Economics Ph.D. (1903), Canadian Humorist Stephen Leacock. It is not day-after-day that one stumbles upon a historical past-of-economics arc connecting Thorstein Veblen to Groucho Marx and Jack Benny. The economist that connected the iconoclast economist to those veterans of vaudeville comedy is the Canadian humorist and Chicago student of Thorstein Veblen, Stephen Butler Leacock. First I post right here some knowledge (the precise starting point of my background examine of Leacock, the Chicago Ph.D.) found within the University of Chicago’s registers of its Ph.D.’s and annual catalogues. The author’s autobiographical Preface to Leacock’s best hit, Sunshine Sketches of a bit of Town (1912) follows. The tales themselves strike most, if not all, of the identical chords that Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon has played over the past decades. Finally I will enable myself the brief-minimize of quoting Wikipedia to complete the sketch of both sides of this most interesting fellow. The McGill economics division entry for mental clarity support Stephen Leacock. University of Chicago Ph.D.
Thesis Title: The doctrine of laissez faire. 1889-99. Instructor in French and German, Upper Canada College. 1899-1900. Graduate Student, University of Chicago. 1921. Head of Department of Economics and Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 1931, April 1. Professor mental clarity support and Head of Department of Economics and Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 1938, April 1. Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. I do know no means during which a author might more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this means a number of the blame for what he has achieved is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life. I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I'm not conscious that there was any explicit conjunction of the planets at the time, but ought to assume it extremely probably.
My dad and mom migrated to Canada in 1876, and i decided to go together with them. My father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was throughout the hard occasions of Canadian farming, and my father was simply ready by nice diligence to pay the hired men and, in years of loads, to boost sufficient grain to have seed for the next year’s crop with out shopping for any. By this course of my brothers and i were inevitably pushed off the land, and have grow to be professors, business men, and engineers, as an alternative of being able to develop up as farm labourers. Yet I saw sufficient of farming to talk exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and mental clarity support the deep sleep, each of body and intellect, that is induced by trustworthy manual toil. I used to be educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, mind guard natural brain health supplement natural brain health supplement natural brain health supplement of which I used to be head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my whole time in the acquisition of languages, residing, dead, and half- useless, and knew nothing of the outside world.
In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of every day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and located myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is named a distinguished graduate, mental clarity support and, as such, I took to high school teaching as the one commerce I might discover that needed neither experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the employees of Upper Canada College, an expertise which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant males who're compelled to spend their lives in probably the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid career in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those that appeared the laziest and the least enamoured of books at the moment are rising to eminence on the bar, in enterprise, and in public life