economic issues even though I had a press pass to the most spectacular extravaganza of economics in this century. It was the 1970s, and the economy was changing almost as often as bed partners. The Great Depression may have been more dramatic, but it was a one- trick pony. In the ’70s, globalization suddenly included the other three-quarters of the globe. The places that used to make our windup toys were making our automobiles. Everything was being imported—except oil, which had hitherto been given away free with a windshield wash and a set of highball glasses at most brand-name gas stations. Then, one day, you couldn’t buy oil for money. Not that there wasn’t plenty of money around in the ’70s. It just didn’t happen to be worth anything. We had a previously unimaginable combination of fever inflation and hypothermia business slump. You could make more money buying Treasury bills than you could make breaking into the Treasury. The gold standard disappeared from the scene. Maybe it joined a cult. International currency-exchange rates were determined with mood rings. The most powerful nations in the world had, at their helms, an amazing collection of economic nincompoops—Nixon, Carter, Mao, Harold Wilson, Georges Pompidou, Leonid Brezhnev. And the electronic-media revolution was under way so that bad ideas about economics were spreading around the world at neural speed. I dozed through it. And I was covering politics, too. Even I realized that money was to politicians what the eucalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter, and something to crap on. I made a few of the normal journalistic squeaks about greed and self-interest, and let the thing slide. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when I’d been a foreign correspondent for ten years, that I finally noticed economics. I noticed that in a lot of places I went, there wasn’t anything you’d call an economy. And I didn’t know why. Many of these countries seemed to have everything—except food, water, shelter, and something to crap on. I decided to go back to the Econ texts I’d finessed in college and figure things out. And my beatnik loathing returned full-blown. Except this time it wasn’t the business majors I despised; it was the authors of the books they’d had to study. It turns out that the Econ professors were economic idiots, too. Looking into a college textbook as an adult is a shock (and a vivid reminder of why we were so glad to get out of school). The prose style is at once puerile
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