Princeton and Retirement, 1963–91

Traumatized and exhausted by the experiences described in previous chapters, Lewis was profoundly relieved to receive Princeton’s offer of employment. It was to set his life on a different course. No longer would he try to ‘make people do what they did not want to do’. He was done with consultancy – or certainly with the kinds of consultancy that involved these kinds of stress. He was done with trying to ‘make a difference’, in the sense of directly seeking to change the actions of policymakers in the interests of the world’s poor. Rather, he was going to do the job he did best, being an economics professor, in an environment as far removed as possible from the world of telegrams and anger with which he had wrestled since his Colonial Office days.