The Worldly Philosopher Behind The Worldly Philosophers

Peter L. Bernstein The Worldly Philosopher Behind The Worldly Philosophers BOB H EILBRONER AND I BECAM E BEST FRIEN D S AT THE AGE OF ABOUT six. From that point forward, best has only become better. Bob was a worldly philosopher from the start. Let me give just one example. When I was nine or ten years old, my aunt and uncle took me to see a play called Up Pops the Devil. In the course of the story, the female protagonist tells a friend she is pregnant but her husband is unaware of this. I was stunned. My understanding at that point of my life was that procreation was the sole purpose of the act of love. No other motiva­ tions were involved. On the basis of that assumption, how could a wife be pregnant without her husband’s knowledge? I gave the matter a great deal of thought but failed to come up with an explanation. Then I consulted my best friend, who had a worldly response to my conundrum: “Maybe they did it once and forgot about it,” he suggested. As the years went by, Bob and I shared life’s exciting experi­ ences of growing up. Girls, fine art, theater, ballet, literature, food, and drink—we did it all, usually with Bob leading the way. He studied jazz piano—and played with wonderful skill and naturalness—while I studied classical with fingers less nimble than his. Later, we frequently sat together at the piano and improvised four-handed modern music compositions, sometimes lasting as long as an hour. How we wish we had recorded these masterpieces for posterity! social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 419 We received our high school education at the Horace Mann School for Boys in Riverdale.1The school had two great attractions. Most important, it was in walking distance of the Fieldston School, where there were girls. Only slightly less important, we learned a lot, and we learned how to learn and how to take pleasure in learning. I think what mattered most to both of us was the boundless enthusiasm our teach­ ers gave us for the joys of literary creation. Over the many years since then, our writing skills have made a major contribution to our incomes as well as to our enjoyment o f life. We went to Harvard together, and Bob chose economics as a major while I turned to political science. After taking the introduc­ tory economics course as well the introductory course in government, I realized that Bob’s decision had been the right one, and I switched to economics. The subject immediately engulfed both of us, because we were determined to find a way to make the lousy world of the late 1930s into a more hopeful one for the future. Economics was without question the way to go. Our tim ing was perfect. We were taking up the subject at the very moment when macroeconomics was born, providing tools for economists to do something about the “economic problem ” instead of just staring at it and waiting for the frictions to dissolve. Indeed, the Harvard economics faculty was trying to make sense of The General Theory at the same time they were trying teach us what it was all about. None of them had ever encountered anything like it. At first, there were fierce battles between the younger faculty and the older professors. The instructors and assistant professors grabbed Keynes and ran with him, with no compunctions and no qualification. Six of them published a little book, An Economic Program for American Democracy, which dared to declare that deficit financing might be a Good Thing under conditions of less than full employment. The full professors were in two camps. Most rejected outright Keynes’s devas­ tating attack on everything they had learned and taught for many years. A few, notably Alvin Hansen and John Williams, refrained from digging in their heels as deeply as their colleagues but still remained 420 social research unconvinced. For us as students, it was a rare privilege to witness this exciting and stimulating debate. Bob and I were allowed to take the graduate course in money and...