Daily Inspiration Quote by Vernon L. Smith

Nostalgia is doing a lot of economic work here. Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel-winning economist best known for cool-headed experiments and market design, drops the lab coat and leans into the sensory: “memory-taste,” “fresh buttermilk pancakes,” “hot buttermilk biscuits,” the emphatic aside “both made with lard!” The sentence is built like a smell that hits before you can intellectualize it. Hyphens mimic the way recollection interrupts itself, piling detail on detail the way a kitchen stacks heat, fat, and flour.

The intent isn’t just to reminisce about breakfast; it’s to authenticate a worldview. By anchoring memory in a specific technology (“that ancient iron stove”) and specific inputs (buttermilk, lard), Smith signals a pre-industrial, pre-optimization domestic economy: thrift, self-reliance, and material constraints that shaped daily life. The parenthetical “made with lard!” has a wink of contrarian pleasure, pushing back against modern hygienic food morality. It implies: we were poorer, the food was “worse” by contemporary standards, and it was still rich, sustaining, maybe even better.

Subtextually, this is also a quiet argument about knowledge. Economists often speak in abstractions; Smith reminds you that preferences are embodied and formed early, in kitchens, not spreadsheets. The stove matters because institutions matter: the tools you have determine the choices you make, and the choices you make harden into habits that later look like “taste.” In one homespun snapshot, he smuggles in the idea that culture and constraint co-produce value.