"Anyway, I enrolled in Economics and one of the things I read was a brand new book, Hick's Value and Capital. You know, after reading though the mish-mash like Marshall and things like that, suddenly there was this clear, well-organized view, you knew exactly what was happening. Just the sort of thing to appeal to me. There was a whole, messy, confused literature on capital theory; all those great debates between Knight and von Hayek and all that. And now here was just the idea of dated commodities and suddenly scales fell from your eyes. A simple idea like dated commodities made whole issues transparent. But as I read Hicks, I could see there were things left out. I turned to this again when I returned from the War, which was really pretty much of a hiatus in any work I was doing - I was gone and very busy for about three and a half years. I had done all my examinations before I had left. So now it was just a question of my thesis. I decided to take Value and Capital and redo it properly. I could see all kinds of specific points that were of concern. I wanted to combine it with Samuelson's stability theory, which he had developed in the meanwhile, the papers on dynamic stability in '41 and '42. Maybe I would add some stochastic elements to the story because as a student of probability and statistics theory I could see noise in the system. Well, it was a lifetime of work, really; it was a very unrealistic thesis."