Economics Ph.D. (1903), Canadian Humorist Stephen Leacock. It's not every single day that one stumbles upon a historical past-of-economics arc connecting Thorstein Veblen to Groucho Marx and Jack Benny. The economist that linked the iconoclast economist to those veterans of vaudeville comedy is the Canadian humorist and Chicago student of Thorstein Veblen, Stephen Butler Leacock. First I submit right here some data (the actual place to begin of my background verify of Leacock, the Chicago Ph.D.) discovered in the University of Chicago’s registers of its Ph.D.’s and annual catalogues. The author’s autobiographical Preface to Leacock’s best brain health supplement hit, Sunshine Sketches of just a little Town (1912) follows. The stories themselves strike most, if not all, of the same chords that Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon has played over the past many years. Finally I'll enable myself the quick-reduce of quoting Wikipedia to complete the sketch of each sides of this most fascinating fellow. The McGill economics department entry for 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 and Head of Department of Economics and Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 1938, April 1. Professor Emeritus of Economics and Mind Guard brain health Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. I do know no approach in which a writer could more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a quick account of who and what he is. By this means some of the blame for what he has finished could be very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life. I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, Mind Guard on December 30, 1869. I'm not conscious that there was any specific conjunction of the planets at the time, however should think it extremely probably.

My mother and father migrated to Canada in 1876, and i determined to go along with them. My father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was through the arduous occasions of Canadian farming, and my father was simply in a position by great diligence to pay the hired males and, in years of loads, to boost sufficient grain to have seed for the subsequent year’s crop with out buying 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, instead of being able to develop up as farm labourers. Yet I saw sufficient of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, each of body and intellect, Mind Guard that's induced by sincere handbook toil. I used to be educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, Mind Guard where I graduated in 1891. On the University I spent my whole time in the acquisition of languages, residing, dead, and half- lifeless, and knew nothing of the outside world.

On this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of every day. Very quickly after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and located myself intellectually bankrupt. In different phrases I used to be what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to highschool instructing 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 experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the numerous gifted and good males who are compelled to spend their lives in essentially the most dreary, essentially the most thankless, and the worst paid occupation in the world. I have famous that of my pupils, those that appeared the laziest and the least enamoured of books are actually rising to eminence on the bar, in business, and in public life