I have been proud of my inclination toward brevity ever since my youth. The bright need just a few words to get the point, or so I have argued tirelessly since the launch of my Residua forty-four years ago (“Intelligenti pauca,” November 8, 1976). It is thus far from surprising that my doctoral thesis was among the shortest on record at the time, and I defended it in 1975, a year before I started my writing project.[1] As I like to boast to all and sundry, it contains no more than fifty-eight typewritten pages, of which the last five are tables stuffed with data. Which is why the thesis minus the tables got published as a scholarly paper a couple of years later.[2] On my walk around Motovun a short while ago, I remembered that magical number. Yes, fifty-eight! As soon as I returned home, I searched for it in my magnum opus. To my amazement, I found it mentioned only in a dream recorded seven years ago, in which my doctoral thesis counts thousands upon thousands of pages, just like my book of books (“The Bookshelf,” March 21, 2012). For all my love of bragging about my penchant for brevity, I fail myself way too often. Brevity is my forte, and it should be celebrated with gusto. As well as clarity. Whence this belated attempt to make things right. Behold, a doctoral thesis at MIT, of all places, on fifty-eight typewritten pages that appeared in print on twenty-three pages only!

Footnotes

1. Bon, R., “Some Conditions of Macroeconomic Stability of Multiregional Input-Output Models,” Ph.D. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975.

2. Bon, R., “Some Conditions of Macroeconomic Stability of Multiregional Input-Output Models,” Economic Analysis, Institute of Economic Sciences, Belgrade, Vol. 16, Nos. 1-2, 1977, pp. 65-87.