An Interview with William A. Brock

William A. Brock has taught in the Departments of Economics at the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago, before moving to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is now Vilas Research Professor of Economics. He has also been an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute since 1989. His many awards include election as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1974, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. His over 100 invited lectures include presentations in Poland, Belgium, France, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, England, Sweden, Norway, and Australia. Brock has been a leading contributor to the development of methods of intertemporal equilibrium analysis in the areas of growth theory, monetary theory, and finance. More recently, he has played a crucial role in the development of new methods for the analysis of nonlinear dynamics in macroeconomics and finance, and models of expectations that relax the assumption of rational expectations. I interviewed Buz in the faculty cafeteria near the Social Science Research Institute building, on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, on October 22, 1998. Our interview was interrupted when he had to go to teach, and then was finished by phone on December 11, 1998. The transcript that follows does little justice to the liveliness of Buz’s conversation, mainly because of my inability to transcribe the animated facial expressions and hand gestures that made the mathematical references more concrete. I have added several footnotes to the transcript, identifying some of the published sources that were mentioned during our conversation