Fusee

On the perks of tenure.

Alan Krueger begins an article in the biz section of the NYT as follows:

"NOT long ago, I asked my research assistant, Melissa Clark, to track down a passage from "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. Although I expected her to consult the modern edition, she instead requested the original 1776 edition from Princeton's Rare Book Library. The librarian accidentally gave her the fifth edition, published in 1789, and therein she discovered a remarkable signature: George Washington." -

Following this lede, Krueger goes off on Adam Smith and Rothschild's recent book on same, but I was so blown away by the, well, laziness inherent in the cozy system in which the Kruegers of the world have their niches that I had a hard time following. You get your assistant - your assistant - to track down passages in Wealth of Nations? Most of us would simply call it up on the Net - it is on this link - use the find function, then take the book down from our shelves and leaf to the passage for the page number. But of course most of us aren't supplied with assistants we can order about on frivolous tasks, on Princeton's dollar no less. There's a Randy Newman song , My Life is Good, my best friend David loves to quote:
"A couple of week ago
My wife and I
Took a little trip down to
Mexico
Met this young girl there
We brought her back with us
Now she lives with us
In Our Home
She cleans the hallway
She cleans the stair
She cleans the livingroom
She wipes the baby's ass
She drives the kids to school
She does the laundry too
She wrote this song for me
Listen
Yeah"

"She wrote this song for me.." - well, as any indentured slave-slash grad student can tell you, that's almost, uh, the case. And to the Kruegers of the world it is just so obviously normal. Why should he trouble himself to look up passages in an easily available, well known book? He has more important things to do, my God. Krueger so obviously lives in the promised land - and maybe someday, if she is lucky, Ms. Clark will too - she'll have her own Ms. Clark to trot around looking up quotes...