Conversations with Economists

"Herbert A. Simon... was rightly complaining about some, if not a lot, of the economic literature at the time that he was moving away from economics. I have a couple of comments. I think a lot of the models that we have now, with the dynamics and the uncertainty, address a lot of the observations that were troubling Herb Simon. He is, by the way, a big proponent of positive economic methods."

"I think that Keynes was certainly a good example of a new paradigm. His work is possibly the best example of a case for which I think Kuhns theory fits as well as it can in the domain of the social sciences. In a fairly short period of time, Keynes gave a new way of looking at the economy, a way which was widely accepted, at least by the younger generation."

"Herbert A. Simon... used to give us a hard time. He likes to take on the devils advocate role. In his Sciences of the Artificial hes pretty balanced."

"Another big influence was Samuelsons Foundations, which I read when I stated here at Chicago. Its a "how-to-do-it" book. a great book for first-year graduate students. It says, "Heres the way you do it." It lets you in on the secret of how you play the game, as opposed to cutting you off with big words. I think the combination of Samuelsons book plays Friedmans class was what got me going."

"The only way I feel I understand something is if I can write it down in a model and make it work. I felt that from the beginning. Thats why I liked Samuelsons book. Hell take these incomprehensible verbal debates that go on and on and never end and just end them; formulate the issue in such a way that the question is answerable, and then get the answer."