Bill Lear: >In my effort to build this understanding I have begun reading Marcello >De Cecco's book *Money and Empire*, as well as his 1979 article >"Origins of the Post-War Payments System" in the *Cambridge Journal of >Economics*, a copy of the latter I would be glad to share, as I have >it scanned in. > I am very impressed that Bill has the time and energy to put into a research project like this, with his 90 hour per week computer job and his 6 week old baby. Sometimes I say to myself--no offense to anybody on PEN-L--that scholarship is only meaningful if you don't get paid for it. Who cares if you get paid to read De Cecco, if it is part of getting ahead. I am afraid that one of the reasons that there is so little discussion on PEN-L is that most people regard this type of discussion as part of their job and who wants to talk about their job. It would be like me and Bill discussing the merits of Perl versus Apache if we got together in Austin, rather than ecology, socialism and indigenous societies. As we did. Sometimes I think the worst thing about the academy is the tendency it has to dull one's appetite for the very subjects one is professionally involved with. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
