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6. William A. (“Buz”) Brock
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 6 William A. (“Buz”) Brock Vilas Research Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin at Madison The interview was conducted in the John R. Commons Room at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in June 2002. Could you brie›y recount your path to becoming an economist? I grew up on a farm in Missouri, so I got to see economics working on a ‹rsthand basis. It was an accident that I went to college; no one in my family had. I was sent up to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to live with my aunt so I could afford to go to a junior college. I wasn’t prepared. The ‹rst day I was sitting in class and saw the professor scribbling something on the board, and I asked the person next to me: “What’s that?” He said, “Math induction—you don’t know what math induction is, you’re in a lot of trouble.” So it was rough at ‹rst. I remember having trouble with calculus, so I went in to see my teacher. I noticed that he had a problem written on the blackboard. It had lots of sines, cosines, and transcendental equations. I asked what he was trying to do, and he told me that it was a proof about some polygons being extendable to n-gons. I was an engineering student, and I had a T square and a compass, so I took some big 157 paper and drew the polygons to see if the principle he was looking for held true or not. At around 20 or 21-sided polygons, I started noticing an increasing divergence. So it was obvious that the principle did not hold for n-gons. I drew up a bunch of these diagrams and took them in to him, telling him that the principle did not hold. (Back then I didn’t know how to say that the conjecture is false.) I showed him the drawings and the divergence. He asked me how accurate the drawings were, and I said they were pretty good. He asked to see them. I came back a week or so later, and the blackboard was empty [laughter]. . . . Ever since then I have been hooked. Science is just a hoot—trying to ‹gure out what’s true and what’s not using any tool that I can come up with. But you didn’t graduate from a Michigan school. You graduated from the University of Missouri. Some of the professors at my college suggested that I should go to a real university, so naturally I thought about going to the University of Missouri at Columbia since in the state of Missouri that was the big time. So, starting my sophomore year, I went there. Soon after I arrived, I met Russell Thompson, who was a young economist from the University of Minnesota and had just come down to teach agricultural economics. He posted a job for a graduate research assistant on the bulletin board. Despite my being a sophomore , I talked him into hiring me. We got along just great and ended up writing some papers together (Brock and Thompson 1965, 1966). The process got me hooked on economics. In my senior year I asked Russell whether I should go to graduate school in economics or mathematics. He said math, and when I asked him why, he said that economists tend to have a hang-up about math and it is much easier to learn math when you are young. So if you get a Ph.D. in mathematics from a ‹rst-rate department, math will be second nature, and then you can concentrate on the economics. So I went to Berkeley to study mathematics. I think that was great advice. Is it great advice for everybody who goes into economics? Well, it does take a long time. You end up getting a degree in a subject that is not your direct interest. A lot of natural scientists think that you can get right into economics. But economics is a difthe changing face of economics 158 [54.221.110.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:10 GMT) ferent way of thinking that takes a long time to grasp. Most people never grasp it. How did you grasp it? I don’t know; maybe it might have been because I’ve been thinking about it since I was seven or eight years old because of living on farms and seeing the ups and downs of agriculture...