Like everyone else, I have mused at times on the universal aspects of universality, among philosophical issues of equal pith and moment. But the results of these musings, in their present state of disorganization randomly walking, are unworthy of the impressive title "Philosophy of Life." So I propose to substitute some autobiographical snapshots, plus a few scattered observations on the state of the world and of our discipline--which, you remember, Carlyle has dignified with the title of "pig philosophy."

There was once a book, whose title I have forgotten, which someone reviewed acidly in some journal. The reviewer called the author a pedantic ass for citing so many obscure unknowns with difficult names. And lo! I was a case in point, one of perhaps half a dozen! So I had best be modest in my autobiographical section, as befits an obscure unknown with a difficult name.

I was conceived in the golden age of the middle classes, an age cut short by World War I before I was born. I was also a "comparative-systems diaper baby," in the same sense that certain third-generation Marxists are "Red diaper" ones. My father, before being born again as a respectable and indeed eminent bacteriologist and immunologist, had been a student leader of the Social Revolutionary party at the University of Odessa in the Old Country, where the Bronfenbrenners were friends and perhaps relatives of the Bronsteins, whose best-known product was Leon Trotsky. In the disappointing uprising of 1905--for which see the Eisenstein movie, Battleship Potemkin-- Father had helped the revolting sailors of the Black Sea Fleet seize the city of Odessa. Subsequently he spent a couple of years underground, before escaping first to France and then to the U.S. (The Czarist Okhrana was less efficient than its successor, the KGB, and no visa was necessary to enter the U.S.) My mother, better known as the historian of science Martha Ornstein, unfortunately died while I was young; the Ornsteins had come to the U.S. about 1890 to enable their sons to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian Army. She believed in the causes of woman suffrage and evolutionary (not Marxian) Socialism; had she lived, she could have been a New Deal Democrat. I also had two paternal uncles and a paternal Grandmother. One uncle was non-political in principle, which had not saved him from being beaten up in pogroms and later condemned to death several times by several contending armies in the Russian Civil War (1918-20); the other was an anarchist. My grandmother was a good Bolshevik, possibly a Stalinist. (I never met a paternal aunt, who would die in the defense of Leningrad against the Nazis.) So I became interested as a boy in the issues which separated my relatives, both from each other and from most of the neighbors wherever we lived--in Pittsburgh, in Boston, in New York, or in St. Louis. The depression, arriving when I was a senior in high school, heightened my interests in "dangerous thoughts."

But why economics, rather than history or politics or sociology or activism? A number of reasons, none of them good. As a child, I had been a neighborhood sissy, unable to give orders and unwilling to receive them; I could not follow in my father's footsteps. My undergraduate college, Washington University in St. Louis, then had a weak spot in its economics faculty. I had been an interscholastic and intercollegiate debater on a wide variety of economic issues, without benefit of formal instruction in the subject. My background made me a star in economics classes. I was not only appreciated and awarded prizes, but came to believe I knew as much as some of my teachers, and was therefore God's gift to economics! (I still think I knew as much as these teachers, but explain the fact differently now.) Had I had better and "tougher" teachers, I'm sure I would never have gone on in economics, especially in view of a mathematics allergy that dated back to the third grade. And finally, there were no jobs, or so I thought, when I took my undergraduate degree in 1934 at the ripe old age of 19. Graduate school, since my family could afford it, seemed like "any port in a storm."

The decision for graduate work in economics over unemployment in St. Louis involved no commitment to "intellectual eminence and scholarship sublime." My ambition was to become a serious economic journalist and editorial writer, possibly even a columnist on economic matters, after fortifying myself with a good M.A. or perhaps even a doctorate if the depression lasted long enough. Teaching and research? Well, maybe, if I forgot how to write, or missed out on journalistic connections. Definitely a second choice; checkers, if I couldn't do chess.

Of the eight or ten graduate schools to which I had applied--and to none of which I imparted the heresies of the last paragraph--only Chicago had offered me financial aid. So it was there I went, despite the warnings of my Washington University teachers about the horrendous ogres I should find in residence as teachers.

