Daily Inspiration Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s line lands like a humblebrag delivered in a cardigan: gentle on the surface, quietly devastating underneath. “One of my digressions” frames “abstract economics” not as a central life’s work but as a side alley he wandered down between more practical errands. Coming from a Nobel-winning economist, that understatement doubles as wit and critique. He’s poking at the profession’s tendency to treat abstraction as the main event, while implying that for him it was an occasional tool, not a religion.

The word “digression” does heavy lifting. It suggests curiosity rather than careerist commitment, a mind willing to roam outside the sanctioned path of publishable orthodoxy. Subtext: economics becomes most self-satisfied precisely when it forgets it’s a means to an end. Vickrey spent much of his career on applied problems like taxation, public finance, and congestion pricing - places where models collide with politics, incentives, and real streets. Calling an abstract paper a “digression” subtly reasserts his values: the point isn’t elegance, it’s use.

There’s also an educator’s posture here. He makes the high-status thing sound approachable, even accidental, as if inviting students and colleagues to treat theory as provisional scaffolding rather than scripture. In a field often accused of mistaking mathematical polish for truth, the line reads as a raised eyebrow: yes, abstraction is interesting; no, don’t build your entire worldview there.