Experimental Economist Vernon Smith on the Housing Bubble, Adam Smith, and Libertarianism

Vernon Smith is a pioneer, discovering a whole new way to study economics and winning a Nobel Prize for doing so. Smith sat down with Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie to discuss a variety of topics, including growing up in Kansas during the Great Depression, his ideological journey from socialist to libertarian, how and why some of Adam Smith's most important intellectual contributions are overlooked, and what experimental economics has to say about the collapse of the housing market. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Shot by Zach Weissmueller and Hawk Jensen. Edited by Weissmueller. Vernon Lomax Smith (born January 1, 1927) is professor of economics at Chapman University's Argyros School of Business and Economics and School of Law in Orange, California, a research scholar at George Mason University Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, and a Fellow of the Mercatus Center, all in Arlington, Virginia. Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Daniel Kahneman. He is the founder and president of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C.. In 2004 Smith was honored with an honorary doctoral degree[1] at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, the institution that named the Vernon Smith Center for Experimental Economics Research after him.[2]