Curious Chuck
1. Should health care be a right in America? If yes, proceed to question 2. If no, proceed to question 1a. Please note that the Wall Street Journal supports universal health care coverage (at least in principle, although their tactics for getting there are unclear).
1a. Should emergency room coverage be provided to individuals without health insurance? If yes, you believe health care is a right, and you may proceed to question 2. If no, proceed to question 1b. Read more…
Success through failure: Final recap
We’ve just finished our final class in the seminar and the good news is that I’m glad that I took the course. With the help of the professor’s final recap, I’ve distilled some of the more interesting topics of the last week into a list of takeaways that are important to keep in mind when considering risky ventures. There’s good stuff there, but at the end of the day it’s the stories of our guest speakers that will stick with me and solidify why these axioms are true. Because of that, the first three days of seminar, when we had a fair amount of guests with experiential credibility were great, but the last two days, where we waxed poetically about the theory and studied cases through an academic distance, did not light my fire. I suppose that’s a good thing to learn in and of itself especially since at one point I had considered academia as a profession. But I digress.
Success through Failure: Themes after Day 2
I’m currently taking a week-long intensive seminar entitled “Success Through Failure”. In it, we have leaders from the business world (and of course HBS grads) come in and talk to us about times that they failed and how they used that to springboard to the current success that they have. There’s a couple themes that have come up repeatedly so thought I’d use this post to share those.
An Intellectual Response
Thank you, Luke, for the excuse to take a break from cover letters! I’m appalled by Sowell’s piece. I’d be amused by a Stanford Hoover fellow with Harvard degree and a Chicago Economics Ph.D spewing anti-intellectualism if that sort of stuff didn’t tend to get violent and oppressive. Read about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Stalin in the USSR or the Islamic Revolution in Iran if you want to know how quickly anti-intellectualism can get out of hand. Here are a few criticisms – I promise to avoid the too-easy ad hominem ones and let Sowell’s alarming hypocrisy slide from here on. Read more…
Intellectuals: making life worse?
Thomas Sowell has an editorial in the Washington Times this weekend entitled “Intellectual or pathological?: Brilliant thinkers often make things worse”. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/06/there-has-probably-never-been-an-era-in-history-wh/ . To be honest, this is a fascinating concept to me especially given my academic background and then my most recent job in consulting. In both of these fields, the idea is king and implementation is often left at the wayside or only paid lip service to. The concept here also has a fair amount of relevance given the most recent discussions that I’ve been a part of here on Inactionable, namely those surrounding John Galt and Obama.
Musings from New Orleans
I’m down here in New Orleans with 40-something other HBS students as part of a trip they’ve done for 4 years [at this point in my first draft I had a clause on this sentence that basically said "to aid in the recovery effort"; but honestly, if I were to have come here with no preconceived notions, I'm not entirely convinced I would have needed to qualify it in this way]. We’re here working in volunteer consulting teams with 8 different non-profit organizations that are each involved in the reconstruction and redevelopment of New Orleans.
But, beyond the “re___” [<-- insert word of choice here] of this town (and by the way, this is a seriously cool and intensely unique city that you should come to see for yourself), I have come across some observations/thoughts/judgments/conclusions that are worth documenting. Keep in mind that these are only my interpretations of what I have seen in a limited amount of time: Read more…
A Concise Guide to Macro: Quick Impressions
Welcome to a five-part (or so) series of posts! I was really excited to see A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics on our J-Term reading list. As you can probably already tell from the blog, this is the part of our coursework that I care the most about. I read the book on a long flight and have more than a few things to say.
My quick impression: this is a fantastic macro book. For better or worse (I’ll say better, given the title), it is incredibly concise. I think Moss hits on the important big ideas (output, money, inflation, expectations) and includes a healthy dose of skepticism in our ability to apply those ideas successfully. There is no more important passage than the one at the end of the book: Read more…
Specialization and Foodies
Humanity owes its quality of living to specialization. The idea is incredibly simple: whoever does a task best can do that task for more than just himself. The best shoemaker in town can make shoes for everyone. The best strawberry grower can grow everyone’s strawberries. If everyone in the town specializes in the task where they enjoy a comparative advantage, the town can do better with the same resources. Think about what your life would look like without specialization and trade … you’d be wearing whatever clothes you could create with your own hands. You’d be living under the best roof you were able to build. You’d be eating whatever you grew, gathered or killed. I know that sounds romantic to some people, but I’ll pass. Read more…
Obama: A leader without a cause
With the current discussion on who John Galt is fresh in my mind, I ran across the following Washington Post article this morning (“Barack Obama: A leader without a cause”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010402720.html). It strikes me that the very thing that we’re discussing with John Galt (who in fact is he?), would be an incredibly difficult discussion to close out if you replaced Galt with Obama. Just who is he?
Self-Interest: John Galt is…not most humans
I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, but I’ve studied a bit of Ayn Rand, or really mostly what other people have studied of her and distilled into a philosophy. The bedrock is that people should or presumably will act in their own self-interest, but then display individual moral fortitude toward the rights of others’ self-interest. The problem with this is twofold:
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