems to be endemic, and, as theorists, few of us consider this to be a 'terrible state.' But as noted by Lakatos (1978, p. 6), 'where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.'
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Theory should be ever more demanding of our empirical resources. Simultaneously, data should be ever more demanding of the empirical relevance of theory and of the theorist's expertise in working imaginatively on problems of the world, rather than on stylized problems of the imagination.
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Nonsatiation (Smith, 1976a). Given a costless choice be ween two alternatives which differ only in that the first yields more of the reward medium (e.g., currency) than the second, the first will always be chosen (preferred) over the second by an autonomous individual, i.e., utility U(M) is a monotone increasing function of the reward medium.
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It is important to remove artificial barriers–stumbling stones, often local in origin and coming from incumbent opposition to entry–and to not burden businesses with taxes that reduce their internally generated funds for reinvestment, growth and striving to overcome market challenges.
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Even though Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century who saw what must be the mainsprings of the extended order, Mises was the choice technician, and no one was better at articulating the primacy of the individual and the need to define and nurture individual rights.
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Parallelism: Propositions about the behavior of individuals and the performance of institutions that have been tested in laboratory microeconomies apply also to nonlaboratory environments where similar ceteris paribus conditions prevail.
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It is not possible to design a laboratory resource allocation experiment without designing an institution in all its detail.
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The vast majority of individuals with Asperger Syndrome need help - without that help they won't be able to do very well. The individuals that I know have to overcome a great deal of difficulty to maximize their potential and get the things in life they deserve.