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I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.

Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side.

As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.

In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.