On Dr. Hla Myint--another excerpt from IER att edition --edited by me--

Excerpt from Let the Shit Fly with the Flowers--an alt-edition--essays about IER.

This excerpt is by Daw Khin Khin Thein--Don't be fooled by her honesty about her grades--She went to LSE, and I have known people who failed the entrance exams there.  She received her Masters there.

I consider KKT one of the most insightful people I have ever met.

Here she talks about her own mentor Dr. Hla Myint--

"While paying obeisance to all my former teachers irrespective of subject studied, I will dwell more on those teachers who were leading lights in my student life:
 First and foremost, there was Saya U Hla Myint who largely shaped my studies. 
An icon of development economics and welfare economics since well before he was  internationally hailed, he advised Southeast Asian economies, then rife with import-substitution strategies, to adopt export-orientation strategies of development.


Dr. Hla Myint served in Burma, after his post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics, as economics professor at the University of Rangoon from 1945 to 1952, and again as rector from 1958 to 1962.   
He introduced a more liberal curriculum for honors Economics at the Social Science Institute under the University of Rangoon, enabling students to have a year’s extra study of a Humanities subject such as History or Political Science, while specializing in  Economics. 
 An idealist and pioneer for quality education, he told us honors students that he did not want to be known as a teacher of mediocrities. I hope I at least barely escaped this categorization, getting once a (C+), once (B-), but finally an (A) for an essay on the concept and derivation of the efficiency locus in production, supplementing  groundwork in the standard textbooks of Stigler, Benham etc. with greater in-depth knowledge from relevant books and journals from the Institute library. Presumably this also was what Saya wanted : self reliance.
He told me to read out my essay to my classmates, two newly appointed tutors.
Often also, it was my turn to explain something Saya asked me to, on the seminar-room blackboard."

Khin Khin Thein.