This does make the Nobel Prize a relatively good indicator of excellence. For this reason, it is useful and inspiring to turn to the Nobel laureates and ask them about their personal journeys — leaving behind the more pedestrian issues of publication indexes, citation cartels and networks. It is much more interesting to have outstanding scholars describe their individual roads to research, originality and excellence, and to ask them about their own character traits, family backgrounds and worldviews. How have they come to be what they are? What is it that triggered curiosity about economics? What does it take to have a promising career? Where do path-breaking ideas come from? What were their sources of inspiration? 

Actually, most Nobel laureates in economics have come to that field because they were attracted by its questions, which they felt an imperative urge to answer in order to improve the world. Those are the missionaries. People with this trait usually have a "vision", as Joseph Schumpeter once said. Among my subjects, Douglass North says that he is "still trying to save the world" today. Gary Becker talks about his youth referring to his emerging "desire to do something for society". On the other hand, there are some born technicians, who easily possess themselves of the proper (mathematical) "technique", as Schumpeter puts it, and who take a while to discover their more profound interest in "people and policies": those laureates have come to economics via their mathematical talent. To some extent, this is the case with Vernon Smith. Blessed with a talent for mathematics, he started out studying physics and electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he was confronted with the social sciences more or less by accident. He stumbled over Paul Samuelson's new textbook, which was revolutionary in presenting the subject matter in mathematical terms. "Samuelson's book indicated that economics was just physics," he said. He has since found that economics is not like physics — but the newly discovered field stuck nevertheless. 

There may be a humility bias in how much one ascribes to chance, looking back on one's life — but it is probably also true that the dice are not yet fully thrown at the age of 16 or 17. Decisions made at such a young age are made with a great deal of uncertainty. Hence, we may take it seriously when most laureates claim that they have more or less stumbled into economics. 

Even for the "missionaries", economics wasn't a fully unequivocal choice before they saw it in class. In Vernon Smith's case, for example, it was chance exposure to economics at Caltech that proved decisive. Paul Samuelson says that he "came to Chicago only because of location" and that it "was an accident that I liked the subject". Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan were simply lured by a scholarship. 

This brings me to the influence of family backgrounds. Edmund Phelps certainly hit the nail on the head when he remarked that it is not straightforward — not impossible, but more difficult — to become an economist if one doesn't grow up in a somewhat bourgeois setting. Absent major crises that affect virtually everybody, economic issues do tend to subside into the fuzzy background of social life unless one lives in a context that brings with it some regular intellectual exposure to questions of this kind. 

Phelps grew up in precisely what he calls a "somewhat bourgeois setting", both parents being oriented towards business and coming from relatively wealthy backgrounds. Gary Becker's case is similar, his father having been a pretty well-to-do businessman. The same is true for Douglass North, whose father was a successful insurance manager, and even for Paul Samuelson, whose father had his own pharmacy and whose family had accumulated a relative degree of affluence but had to watch it gradually dissipate when the Florida land bubble burst in the 1920s.