Senator Phil Gramm

Phil Gramm (Ph.D., University of Georgia) taught economics at Texas A&M University from 1967 to 1978, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. He was a member of the Senate Budget Committee and chaired the Senate Banking Committee during his tenure. He was one of the architects of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman Act. After his retirement from the Senate, he was the Vice-Chairman of UBS Investment Bank for 9 years. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a Senior Advisor to US Policy Metrics.

 

 

Were there any particular books that were important to your development as an economist?

“It wasn’t particular books that made me want to study economics. It was that I saw in economics the explanation for the world I observed growing up. I wanted to know why some people were successful and some were not, why some things had value and some did not. As I studied economics, I realized that people actually studied a lot of the things I had noticed. . . . Books can’t teach you everything, but I did learn names for some of the intuitive principles and tendencies I had seen going on around me growing up in Columbus, Georgia. I guess you could say I learned the value of experience versus simply learning from books.”

Economics explains a lot about the way the world works. Is there anything economics can’t explain?

“Happiness can’t be explained by economics. Money can’t buy happiness. It buys freedom. You choose happiness for yourself.”