The Chicago ogres were, it turned out, somewhat over-rated in the fire-breathing department. True, I would in any normal year flunked out in my first year, but that term the chief and unavoidable ogre (Jacob Viner) was wasting his sweetness on the desert air of Washington, D.C., and I accepted the advice to utilize this unearned respite by getting myself "a little potted calculus" and a good undergraduate course in economic theory before facing him and the other big guns of the Chicago Department.

As a result, my principal traumas at Chicago were not its big guns-not even Professor Viner [1]--but my fellow students. There were four (4!) future Nobel Prize economists roaming the halls of the Social Science Building in those years (1934-1938). If I underestimated some of these, I overestimated certain others who have thus far received less professional recognition than the Big Four. Most impressive of all was Paul Samuelson, still technically an undergraduate and somewhat younger than myself, but well on his way to becoming the Liszt or the Paganini of twentieth-century economic gymnastics.

Of course I had much to learn from any half-way decent graduate faculty in economics. In fact, I learned much of it at Chicago (and at Minnesota, where I spent the Summer of 1937.) Some of the things I needed and acquired:

1. Some revival of confidence. (I still enjoy quoting Paul Douglas: "You needn't be as good as Samuelson to get along in economics.")
2. Respect for "the theoretical mechanics of the price system" (Frank Knight) as an intellectual construct, as compared with "that social-work twaddle" (Henry Simons' characterization of the warmed-over labor institutionalism I had brought with me from St. Louis).
3. The ease of paving Hell with good intentions in economic policy (Simons again). The frequent limitation of many policy proposals to "Me (and My Gang) for Dictator!" (Knight again).
4. Realization that economics was neither "cut and dried" nor "all in Marshall" (or anyone else). That it was evolving and developing. especially in the empirical direction. That it was a worthy enterprise to join the procession (Henry Schultz and Paul Douglas), even when it leads to alternatives for "free enterprise" (Oskar Lange).
5. That academic life can be more than a consolation prize for not "mattering" in the Real World. But also, that racial, religious, and ideological quotas made Ivory Towers difficult to climb (Schultz at Chicago, Arthur Marget at Minnesota).

By the time I took my degree in 1939 (with an undistinguished. thesis under Schultz [2] on the monetary theories of the Lausanne School) I had accumulated a little teaching experience at the University itself and elsewhere in "Chicagoland." I was a pretty good undergraduate teacher, especially for those fortunate student who needed no teaching at all [3]. Also, I liked teaching too well to search actively for a journalistic post--although of course if journalism had sought me things would have been different!

The ashes of my journalistic ambitions have been on balance handicaps in my later work. Despite the pressures of scholarship, I still write pretty well (for an economist, that is). But I remain impatient with both logical rigor and factual detail. (The last-named failing, would of course disqualify me as an "investigative reporter.") I retain a certain willingness to jump to conclusions, and then to change my mind, more quickly than one should as a reliable spokesman for any partisan viewpoint; I sympathize deeply with Judge Robert Bork, crucified and rejected in 1987 as a Supreme Court nominee for certain law-review opinions of a dozen years before. And finally, I flit hither and yon in economics, and sometimes beyond economics, before attaining expertise in any topic. Doubtless I shall end, if I live long enough, "knowing nothing about everything," as against the specialist's "knowing everything about nothing." In the meantime, I have entitled my selected essays Keizaigaku Tokorodokoro which I believe to be the Japanese translation of "Here and There in Economics."

Thus far I have mentioned no "Japanese" interests, and for good reason. Such interests were in fact infinitesimal [4]. But Pearl Harbor naturally developed my Japan-consciousness at the same time that it propelled the country into World War II.

