9 - Experimental Economics at Purdue

Summary

This memoir is about many people connected with Purdue and with Em Weiler, but mostly it is about me and a continuing struggle of escape from the prison of conventional patterns of economic thought.

I arrived in West Lafayette in the summer of 1955. I had turned down an offer from Princeton at $3,750 per year, because I was already poor enough, and a good offer from Carnegie Tech, because somehow Carnegie seemed too structured. Whatever Purdue was, it wasn't that! In the next two to three years I found myself in the company of Ed Ames, Lance Davis, George Horwich, Chuck Howe, John Hughes, Jim Quirk, Stan Reiter, Rubin Saposnik, Larry Senesh, and, of course, Em Weiler. Many of us had only one thing in common—a very subverting sense of considerable dissatisfaction with our own graduate education, whether it was at Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, or wherever, and with the state of economic knowledge. This was the glue that bound—that allowed each of us to be encouraged to “do our own thing” (before that phrase became part of the language) by Em Weiler. Em, I think, had no prevision at all as to which direction that collection of renegades should go, but he had an intuition that maybe something would emerge out of a process that did not try to prevent things from happening.