ABSTRACT
This paper, and the one that follows, was written in 1986 and delivered at a conference to celebrate the retirement, as will happen if one lives long enough, of one of my young friends. Albert Kervyn de Lettenhove, retiring as professor of economics at the Catholic University of Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, was an academic rather than a bureaucratic colleague. He came to the Department of Economics at MIT for the years 1951-2 and 1952-3, after having escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp, studied and worked in London during the war and immediate postwar, and served on the staff of Gunnar Myrdal and the late Nicholas (subsequently Lord) Kaldor at the Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. At Geneva he met my friend and later colleague, Walt W. Rostow, who helped him arrange to come to MIT. Upon returning to his native Belgium, he had a distinguished career in government planning, in representing his country at international meetings on economic issues, and finally in teaching and consulting, both in Belgium and in Africa.
