Former Chilean President Piñera

Memories of My Lifetime Friend

Sebastian – Precious Memories

My economics PhD class had 25 or so members. One was from Brazil, one from India, one from Iran, one from Mexico, one from Ireland, one from England, one from France, one from Italy, one from Israel, and one from Canada. The rest, with one exception, were from the States.

The exception, indeed, the exceptional exception, was from Chile. I met him on the first day of class. We were inseparable for the rest of grad school. I appreciated Sebástian on many levels. He was brilliant, fun, funny, serious, sharp tongued, witty, worldly, savy, confident, and playfully arrogant – all rolled up into one. He was also endowed with incredible economic intuition, which is the sine qua non for being a great economist, whether in academia or the business world.

Sebastian knew Harvard had made a smart move in accepting him. I was convinced Harvard had made a clerical error in accepting me. But I kept that to myself. To cross verbal swords with Sebastian, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, one had to stand one’s ground. Otherwise, his feigned air of superiority would find no match, eliminating all the fun in the game.

I finally got the best of him when we took our first theory exam. We were walking from the economics department through Harvard Yard, probably to grab a beer, and he asked,

“Do you know who got the top score in the theory exam?”

I said, “No. I don’t know. Have they posted the grades?”

Sebástian said, “Yes, they posted the grades. But I just can’t understand something.”

I said, “Gee, they posted the grades.”

“Yes, they posted the grades. But there’s something that makes no sense.”

“Well, did you look at the posted grades?”

“Yes, I looked.”

“Ok, they posted the grades and you looked at the grades.”

“I looked and It’s very strange. No one will believe it.”

“Gee, they posted the grades and they showed something unbelievable?”

“Exactly.”

“Did you check if I passed?”

A forever minute went by.

“Yes, you passed.”

“Wow, that’s a huge relief.”

“Did you pass?”

“Yes, I passed.”

“Well, that’s great, we both passed. So, what can’t you understand?”

“I didn’t get the top grade.”

“Well, you passed. That’s a big deal. How well did you do?”

“I got the second-best grade.”

“Fantásticoso. So, what can’t you understand? Why do you have this tortured look?”

“I can’t understand how you beat me.”

At this point, I grinned, put my arm around Sebastian’s shoulders and said, “Sebastian, let me explain. You’re from a developing country. English is your second language. You’ve only been here a couple months. You’re surely suffering culture shock. Give it time. There’s nothing terrible about winning silver.”

This was the only time I experienced Sebastian unable to muster a response. For my part, I had been too scared to check the grades. I was sure I had failed the test and would be booted the next week along with a message that they’d discovered their admissions error.

Anyway, this was the nature of our repartee.

Then winter break arrived. Sebastian hopped on the first plane to Chile. He returned with the most beautiful woman the world had yet produced – his Chica. Her beauty was far beyond skin deep. It emanated from her soul. She was only 19 but became a real sister to a large number of our almost all male classmates, particularly me.

Years later, Sebastian told me he had wanted to get married right away to get Chica out of Chile. He correctly sensed that things were about to turn violent.

Sebástian and Chica were deeply in love. But they were forever verbally jousting to everyone’s amusement, particularly theirs. Chica gave far better than she got. In the process, she introduced me to many interesting Spanish expressions.

Sebastian and I had decided to write a paper together – the first for both of us. For months we huddled over equations scattered on their small apartment’s small kitchen table. The paper was about the internal slave trade, tariffs, and whether slavery’s expansion was economically critical to the South as Southern politicians claimed at the time. We showed it wasn’t.

Anyway, the paper was quickly accepted at the top economics history journal. Years later, Sebastian shared a letter with me that he’d sent introducing himself to the President of Harvard. There was a long list of accomplishments including his then position as President of Chile. I’d asked Sebastian to speak at Boston University, but he also wanted to speak at Harvard. So, he wrote Harvard’s President to make the request. The list of accomplishments included our decades-old Journal of Economic History paper. I’ve always wondered about its inclusion. Did Sebastian want to signal his academic roots to the Harvard President or did he think this was one of the major achievements of his career? Maybe it was, in his mind, comparable to owning the nation’s airline.

I should have asked. I should also have asked Sebastian why he failed to mention, in his letter, his winning silver medal in our first theory exam! That was, by the way, the last time, to my knowledge, that Sebastian scored second in any exam.

While we worked on economics – not just on our paper, but as study partners and research assistants for Martin Feldstein, we spent many a dinner discussing the world at large, particular Chilean politics. Once Menena arrived, she wanted in on the conversation – full time. Both Chica and Sebastian were slightly, actually fully obsessed with Menena who, at six months, had them wrapped around her finger.

At this point, we were spending the summer in D.C. – Sebastian at the IMF, me at the FED. One Saturday, I insisted they needed a break and to let me babysit. Six hours of lobbying with Chica proved successful. They left me to watch Menena and headed off to the movies. But a half hour later they were back with take-out Chinese.

For me, my grad school days with Chica and Sebastian was straight out of a Truffeau movie. But everyone in the class was enchanted by them. Yes, they were strikingly beautiful. Yes, they were amazingly outgoing. But they also were people with an inner core. They didn’t talk about themselves. They talked about you, about the world, and about what needed to be fixed.

Their apartment, small as it was, was a Mecca for Latin American students throughout Boston. The parties could get very political. I recall the night of the coup in Chile. It seemed that every Chilean student in Boston was stuffed in Sebastian and Chica’s apartment. I was the only Gringo.

The debate got very heated – with a number of very right-wing students supporting Pinochet. Sebastian was unusually quiet and terribly sad. At the end of the evening, he told everyone what he thought – which everyone had been waiting to hear. He expressed his strong opposition to what had happened. He recognized the economic problems with the socialist agenda, but he made crystal clear that democracy not dictatorship was the way forward.

As I think of the 30 plus Chileans – all waiting to hear from Sebastian, it should have been clear to me that he was would someday make an enormous and permanent difference to Chile and its democracy.

After only three years, Sebástian received his PhD diploma and took his family back to Chile. This was the beginning of phase two of our relationship. I visited Chile or they’d come to the States or we’d just call and, later, email, txt, and swap pictures. In Sebastian’s first term as President, my friend, Felipe Lorraine, then Finance Minister, and I organized, each fall, a high-level conference of economists that was open to the public. This was preceded by extensive economic policy meetings with Felipe and his outstanding staff. Then we’d all sit down with the President and give him our suggestions. The list of academics from abroad attending those meetings constitutes a Who’s Who of Nobel Laureates and other top economists.  

I’m devastated by the loss of my lifelong dear friend. He was on my podcast a few weeks back together with Domingo Cavallo, former Economics Minister of Argentina. As you can watch here, we discussed not just Argentine economic policy, but the troubled prospects for ongoing economic development in Latin America. Sebastian was, as ever, dazzling and incisive. He also indicated his desire to run for a third term if he could procure Chica’s consent. He wasn’t driven by power. He was driven by what he viewed as his God-given mission – to bring hope, prosperity, and equity to the country he loved, while caring for his real treasures – his Chica and his marvelous children and grandchildren.  

Chileans have lost a guiding light to the promised economic land – one prosperous enough to lift all boats and deliver a full measure of social justice. They have lost their friend, their brother, their father, and their son. Let us pray, as Sebastian would pray, that his tragic death provides a national turning point – one in which Chileans move from division to unity and, at long last, join hands to achieve the country’s shared economic and social vision and, above all else, to love one another.