Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is February 15th, 2011, and my guest is George Will, author and syndicated

columnist, George Welcome to Econ Talk. Glad to be with you. Let's start with your biography. Tell

us how your career started and how you got to where you are. Well, I grew up in Champagne,

Illinois. I was a faculty brat. My father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois.

I went away to school at Trinity College in Hartford, which I could afford to do only because a

Trinity alumnus had set aside scholarship money for Illinois students. After Trinity, I went to

Oxford for two years studying what's called PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Leaving

Oxford, I didn't know quite what I wanted to do, so I applied to law school and Princeton

in philosophy. I went to Princeton because it was midway between two national league cities,

which would give you a sense of how fundamentally unserious I was as a scholar. I got PhD in

three years and went off to teach, intending to make a career of it, and taught for a year at

Michigan State University, and then at the University of Toronto. I went to Michigan State in the

fall of 67, Toronto in the fall of 68. In the fall of 69, Everett Dirksen died. Illinois

Senator who is minority leader of the Senate then for the Republicans. I remember him. And the

Republican shuffled their leadership in a Colorado senator named Gordon Hallett of whom I had never heard

became third ranking Republican in the Senate and chairman of the policy committee. He decided he

wanted to hire to write for him a Republican academic. And there weren't any. This was the late

1960s. I was the only one in North America and I was in Canada. But through serendipity he heard

...