At that time (1941-42) I had been, I thought, broadening, myself by bureaucratic experience in the Treasury and the Federal Reserve system, but the broadening process did not extend to matters international. Actually, my most important lesson from this venture-a lesson often confirmed later-was that I was poorly adapted to work in a hierarchical organization, civil or military. I had not learned, and still do not know, how to adjust to an ass as superior officer. How does one report to an ass on technical matters beyond his asinine understanding, or communicate through such an ass with the higher authorities "upstairs," who may or may not be equally asinine? Remember, it must all be done without revealing one's awareness of anyone's asininity, especially the asininity of one's immediate superior. (One's occasional asinine chairmonster, deanmonster, or presidentmonster can easily be evaded among the nooks and crannies of the ivory tower.)

But back to Pearl Harbor and its consequences: World War II was a "popular" war, meaning that one's draft-dodging had best be done in uniform, and that the 4-F or "unfit for service" classification was a mark of shame, not a stroke of good fortune. My state of nearsightedness and mal-coordination, I believed, might get me killed or disabled in basic training, or possibly assigned to permanent latrine duty or office routine after I survived. Of such as I, along with more conventional cowards, are draft-dodgers made, both in and out of uniform. As for me, I qualified academically for the Japanese-language program of the Naval Training School (Oriental Languages) on the University of Colorado campus nestled under the Rocky Mountain foothills at Boulder. I volunteered, I was accepted, and there I was (late January 1943, at 15 degrees below zero). Technically I was an apprentice seaman, but if I performed satisfactorily I would be commissioned an officer. Statistically speaking, I would be "promoted from the ranks" as evidence against the Navy's reputation for elitist gentility in its officer corps.

Language School was 18 months of intensive Hell. Brute memory, for which I had lost a childhood aptitude, was the principal component. All in all, it was the most unpleasant educational experience I had ever had. (One little detail; a four-hour examination every Saturday morning!) My performance was mediocre but passable, and I lived largely for the periodic "breaks" during which I could try to read and write economics again. Many of my classmates cracked psychologically under the strain, but I only swayed sufficiently to graduate two or three months behind schedule. My Ensign's commission, incidentally, had been held up by a foretaste of what we now call McCarthyism. I was one of the "85 club" of 85 Boulder students with relatives in Axis-occupied lands, or (in my case) something called "premature anti-Fascism" on their records. As an offset, contact with my Japanese teachers-- many of them refugees from Japanese militarism-immunized me permanently from the racist attitudes pervading the American forces in what was a "race war" to a much greater extent than we like to admit.

Graduation came about the time of the Normandy landings in Europe. My first assignment was to the Advanced Naval Intelligence School in New York. Then came the Navy Department in Washington and finally Pearl Harbor itself, primarily as a translator of captured documents and secondarily as a POW (prisoner of war) interrogator. The translation was deadly stuff, economically significant insofar as it involved Japanese modifications of U.S. designs in response to Japanese wartime shortages. POW interrogation was fun. Far from torturing or maltreating prisoners "like in the movies," I got along better with them than with my superior officers, and gave them most of my rations of beer and tobacco. (I drink only moderately, and smoke not at all.) I was assigned prisoners who had worked in factories of which we had aerial photographs. As an economist, and therefore an expert on factory production, I was instructed to ask questions whose answers might help the Air Force assign priorities for future pinpoint bombing. The prisoners co-operated without question--we treated them considerably more humanely than the Japanese Army and Navy had done-- and perhaps my questions might have been useful had the war lasted longer. Pearl Harbor, of course, was thousands of miles behind the battle lines, but there was a widespread rumor that we were being saved for the invasion of Japan's southern island of Kyushu, scheduled for November 1945. (This was to take place simultaneously at three widely-separated beaches on that large island; Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, was where rumor had me headed.)

But in August 1945 the atom bombs fell, the Soviets entered the war, and Japan surrendered. For admittedly selfish reasons, therefore, I am less opposed than most of my friends to nuclear warfare as compared with the "conventional" varieties. After the Japanese surrender, I did indeed go to Kyushu, but as a member of a forlorn Civil Censorship Detachment wandering about the northern half of the island in search of a more definite assignment. It was on these travels that I was bitten by the "Japan bug" from which I have never recovered. Forty-odd years later, Japan remains "Good to the Last Drop" even though "the last drop" falls far short of the first ones.

