Yesterday afternoon, I was fidgeting at the back of a crowded room, shifting from one foot to another, trying to move the ache from the tired foot to the less tired one. This has been going on for about an hour now. No, make that an hour and a half. Why am I here? In fact, why are all these freaking undergrads here?
Doing your Ph.D. at a smaller university that is known for graduating teachers or corporate guns rather than researchers has its drawbacks. And one of them is the absence of Nobel Prize winners lurking in our hallowed halls. And believe me, our halls are quite hallowed; some of them have been built when your great-great grandpoppa was still a twinkle in your great-great-great grandmomma’s eye (she probably didn’t meet the right fraile at that time). All the phantoms at the University are real ghosts. So it was with great expectation that we welcomed the Phantom of Princeton, Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Now, as I have said, a Nobel Prize winner would cause a great deal of excitement in our little we’re-not-Harvard-but-we-charge-as-much-as-them athenaeum. A Nobel Prize winner who has been played by Russell Crowe in an Academy Award-winning film would cause no less than a sensation. Ergo, plenty of ickle undergrads (with their fancy iPhones taking photos) took most of the seats in the auditorium. And yes, I get to bitch, because I took a whole semester’s worth of graduate level game theory even before I read or saw A Beautiful Mind. Oh, and just for the record, I thought Russell Crowe should have won the acting award for that movie, and not for that clunker-pretending-to-be-a-Roman-epic Gladiator. Though Joaquin Phoenix was so good at being evil…
Ooooh, look at the kitty! Anyway, moving on…
There were a couple of speakers before the main event, both of whom I heartily applauded at the end of their respective speeches. The first one was Professor Dominick Salvatore, a leading international economist, and the chair of the Economics Department at Fordham University. He gave an overview about the current financial crisis, and he made a couple of points that stuck in my mind.
Firstly, the current administration has taken a lot of flak for causing the crisis, but people have to remember that the last Democrat President was the one that let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac run wild to begin with. Let’s put blame where it’s due, shall we?
Secondly, there isn’t going to be a depression. Can you repeat that for me please? THERE ISN’T GOING TO BE A DEPRESSION! Governments and central banks are better equipped now more than ever to stimulate the economy. Unless of course everyone believes everything that the media says. Then we would be in a whole boat load of $#!&@!
The second speaker was Dr. Charles Soludo, the Executive Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He lamented the situation of a lot of developing countries that have worked hard to rebuild their economies, only to see their work washed away by what is seen by many as irresponsible spending habits of the world’s largest economy. In case any of the clueless undergrads are reading this post, yes, Dr. Soludo was taking a potshot at you. And by God, I gave him a standing ovation. Well, I couldn’t give him a sitting one, because I didn’t get there early enough to stake out a seat.
Now for the main event. By the way they all turned out in droves, people must have expected fireworks at the very least. Professor Nash put nearly everyone to sleep with his marathon lecture on “ideal money.” But just because he put everyone to sleep doesn’t mean that he isn’t brilliant. The man, the legend, at eighty years old, is still pretty sharp. His lecture on the evolution of monetary systems and the concept of “ideal money” (which, I understand from his speech, is money/currency that is more stable vis-à-vis inflation shocks. I could be wrong. I was almost asleep by then) is still relevant to the ongoing crisis. Or at least, it could have been relevant if they had let him finish the section on saving behavior. But apparently, there wasn’t enough time, and just when it was just getting interesting…ah well, Professor Nash promised to post a copy of the presentation. (I can’t believe they stopped him! To a student of economics, it’s like CNN cutting off the US President while he was holding a press conference!).
And in spite of the bitching I did earlier, the main reason that I was there was pretty much the same that of those undergrads I was ranting about. I wanted to be in the presence of greatness. I wanted to stand in the shadow of a giant. Maybe listening to him would inspire me to work harder on my dissertation, to take pride in my research, to throw myself body and soul into what would be perceived as my life’s work.
Or not.
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