I had enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires in March, 1960. The curriculum included courses in accounting, law, and calculus. With those behind me, I took the introduction to Economics and was sure to pass the oral exam because I had spent the whole, long summer vacation working through R. G. D. Allen's Mathematics for Economists. However, I failed on the first attempt because Leopoldo Portnoy, one of the three examiners, only wanted to hear about the Marxian Theory of Value.

The Institute in the title had been founded and was directed by Prof. Dr. Julio H. G. Olivera, who taught the second-year Money and Banking course, a sieve through which hardly anybody could pass. While registered for the course in 1962, Olivera asked me to join his Institute as a research assistant. Senior research assistants were Miguel Sidrausky and Morris Teubal, who soon left with Ford Foundation scholarships for study at the University of Chicago.

My assignments were to assist in a study of the demand for money by Manuel Fernández López and general research assistance, including translations to Spanish of several journal articles in English and German. One day, as John R. Hicks was visiting Olivera, the latter came to my desk with a clipping from the Argentinisches Tageblatt to request, on behalf of Mr. Hicks, a translation from German to English of an article written by Roberto Alemann. That was finished while Mr. Hicks was still in Olivera's office...

A volunteer job was to organize field trips for seminar participants. The Agricultural Economics Seminar was given by Professor Stewart Joy from England, for whom I organized two field trips to farms, one a dairy farm near La Luisa in the Province of Buenos Aires, the other a grain farm at Los Surgentes, in the Province of Córdoba. That could be done thanks to contacts with the Faculty of Agronomy, where Roderick Dalziel, one of its students, had often included me in Professor José Molina's field trips. The Professor had developed farming methods that today might be praised as "organic" and led farmers' groups (Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola) that implemented his methods co-operatively.

The work of Fernández López was completed in 1964. Our paper was presented at the very first annual convention of Argentine economists held at Río Tercero in September of 1964. That was a time when computers were a rare novelty. Our computations were contracted out to the Faculty of Mathematics, to be done on their UNIVAC. The results were expected mañana, that was after the convention had started and the two discussants had prepared their comments with some annoyance about the incomplete paper. I stayed behind, picked up the results, and rushed them to Río Tercero just in time for the presentation.

My last act at the Institute was to submit for publication a review of transport plans where it was stated that the demand side had been omitted by the domestic and foreign technical experts involved, and showed some of the unpublished data kept in the railway's administration of a formal rationing system. That sparked a controversy with Manuel A. Solanet of the Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Económico in the pages of Desarrollo Económico.

The work on demand for railway transport was continued at the University of Chicago, to which I got by sheer good luck. Adolfo Canitrot, who succeeded Olivera when the latter was elected rector of the University of Buenos Aires, kindly recommended me to Richard Blackhurst. Professor Blackhurst had come over the Andes from Chile needing to fill a 10-person quota with candidates for scholarships tenable at Chicago. After his selection of Ana María Claramunt at Mendoza, Norberto Belocercovsky and I were two lucky ones chosen in Buenos Aires.