I was born in Wooster, Ohio, a small Midwestern town about fifty miles south of Cleveland. My brother and I grew up on an apple orchard owned by my father and grandfather. In many respects I had an idyllic childhood – I remember long summer days of playing among the apple trees and lying on the hillside watching the shapes form in the clouds. However, despite the appeals of this pastoral life, I always felt trapped on the orchard. There was a whole wide world out there beyond Wooster, Ohio, that I was missing out on.

I was an avid reader, especially of science and science fiction, and spent virtually every Saturday morning at the library picking out the next week’s set of books. When I was about twelve I joined some mail-order book clubs. One of the initial three offerings was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which was a series of novels revolving around the predictions of a “psychohistorian” who created an elaborate mathematical model of the Galactic Empire. The idea that one could construct mathematical models of human behavior made a big impression on me; perhaps this is why I eventually became an economist. (It appears that both Paul Krugman and Newt Gingrich were also inspired by Asimov’s book; see Dowd 2011; Krugman 2000.)