The situation was, however, altogether different for Vernon Smith, whose parents left school at 14. His father provided the work ethic and can-do knowledge, while his mother was active in political and social affairs in the community. Financial problems forced the family to practise self-sufficiency on a farm for a couple of years. The situation of James Buchanan was similar to Smith's. His family lived on a farm throughout his youth. His father had gone through two years of university training ("and played football"). His mother, however, had been a schoolteacher. She was endowed with an exemplary work ethic and a voracious intellectual appetite. Both character traits, as it seems, have left an important and lasting impact on the son. 

Even without much schooling, therefore, parents can provide their children with intellectual appetite and a motivation for achievement. Discussions at the dinner table, or other regular family gatherings, are extremely important — and it doesn't matter much how high-powered the arguments are. What is crucial is that the awareness is raised-awareness about the importance of certain topics relating to economics and economic policy, to anything that touches social questions and of course the appetite to learn more about them. 

This is an experience that most laureates share. Smith was fascinated to discover at college that the topics that had been debated at the dinner table were actually "things you could study, that it needn't be only a matter of opinion. You could actually base your opinions on analysis, on investigation, on some kind of understanding about how society and how the economy work". In the Buchanan household, discussions were more about politics. 

Worldviews also play a role in instigating academic research. As Schumpeter put it, worldviews enter the "pre-analytic cognitive act" or "vision" that "supplies the raw material for the analytic effort". To some extent, a person's worldview is usually shaped at home, in the family, actively and passively, perhaps also during dinner table conversations. This "initial endowment" may however fade away as new influences come in later in life. Interestingly, in the case of the ten Nobel laureates I interviewed, the initial ideological endowments were mostly socialist. There is a saying that a person who, as a youngster, is not a socialist, has no heart — and a person who still remains a socialist in later years has no brain. There may be something to it. Smith comes from a socialist background. Becker was a socialist, just like his father, who "although he was a pretty successful businessman, strongly supported interventionist-type candidates". North was an outright Marxist. Arrow regarded himself as a socialist ("not a communist"). Buchanan doesn't make such a fine distinction. He came from a populist background, but when he turned to economics, his peer group lured him over to socialism. "I would have signed up immediately to the Communist Party had a recruiter come along," he says. As predicted by the popular saying, however, those initial ideological endowments indeed didn't last. In Buchanan's case, it was the University of Chicago that turned him around, "and in a hurry". 

The same happened to Becker, who remembers that two things pulled him away from socialism: Milton Friedman and economics. When North got his first job at Seattle, he relearned theory — and, as he says, this "was the last step in my getting rid of Marxism. As I relearned theory, I became a very rigid neoclassical, Chicago-type economist". As the Nobel laureates moved on with their schooling and academic training, they came across teachers and mentors who, in most cases, played a decisive role. These mentors managed to entice their intellectual appetite even more, opened up interesting new fields for them, gave them good advice and urged them ultimately to stay in academia. The role of teachers is as important as it is psychologically interesting. Teachers provide the intellectual socialisation, and they are role models. This is clear from Becker's experience with Milton Friedman at Chicago. "He was by far the greatest living teacher I have ever had," Becker says. But Becker ultimately had to defend his intellectual autonomy some years later, deciding to move on to Columbia University. Buchanan was in Frank Knight's wake, while in Smith's case, Wassily Leontief and Gottfried Haberler and especially Edward Chamberlin, left their mark.