I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college.

Humphrey contrasts abstract, classroom economics with the hard, immediate lessons of environmental and agricultural catastrophe on the Great Plains. A “South Dakota dust storm” evokes the Dust Bowl era’s soil erosion, crop failure, and rural financial collapse—conditions that made economic forces visible as lived experience: scarcity, debt, market volatility, and the dependence of prosperity on ecological stability. The remark underscores a populist, experiential view of political economy: policy should be grounded in what happens to ordinary people when nature, markets, and institutions collide. It also implies skepticism toward purely theoretical training and a preference for pragmatic, human-centered economic understanding shaped by crisis.