A day in the life of Prof. Tinkwiddle

Short Story for https://substack.com/@robertreich

A Ph.D. this is a degree that shows you can write complexly so that you have a chance to write simply. This he learned the very hardest of ways. A couple of years after getting his Ph.D. with his dissertation he was in a very posh neighborhood at a very trendy location enjoying his time at a party that was meant to celebrate the new PhD’s. he looked this way over the white built-in bookshelves and there he saw the cover of his dissertation. He stood on his tip toes and reached for it when the host came by and shook his head. This caused a consternation on his face which he did not hide but was posed to be book off of the second highest shelf showed it to him and then opened. Within the binding was not his dissertation but an alarm that would be set off if anything on the shelf was disturbed.

It then occurred to him that his dissertation was so verbose and ornate that no one was going to read it. Internally he had a pit in his stomach but also decided that hideous dissertation-like books were not the way to go. He promised to write more simply and do much more in the way of explaining to average people how they were being lied to by people who spoke “Economese”-  that dialect which sounds like English but has the reverse effect of proving to the average people that they should give of money to be happy with poverty.

Now the dissertation was part of this process, but it was aimed at economists, who were the people who were most prevalent in phrasing matters in this language. He then determined in his mind and his heart that this would not be his problem. Of course, there were other problems that he would partake in, but simply not like that. Years later he would hear a comedian doing a skit on “Not Like That” and setting it in his fictional world of Lake Wobegon.

Then one summer he applied for a conference in Chicago. This was to be an excursion to the other side, the black arts of giving the rich people money and hoping it would all work out. The first day of the conference was an ephemera until the large attendees arrived late in the day. Then at the soirée after the lectures, he ran into to person whom he knew by reputation. He felt sorry for him because he was the son of one of the favorites in economics, and did not have a single good idea in economics. He had many little ideas, and if he had been a nobody from nowhere would have made himself a great reputation, but unfortunately he was somewhat from somewhere, and that meant he was compared to his great father below. Naturally when you are another produces a single great book which even people on the other side, the result in reputational terms is decidedly negative.

So, he sat looking up sloshing around his club soda trying to think of how to start and then and a conversation with someone who you must professionally like but internally dislike. It was not an easy answer, and he then realized that this capacity to build start, and stop the conversation is one of the things that makes a person truly great. This was because he needed to send the signal to the other person that he was not worth your time but had no marks in quotable words. Thus, he let his opponent make the first move, it was probably not the best option but he knew that he was unskilled at this tête-à-tête.

“So how has your dissertation then received?” he looked up at his opponent and wondered if he somehow held stock in the company that pervaded the alarm. Probably, it was a publicly traded company.

“It hasn’t gotten the best response. But then…”

Completing the sentence his opponent said, “Labor economics is not the most desirable field.”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you slightly shift fields?”

“To what?”

“My colleague published a paper about our US bonds really wealth. I think that that is more the kind of thing that will get attention.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The government wants to tax their way out of their predicament.”

“And you think that being antitax is a sound position?”

“I think you get a great deal more leverage from the corporations.”

He flushed but then got out: “I don’t think that my interests lie in that area.”

“Suit yourself, you know where to get to me. You could be read with a top paper.” Since his opponent was on the University of Chicago campus it would be no problem at all. He nodded and then went back to chatting other people up just in case he wanted to have a different venue. But Chicago was probably not going to be the answer.

He saw what was going on. He was being seduced into looking at wealth and the taxes upon wealth and finding inconsistencies between the two. It also meant that working people would probably bear the brunt of any policy changes.  He felt like his entire head was being consumed by Cthulhu and his economics department.

-

Then one day, much much later, in New York at the last bastion of pastrami sandwiches, he took a bite out of the pastrami on rye sandwich and recounted the latest adventure in labor economics, which was very dry and needed some sort of spice to make it worth publishing The Paper of Record. Is acquaintance also an economist on the left and of the spectrum, but one who had a particular talent for balancing the competing edges? In short, he was practical.

His acquaintance stopped him in the middle and asked: “Remember that time when you were going to conferences? Why didn’t you listen to what the freshwater economists were offering?”

“When I was going to conferences, my salary was trivial and I might get bought for pennies on the dollar.”

“I don’t think that your price was all that much more.”

“Yes, but I kept my principles.”

“It would not have been hard to listen.”

He then grunted. It was a mournful grunt of quasi-despair. “The problem is that I knew my price, and it was extremely trivial.”

His acquaintance raised an eyebrow.

“I was sure that if I listened, I would be bought.”

“The money?”

“To be read is the most precious thing for anyone who spins his mind over the same ground.”

They completed the pastrami on rye with coleslaw without making another sound.