Daily Inspiration Quote by Vernon L. Smith

A strangely clunky sentence from a future Nobel laureate ends up revealing something elegant: the career-making power of indecision, properly instrumented. Smith frames the MA in economics not as a calling but as a vehicle, a utilitarian contraption to test-drive a life. That word matters. It strips economics of romance and rebrands it as a method: a way of thinking you can adopt if it proves useful, not a faith you profess.

The subtext is pragmatic midcentury American mobility. An engineering degree is already a ticket to stable work; choosing to pivot from that is a controlled risk. So the MA becomes a low-commitment experiment in commitment, a credential designed less to signal expertise than to buy time and optionality. In a discipline that often models choice under uncertainty, Smith is narrating his own human-capital investment with almost deadpan self-awareness.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to the tidy origin stories academics like to tell. No lightning bolt, no childhood obsession with markets. Just a procedural question: do I want to keep going? That modesty aligns with Smith’s later identity as an experimental economist, someone who distrusted grand theory unmoored from testing. Even the sentence’s ungainly repetition of “decide” and “economics” feels honest: it’s the language of someone thinking in real time, not polishing a myth.

Contextually, it’s a reminder that economics, for many, arrives as an upgrade to tools already in hand - engineering’s problem-solving, redirected toward human systems. The line’s intent is autobiographical, but its effect is bigger: it normalizes intellectual drift as a disciplined strategy.