I sometimes fear politicians encourage tensions around race so the poor will not make common cause across racial divisions. My courses at Harvard, which were meant to be at the graduate level, covered the same ground as those I had completed at Cambridge four years earlier. This seemed a total waste of time. One day, walking back to the decent apartment we had finally found, I had a sudden insight. The lessons that Richard Goodwin had tried to teach me while I was at Cambridge finally clicked.
Economists claim that their discipline is value-free and applicable to all sorts of cultures.
It is argued that rich and poor countries operate according to the same dynamics. This would seem ridiculous to anybody but an economist. It is, however, an article of faith for the economics profession. It was this conclusion I suddenly saw as false, for I recognized that the way people in the Western world had been manipulated to see consumption and jobs as central to their lives was critical to Western socioeconomic structures. One of the issues which has always interested economists is how people would react if they were able to earn more money in less time.