Japan's appeal was not a matter of serenity, geishas, and Mt. Fuji. There was no serenity about immediate postwar Japan; girls calling themselves "geishas" were mostly something else; my first view of Fuji was from an aircraft carrier headed back to the U.S. What was it then, this peculiar appeal? Mainly, I think, being a highly-privileged observer of a society in flux--turning itself inside out, under an Occupation mild enough to transform wartime hatred into a temporary wave of good feeling. (By the same token, contemporary China as a more interesting place than today's complacent Japan!) And secondly, going back to 1945, the realization that Language School Japanese was good for something, so that my investment of time and effort (over and above the Navy's estimated investment of 27,000 pre-inflation dollars per Japanese language officer) was not a complete waste.

I had of course learned that bygones were bygones and bad investments bad investments. One took one's losses and started over; one did not pour good money after bad. I was advised again and again, by colleagues I respected, to "forget all that Japan stuff " in favor of following the current fads of the scholarly journals to professional recognition as a main- stream economist. Perhaps I should even have taken their well-meaning advice, but "economic principles" sometimes make better sense on the blackboard than under one's own skin.

Having been fortunate enough to wangle repeated revisits to Japan, I have found them paying unanticipated dividends, of which I mention four:

1. A box seat at the "economic miracle"-- whose "miraculous" nature and significance I somehow failed to recognize until it had already happened! (Had the Japanese taken my advice, they would neither have subsidized heavy and technical industries, come "up-market" in their price and quality policies, nor tolerated the inflationary accompaniment of their "income-doubling" plans. Had the miracle occurred at all, it would have been slower than it was, and run more quickly into foreign resentment.)
2. A certain recognition as a specialist, if not precisely an expert, in Japanological economics or economic Japanology. This came to include an increasingly important teaching field, which tolerant colleagues in other departments have sometimes let me expand into general Japanese history at an advanced-undergraduate level.
3. A post-retirement teaching position in a School of International Studies at a Japanese private university, Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo, which is evolving from a pre-war "mission school" into a full-fledged institution of learning.
4. And most important of all, my wife Teruko. She is a civilian veteran of both strafing from the air, at her wartime job in an airplane-parts plant, and the fire-bombing, of her home city-- Yokohama, in May 1945. After my first marriage became a casualty of wartime separation, I met Teruko on my second trip to Japan in 1949- 50. I was disguised as a tax economist and revenue estimator; she was a trade-union activist and a student of Western-style dramatic art. After a difficult courtship and a long separation, we were married in Madison, Wisconsin, late in 1951. She has been an ideal wife (and psychiatric nurse) for a problem husband, as I found out under the related strains of McCarthyism and periodic psychological depression. She has also learned some economics in spite of herself; originally well to my political Left in economic policy, she has moved well beyond me on the Right, to the dismay of two children who grew up protesting this and that in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

After people settle into domestic routine, their lives tend to become dull and uninteresting--sometimes even to themselves. In my case, the years since 1951 have been spent on campuses and in airplanes between campuses, so I am no exception to the general tendency. Few people, I am sure, are interested in how I became first enchanted and then disenchanted with Keynesianism, how my concern with the alleged maldistribution of income and wealth became weathered down to a desire for safety nets for those at the very bottom of those distributions, how I tried to "modernize" Marxian economics, or how I struggled to reconcile general theories of economic growth with the special case of Japan. But a few points have involved "philosophy of life" issues during the past generation.

First among these is the "scoundrel time" of McCarthyism, during which I was investigated by several "security" and "intelligence" agencies. My closest approaches to conviction (or even indictment) for anything at all came when I resigned my Naval Reserve commission in 1947, ostensibly as "over-age for my rank," and when I cut short a leave of absence in Japan "under fire" in 1950. This near-immunity I may owe largely to luck; what the Navy had against me was not what the Civil Service Commission had against me, and neither was what SCAP (the Occupation of Japan) had against me. Had the various "Bronfenbrenner" files been unified and combined, as they may be today, I might have been in real trouble on the principle of "where there's this much smoke, there must be some fire." Eventually I made and kept a New Year's resolution never to apply for any position requiring a security clearance. Meanwhile I never had occasion to "take the Fifth Amendment" or to have a passport denied. I was, in short, a very small fish indeed--perhaps a sub-minnow.

