Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

By late afternoon, I was exhausted and emotionally drained. On top of everything else, a bad case of jet lag had set in. Returning to my empty apartment, I felt desperately lonely and abandoned. My promotion seemed meaningless or, even worse, to be a badge of my willingness to sell out. I threw myself onto the bed, overwhelmed with despair. I had been used by Claudine and then discarded. Determined not to give in to my anguish, I shut down my emotions. I lay there on my bed staring at the bare walls for what seemed like hours.

Finally, I managed to pull myself together. I got up, swallowed a beer, and smashed the empty bottle against a table. Then I stared out the window. Looking down a distant street, I thought I saw her walking toward me. I started for the door and then returned to the window for another look. The woman had come closer. I could see that she was attractive, and that her walk was reminiscent of Claudine’s, but it was not Claudine. My heart sank, and my feelings changed from anger and loathing to fear.

An image flashed before me of Claudine flailing, falling in a rain of bullets, assassinated. I shook it off, took a couple Valium, and drank myself to sleep.

The next morning, a call from MAIN’s personnel department woke me from my stupor. Its chief, Paul Mormino, assured me he understood my need for rest, but he urged me to come in that afternoon.

“Good news,” he said. “The best thing for catching up with yourself.”

I obeyed the summons and learned that Bruno had been more than true to his word. I had not only been promoted to Howard’s old job; I had been given the title of Chief Economist and a raise. It did cheer me up a bit.

I took the afternoon off and wandered down along the Charles River with a quart of beer. As I sat there, watching the sailboats and nursing combined jet lag and vicious hangover, I convinced myself that Claudine had done her job and had moved on to her next assignment. She had always emphasized the need for secrecy. She would call me. Mormino had been right. My jet lag—and my anxiety—dissipated.

During the next weeks, I tried to put all thoughts of Claudine aside. I focused on writing my report on the Indonesian economy and on revising Howard’s load forecasts. I came up with the type of study my bosses wanted to see: a growth in electric demand averaging 19 percent per annum for twelve years after the new system was completed, tapering down to 17 percent for eight more years, and then holding at 15 percent for the remainder of the twenty-five-year projection.

I presented my conclusions at formal meetings with the international lending agencies. Their teams of experts questioned me extensively and mercilessly. By then, my emotions had turned into a sort of grim determination, not unlike those that had driven me to excel rather than to rebel during my prep school days. Nonetheless, Claudine’s memory always hovered close. When a sassy young economist out to make a name for himself at the Asian Development Bank grilled me relentlessly for an entire afternoon, I recalled the advice Claudine had given me as we sat in her Beacon Street apartment those many months before.

“Who can see twenty-five years into the future?” she had asked. “Your guess is as good as theirs. Confidence is everything.”

I convinced myself I was an expert, reminding myself that I had experienced more of life in developing countries than many of the men—some of them twice my age—who now sat in judgment of my work. I had lived in the Amazon and had traveled to parts of Java no one else wanted to visit. I had taken a couple of intensive courses aimed at teaching executives the finer points of econometrics, and I told myself that I was part of the new breed of statistically oriented, econometric-worshipping whiz kids that appealed to Robert McNamara, the buttoned-down president of the World Bank, former president of Ford Motor Company, and John Kennedy’s secretary of defense. Here was a man who had built his reputation on numbers, on probability theory, on mathematical models, and—I suspected— on the bravado of a very large ego.

I tried to emulate both McNamara and my boss, Bruno. I adopted manners of speech that imitated the former, and I took to walking with the swagger of the latter, attaché case swinging at my side. Looking back, I have to wonder at my gall. In truth, my expertise was extremely limited, but what I lacked in training and knowledge I made up for in audacity.

And it worked. Eventually the team of experts stamped my reports with their seals of approval.

During the ensuing months, I attended meetings in Tehran, Caracas, Guatemala City, London, Vienna, and Washington, DC. I met famous personalities, including the shah of Iran, the former presidents of several countries, and Robert McNamara himself. Like prep school, it was a world of men. I was amazed at how my new title and the accounts of my recent successes before the international lending agencies affected other people’s attitudes toward me.