He majored in American Studies at Grinnell College and he did not become interested in economics until after he spent three years teaching, volunteering, and bicycle touring in Asia and Latin America where he became fascinated with the dramatic differences in the lives of ordinary people across arbitrary political borders like the Rio Grande or the Strait of Malacca. He lived in a Mexican neighborhood in inner-city Chicago for a dozen years where he worked in a welfare-to-work urban gardening program called GreenCorps and as the information systems manager for the University of Chicago GSB alumni office. Then he went back to school for his Ph.D. where he began researching the origins of mutilitarianism for his dissertation on the history and epistemology of the ordinal revolution in economics. Presentations