Once, in 1955 1 believe, I was asked to "name names" among my former associates. I am ashamed to confess that I did so, "covering myself " (or so I thought) by adding that I knew nothing of anyone's Communist Party membership or present political position, and that to my best knowledge none of these people had ever committed a seditious act. But one of them, a California medical researcher named Bill Sherwood whom I had known at Chicago, committed suicide two years later on the eve of an nth re-investigation of his own case.

So far as I know, my academic superiors were not informed these problems of mine [5]. The troubles I anticipated never eventuated. I did not even, for any long period, consciously take a low profile or moderate my policy positions. (Some of my students have wondered whether McCarthyism had amputated my intellectual backbone; I not only hope but believe that they are wrong.)

What McCarthyism (and its successor, the John Birch Society) actually did was to keep me voting New Deal Democrat for some years after my economic-policy views had drifted away from Keynesian orthodoxy. Better to be a free man under Keynesian inflation or neo-Cambridge "incomes policies," I thought, than in jail under free enterprise! More generally, what does one do when one's best friends within the profession are on the other side of some important policy questions, and when one's policy allies include a significant minority of unsavory characters with whom one would rather avoid association? My solution has been to follow principles and ignore associations; I am not sure I can recommend it for others.

A dozen years after disgrace and alcohol had silenced both "Our Joe" and his numerous imitators in the Wisconsin State Legislature, the universities faced similar pressures again--this time from the Left, in the so-called student revolts. It had taken disgrace and death to end McCarthyism. Ending the military draft, withdrawal from Viet Nam, co-ed dormitories, the erosion of academic standards--and a dose of postwar unemployment!--sufficed to scuttle the student revolt. At that time, as a senior professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, I took a stronger stand against student activism than I had dared take at Wisconsin against McCarthy. I felt and stated that, in hiring junior faculty members from outside, we should investigate who had and who had not been involved in physical violence on the campuses from which they came, and reject out of hand those who had been so. And also, that we should warn other universities against the extremists in our own student body--speaking, of course, as individuals and not as representatives of the university. Such steps should not have been matters of academic freedom, but might of course have become so in practice. I still think I was right in this position, and later observed with some horror the influences of Vietnam-Era appointees in other departments. (Economics has been fairly effective in isolating direct- action extremists in a few "Red ghetto" departments here and there; as a result, "political economy" courses, springing up outside economics departments, have tended toward emotional propaganda devoid of analytical content.)

Having located myself at several different institutions at various points in time, I cannot dispute my reputation as one of the more volatile and nomadic members of our profession, with overtones of unreliability and being difficult to deal with. I have indeed moved too much, and some of my lateral moves have been mistakes. But in every case I was pulled rather than pushed, and I claim to have avoided some mistakes worse than any I actually made. Also, precisely because of my Jewish ancestry, I have deliberately refrained from haggling about money, fringe benefits, and so on. When I felt myself treated unfairly and received an attractive offer from outside, I have tended to accept it, sometimes with too little concern about leaping, from frying pans into fires. In terms of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, hindsight suggests that I over-played the first and under- played the third. Duke University, however, was the exception. In my 13 years at Duke, I was happy to be there, and I would have been happy to see the children enrolled there; in the event, they chose to go away from home; but Duke does a remarkably good job of satisfying faculty and student body otherwise than at the expense of each other.

Much my substitute for any formal "philosophy of life" has already been interspersed with the autobiographical notes just completed. The result is a kind of club sandwich, hopefully digestible--readable, I mean. But there are postscripts I want to add.

