Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence R. Klein

The disarming modesty here is doing real work. Klein isn’t reminiscing about an abstract intellectual awakening; he’s describing the moment a field revealed itself as an institution with a heartbeat. “A surprise” signals that econometrics, in his early years, still felt like an upstart: not yet the default language of economics, not yet guaranteed a home in departments or policy circles. The punchline is bureaucratic, almost funny in its restraint: the revelation isn’t a beautiful theorem, it’s that a professional society and a journal were “flourishing.” For an ambitious young economist, that’s oxygen.

Read as subtext, he’s narrating the difference between dabbling in an idea and committing to a career. A flourishing journal means standards, peer recognition, and a pipeline for legitimacy. It means you can build a life around quantifying the economy without being treated as a crank with a slide rule. Econometrica, tied to the Econometric Society founded in the 1930s, represented a specific wager: economics could borrow the authority of mathematics and statistics and become a discipline that looks, and therefore governs, like science.

Klein’s “great enthusiasm” lands as more than personal excitement; it’s a statement about generational mood. Coming of age alongside the Depression’s lessons and the postwar state’s hunger for forecasting, he’s gravitating toward tools that promise to make policy less guessy and more accountable. The line captures an inflection point when technique wasn’t just method but a passport into power.