Life's Pleasures Quote by Vernon L. Smith

The flex here isn’t glamour; it’s legitimacy. Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel-winning economist famous for taking markets into the lab, reaches back to a 9th-grade paper route with a pharmacological twist: prescriptions and “sundries” ferried by bicycle to people who “called in orders.” It’s an origin story calibrated to sound ordinary, even a little dusty, and that’s the point. Smith is quietly grounding his later faith in markets and incentives in something tactile: work that has a price, a customer, a deadline, and consequences if you mess up.

The phrasing does two things at once. “First wage work” is a small, almost ceremonial marker of entry into the adult economy, while “customers who called in orders” frames commerce as responsive and decentralized. No grand planner, no heroic entrepreneur - just demand signaling, logistics, trust. The drugstore setting adds an ethical charge: you’re not delivering pizzas, you’re delivering necessities, sometimes urgently. That underscores reliability as a moral virtue and hints at why Smith would later care about how real people behave under rules and constraints, not how they behave in immaculate theory.

There’s also a period tell. This is pre-digital convenience: phone calls, local inventory, human delivery. By invoking that world, Smith subtly critiques abstracted economics that forgets friction, proximity, and the social fabric of exchange. The subtext: markets aren’t diagrams; they’re errands, reputations, and a kid pedaling hard because someone is waiting.