"In the 9th grade I began my first wage work for the West Side Drug store delivering prescriptions and sundries on my bicycle to customers who called in orders"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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