What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I got into economics because I wanted to make things better for the average person.
The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics.
I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.
I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.
By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.
One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.