C.P. Snow was right to speak of the Western world's Two Cultures, the humanistic and the scientific. And Paul Samuelson was more than half right to point out that economics is almost unique among our scholarly disciplines in combining the two cultures and providing room for both scientists and humanists. But Samuelson may be less than 100 percent right, because I think he forgets three points:

1. Economists are not born but made.
2. There are two separate and disparate streams of recruits into economics, one from more exclusively humanistic branches of learning, and the other from more exclusively scientific ones.
3. Within economics, members of these two streams engage in competitive coexistence, more competitive on balance than coexistential.

With only so many "loaves and fishes" to go round--graduate fellowships, prestigious chairs, Nobel prizes--there has arisen a certain rivalry between our "humanists" and our "scientists" about their division. At the beginning of the current century, the rivalry was muted, because The Economist as Preacher--George Stigler's title--had things pretty much his own way. "The economist as preacher" (or social philosopher, or historian of economic institutions) was the profession's first-class citizen. The occasional "economist as applied mathematician" (or statistician) was the second-class citizen if recently not the outcast or what we have more come to call the "weirdo." By the time I ventured out of the woodwork, in the 1930s, the balance was being redressed; the formation of the Econometric Society in 1933 was a benchmark. Although basically a humanist by preference, I thought the change was desirable, and supported it in some small way. (Had I known how far the change would go I should surely have got out of economics while the getting was good, if indeed I had ever entered at all!) For now the balance is reversed. To see economics as a branch of applied mathematics (or applied statistics, or applied computerology) makes one a first-class citizen, while "the economist as preacher" is exiled to Academic Siberia at places like Elmer Gantry's Terwilliger College "with standards equal to the better high schools." I have been thinking wishfully for a generation that this trend too had gone far enough, had reached its peak, and would reverse itself next year or the year after. Thus far I have been egregiously wrong.

Many budding economists share my experience of having thought themselves God's gifts to economics, and then being deflated to something considerably less. How one should react to such psychological trauma I do not know, but have advised students along the following pessimistic lines:

1. The profession has plenty of room, even "need" for mediocrity. (If agencies wants Ph.D.s for high-school level hack work, some graduate schools will meet the demand.)
2. Forget about "not failure, but low aim, is crime." If your deficiencies consign you to the lower levels, adjust accordingly-- even when others no better qualified (but better connected!) make it to the topmost heights.
3. Don't try to make a marginal dissertation mediocre, either by expansion or by mathematization. Don't let "landmark" dissertations (Canada's Balance, Monopolistic Competition, Economics of Control, Foundations of Economic Analysis) scare you into a writing block. If your subject is the dog tax in your home county, just do whatever you can with it.
4. Melancholia is to professional work, including economics, as black lung is to coal mining. Many people of course escape, but you should assume you will eventually get it. Finish graduate work and get your first job quickly, so that you can relax and take it easy if depression hits you. Pick your family and friends, if you can, with an eye to their prowess at psychiatric nursing. If worst comes to worse, you may even have to see a psychiatrist.

Teaching, at or below the undergraduate level, is a common fate, often involuntary, for economists at some stage in their careers. Economists should therefore rid themselves, if they can, of the notion that such teaching is below their dignity, even if their "average students" belong in universities only to the limited extent that deaf-mutes belong in the Metropolitan Opera.

Teaching relatively small groups of self-starting superior students-- who, I have said, do not really need to be taught--demands different skills (subject-matter enthusiasm and facility) than does the keeping of thundering herds of Yahoos reasonably awake and happy for 50 or 75 minutes at a time. Some great university teachers can do both at once; among my professional acquaintances Walter Heller and Abba Lerner came closest to doing so. Others are content to concentrate on one group, letting the other shift largely for itself. Admitting myself an intellectual snob and lecturing on that basis, I came at Duke to combine the best of two worlds--high student "ratings," small undergraduate classes.

But was it ethical to fob off average students so largely on one's colleagues? My "other" chairman at Duke--I held a secondary lectureship in history--said that it was. I said that it was not. It conformed, I thought, to my comparative advantage; many teachers, perhaps most, prefer students who come to be entertained and who ask no searching questions; and finally, the reward structure for teaching concentrates at most institutions on one's performance in the big classes, through which research time is opened up for one's colleagues.

