I came to Wall Street in 1970 while still finishing my doctoral dissertation for Cambridge University because I knew what I did not want to do. During the summers of 1965 and 1966, on either side of my first year at Cambridge, I had served as an intern for the Senate Finance Committee as LBJ’s triumphant Great Society administration began its catastrophic dissolution. I emerged from the experience permanently immunized against Potomac Fever.

In 1968 and 1969, I had worked nine-to-five in the Public Record Office in London’s Chancery Lane, conducting primary research on the economic policies of the Labour government of 1929–1931. I expected that I would return from Cambridge to pursue an academic career in economics in the United States, so the following Christmas vacation I interviewed my way from my alma mater, Princeton, by way of Yale, to Harvard and MIT just before the academic job market was submerged by the deluge of graduate students whose scholarly ambitions had been intensified by the Vietnam War. In those slack market conditions there was an opportunity available in each school’s Economics department. The results of the interviews were uniformly positive, but each offer of employment came with a common curse that expressed itself in the suggestion that I might be more comfortable in a department of Politics or Government or History rather than Economics.