Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Economist, writer, academic, and former US Ambassador, best known for his influential books on economics.
On the island
Eight records
The Glendorel Highland Pipe Band
My family come from that part of Scotland. My great great grandfather was born along the shores of the Crudden Canal.
Well, the happiest among the happiest years of my life were spent at Berkeley.
Well, I suppose we should defer in some musical way to my university, where I've been for nearly fifty years to Harvard.
Well, I've had two occasions when I've been deeply involved with this. One during the Depression years and of course, in the times when I've been occupied with the problems of the poor countries...
Well, let us go on from the contemplation of the poverty of the early days of the New Deal and of the rural South to something better, and to one that to this day, speaking as a Democrat, one can't go to a political meeting without hearing.
Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'Favourite
This had great meaning for all of my generation. It was from the great age of musicals in New York...
...one that is marvelously evocative of the two campaigns in the nineteen fifties of Adley Stevenson and which still comes up as a Democratic theme song.
I suppose I picked that out partly because the conductor is a friend of mine... partly because I represent one of the most unsuccessful episodes in his career.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:39Could you endure loneliness for a long time?
The whole idea doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm not especially gregarious. I can get along with my own dismal personality for a little while. But I would hate to endure it for any length of time.
Presenter asks
1:15How did you set about choosing just eight records?
Well, I had to listen at some length to my wife because she thought some of my selections first selections were rather sordid... If I don't take it the first time, then she repeats it. So this is a family choice... I picked out things which I've enjoyed and which had some meaning for some part of my long past life.
Presenter asks
3:41You were brought up as a farmer's lad in Western Ontario, but you weren't really happy in that life?
I was incredibly happy to get away from the repetitive, tedious, and no doubt very healthy life of a Canadian farm... I developed at a very early age a very deep aversion to manual labor.
The keepsakes
The luxury
I would take my old electric typewriter to which I become deeply attached my closest association with any inanimate object.
Presenter asks
Which President has most carefully worked over your speeches and made them his own?
the man who concerned himself most meticulously with the speeches that were given to him was Adley Stevenson. And I became so much in the tune of Adley Stevenson's speech making that to this day when I write a speech for myself, it has the same balanced sentences and the same resonance as the Stevenson speeches.
Presenter asks
13:27Which of the Nazi leaders did you interrogate yourself?
In interrogation teams, most of them. Goering, Keitel, Jodel. Uh ribbon trough. And of course the most important of all, Albert Speer, some of the lesser ones like Funk, but at one time or another in the spring and summer of nineteen forty five, I was engaged in the interrogations of of all of them of any significance.
Presenter asks
25:41Are we now on the road to recovery?
I wouldn't be optimistic about the economic prospect either under President Reagan or Prime Minister Thatcher. I have long felt that the old and I would even say archaic conviction that you can solve problems by monetary policy. and that there is constructive action in cutting services, public services including those for the poor, that those things do not work.
“I made it from the Ontario Agricultural College as a student to the faculty of Harvard in three years. I always considered that my most rapid movement. And I look back on that exercise in egregious upward mobility with some pride.”
“I write. Put it aside for a day or two. Discover how appalling it is, literally how appalling I work it over. And then I revise it and then I restructure it. And on the fifth revision, it begins to seem to me tolerable. And I've said many times that it's in the fifth revision that I put in that note of spontaneity that my critics all comment on.”
“I do not believe that it is possible to run a modern economy without a strong affirmative incomes and price policy, that this is the the natural consequence of an economy of large corporations and strong unions and of a declining market power.”