Nineteen Eighty Four has come and gone; it was my retirement year at Duke. But the problem Orwell raises has not really gone away. (The Orwell model must be modified to whatever extent new generations of nuclear weaponry make continuous long- range nuclear warfare obsolete.) Independently of Orwell, I agree that contemporary military technology, with its premia on speed and secrecy and its "unbearable" cost, combined with electronic surveillance and data-banking, put the liberal society at increasing disadvantage. This disadvantage is not only against illiberal foreign powers, but also against private armies and professional guerilla groups within its own borders [6]. I therefore fear we may be headed for at least a modicum of dictatorship with civil rights at least suspended. The regime may, if all goes well, permit liberal ideas to hibernate in isolated spots (ivory towers included).

As early as World War II I had feared that civilian control might not be given up after hostilities had lasted for a few more years; in the event, the Nazi collapse and the atom bombs proved me not wrong but irrelevant. I thought the same in the Viet Nam War; here the American war effort collapsed instead. And so it may be indefinitely, or at least until technology changes back in favor of the ordinary citizen. Nevertheless it behooves more of us, I fear, to keep escape hatches open than now seem willing to make the investment. (We could use potential American Solzhenitsyns, capable of teaching junior high school physics and math in small towns and writing "for the drawer" while waiting for the next thaw.)

I close by rewarding your patience with a parody on Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience:

If this old fud expresses himself in words too deep for me,
What an extraordinarily deep old fud this deep old fud must be!

1. Professor Viner was a hard grader, but meticulously fair. He also called on students in class, to cross-examine them with the technique of a prisoner-of-war interrogator. I was afraid of him, but never felt I deserved better than the mediocre grades he gave me. He did, however, scare me away from his principal teaching field of international economics. (Paradoxically, this has become my own principal teaching field in Japan, after a crash course of self-education on my part.) Shortly before his death (in 1970), Viner expressed to a colleague of mine regrets at having discouraged students by the harshness of his grading and classroom manner. Scenting a message meant for myself, I wrote Viner to assure him that I deserved no better grades than he had given me. His reply: "Are you sure? I thought I had given you As." As for classroom manner, some critics claim I have learned more from Viner than I am willing to admit. Certainly the aimless flounderings of "the average student" still lead me to recall Viner's methods of handling such oafs at Chicago half a century or more.
2. Professor Schultz himself had died during the preceding autumn, in an automobile accident on California's Pacific Coast Highway.
3. This is an exaggeration of a sort. What can a teacher do for a student "who does not need teaching?" He can make it worth such a student's while to attend class and stay awake. He can encourage such a student to go on to more advanced levels of study. He can slow such students down when, in their haste, they neglect the fundamentals. And he can be a wall off which such students can bounce ideas, both orally and in writing.
4. My father had got his professional start in America, well before I was born, as research assistant to the great Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi in the study of the trypanosome of syphilis. I recall meeting the Great Man shortly before he left for Africa to study the etiology of yellow fever, which would kill him in 1928. Later I had read his biography (by Gustav Eckstein), an unhelpful introduction to "things Japanese."
5. An exception from the early 1960s: Speaking at Morehead, Minnesota, I mentioned my grandmother's service in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. (She was a nurse, and had headed a military orphanage.) Certain Morehead citizens came to Minneapolis and complained to the President of the University of Minnesota about hiring professors without investigating their grandmothers! President Meredith Wilson of Minnesota did not inform me of this incident; when I found out about it by the grapevine, I apologized to President Wilson for involving him in such a stupid waste of time.
6. I have tried to spell out and support these ideas in "The Liberal Economist in the Directed Economy," Southern Economic Journal (April, 1980).

*Kenan Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Duke University. Professor of International Economics, School of International Politics, Economics and Business, Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo, Japan).

**Posted with permission from Dr. William D. Gunther, Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Omicron Delta Epsilon.