Discovery - A Memoir

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Discovery enters a child's homeland of hardship transformed by promise, revealing a richly inspiring world of achievement. Vernon Smith, born in Wichita before the Great Depression, witnessed entrepreneurs defy economic despair, transforming Kansas wheat fields into thriving oil and aviation industries. Unemployment forced his family into temporary farm life, where he began school in a rural one-room house. This farm experience became a crucible of learning that transcended its limitations. With blue-collar roots in the railroad and petroleum sectors, Smith overcame a lackluster high school record to graduate from Caltech. He then shifted from science to economics at the University of Kansas and Harvard, guided by an instinctive sense of direction. As a young professor at Purdue, he resisted the pressures of the economics profession to conform to its restrictive norms. Unbeknownst to him, Smith would play a pivotal role in transforming economics into an experimental science, challenging the conservative view that it was a non-experimental discipline. His contributions culminated in a Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. However, this memoir emphasizes not just his intellectual journey but also his personal voyage, exploring the depths of human experience through various activities. Ultimately, it reveals how understanding "how things work" encompasses both spiritual and scientific values, emerging from unseen depths beyond immedi