ABSTRACT
One fine, crisp, winter’s day, in February, 1981, I received a telephone call from Jean-Paul Fitoussi’s secretary. I was in my office at Peterhouse, having just succeeded my own teacher, mentor and friend, Richard Goodwin, as Director of Studies in Economics at that most ancient of colleges – indeed the oldest in Oxbridge. Fitoussi was in Fiesole, at the European University Institute, having himself succeeded the late Andrew Schonfield as the head of their small economics department. The telephone call contained the serendipitous1 invitation to come for an interview, preceded by a seminar which I was to give on any macroeconomic topic of my choice, for the post of an Assistant Professor. I had also just been offered a Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College and we, my wife and three young children (the last one not quite eight months old), had only moved back to Cambridge less than one year before that fateful telephone call. In spite of this, I agreed, almost with alacrity, to come for the interview.2
