As is clear from my title, professor of economics, political science, and public policy at UCLA, I ended up being a multifaceted economist, working not only in economics per se but also in international relations as part of my involvement in political science and public policy issues. Even within economics itself, while most economists work in one or two fields, I work in many, including:

1. Economic theory and mathematical economics

2. Econometrics

3. Health economics

4. Reform of the Russian economy

5. Strategy and arms control

In this essay I would like to explain how this happened, starting from the beginning when I was an undergraduate student at MIT, majoring in mathematics. As I started the junior- and senior-level courses in mathematics, I felt that the material was too abstract, and I was looking for something that was tangible and more connected to the real world. I took a course on twentieth-century economists taught by Elspeth Huxley Rostow, and it was this course that convinced me to become an economist. The course included a few lectures by Elspeth’s husband, Walt W. Rostow, at that time professor of economics at MIT and later to become national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. (They both ended up at the LBJ School of the University of Texas, Austin, and I saw them there many years later when visiting James Galbraith while Elspeth was the dean of the school.)

Introduction

Major terrorist campaigns date back to the Jewish Zealots' struggle against the Roman Empire from 48 AD to 70 AD, the Hindu Thugs' brutal attacks against innocent travelers in India from 600 AD to 1836 AD, and the Assassins' actions against the Christian crusaders in the Middle East from 1090 AD to 1956 AD (Bloom, 2005; Rapoport, 1984). In fact, the Thugs may have murdered more than 800 people a year during their twelve-century existence (Hoffman, 2006, 82–83), making them twice as deadly on an annual basis as the modern era of terrorism (1968–2006). Some form of terrorism has characterized civilization for the last 2,000 years. Each of the two recent globalization periods has been associated with transnational terrorism that has international implications. In the earlier era of globalization starting in 1878 and ending in 1914, the anarchists waged a terrorist campaign that culminated in World War I. More recently, leftists and fundamentalists utilized transnational trrorism to capture headlines during the current era of globalization from the last third of the twentieth century to the present day.

During the modern era of transnational terrorism, terrorists crossed borders and, in some instances, staged incidents in foreign capitals to focus world attention on their cause or grievance.

Introduction

Planning refers to the elaboration of an explicit set of decisions concerning the present and future values of certain choice variables by a decision maker (planner) in order to achieve certain goals. Planning, therefore, involves the determination of a strategy that, in turn, involves decisions on both actions and their timing or pattern of implementation. Planning in this sense is pervasive in the economy, and it is exemplified by national economic planning, corporate capital planning, inventory planning, household expenditure planning, investor portfolio planning, and planning in many other areas, for example, defense planning, development planning, environmental planning, energy planning, and educational planning. Most previous studies have treated the problem of planning in such a particular institutional or sectoral context. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute a general theory of planning that treats certain common features of all these particular forms of planning. These features involve certain basic choices concerning timing and implementation and typically must be chosen in advance of any specific plan. First is the choice of a horizon, that is, the time interval covered by the plan. Second is the choice of a period, that is, the time interval during which the plan remains in effect before it is revised.