I am a victim of what Clifford Geertz once in a small paper called the syndrome of being too busy because busyness carries with it social status. He was right. I don't agree very much with Geertz as I don't agree usually with any anthropologist or ‘Indologs’ (Indoloog, university graduate in the cultures and languages of the Netherlands Indies), but on that point he was right. But I have done some preparation for this interview so perhaps you could bear with me while I talk about the various stages of my economic thinking, even if it turns out to be a rather rambling account. I am not prone to looking back. Indeed, I am generally speaking suspicious of people who have a predisposition to look back; it is so often an exercise in self-justification — you always tend to see yourself as more important than in fact you were. And then there is the nostalgia syndrome; people tend to talk about the good old times but I don't think they were the good times at all. That is my approach and that's why I haven't wanted to write much about myself. Now having said ‘Yes’ to Dr Thee Kian Wie, I am almost forced to look back. But bear in mind these caveats.

When I look back at what I am and what I was, I realise that I belong to the category of economists who are mainly interested in what was once called ‘political economy’. My approach to economics cannot be detached from the political environment in which I grew up and in which I still operate. But now, with the wisdom of hindsight I can clarify my own role. I can't divorce my early training from the political environment in which I grew up. My father was a civil servant in the higher-middle echelons of the Dutch administration so I went to Dutch schools. I remember the trial of Sukarno, and that of Hatta in Rotterdam. I think they both made a great impression on me.