ABSTRACT
During all those busy years, Jean and I had been able to build and hold together our own family. Jean had brought forth two fine sons—Peter in 1958 and Michael in 1960. Their early years were spent in an environment that gave them Jean’s interests in history and architecture and mine in politics, its left varieties in particular. Retrospectively, we were rather unexpectedly successful in hiding our marital difficulties in the late 60s and early 70s (when the boys were from about 7 to 15 years old), and the marks of a happy and busy early life can be seen in their lives today. Both sons benefitted from the very successful gifted program in the San Diego public schools. Jean’s interests were imprinted in Peter very early on. He knew, in response to years of French and English Gothic churches, English parish churches, and early English history, that he wanted to be a historian. To his surprise, he passed the written entrance exams to Oxford, and today, in his 40s he is a fine (and English) historian. Michael did not know early on what he wanted to do—his rationality and unyielding argumentative powers once moved me to suggest that he might want to be a lawyer, which he rejected with some vehemence. He found his interests in economics as an undergraduate. In later years, I realized that his attempt to understand what makes the world work was expressed in his microeconomic interests on the one hand, whereas his concern with economic history (partly out of an interest in political economy) motivated his macroeconomic ones.
