讨论一下关于B school的本质

windboy

i am now really surprised that you were trained in chicago, as your comments sound more like typical wharton grads i have come across, quite a few..than from chicago, where Lucas is the god father for rationalism/expectation...

steve is very smart/renowned micro-economist and i won't argue sth abt some basic stuff from econ101. anyone with decent training in statistics/econometrics will understand my previous comments, which of course involves nothing technicality, which i didn't bother to include. my comments before were more of a methodolgy suggestion, rather going into details of explaining how to set up your regression equations and calibration methods with MCMC or gmm (check it out on Hansen's page if gmm doesn't ring a bell or google gibbs sampling algorithm if you don't understand MCMC.)

i made my comments before as some of the comments on this thread were becoming too philosophical, with too good rethorics to have much practical relevance.. anyway, won't waste too much time as still lots of work to do today even it is saturday, sign...

the bottom line of my suggestion: mba from a top school is sth will highly likely to change your life/career. so don't give it up if you have an offer. it is like a simple trading rule: you will have higher probability of being up while the downside is limited. The risk/return profile of an mba is very good.

cannedpineapple

I thought I was suggesting something very eminently practical, but my thoughts- not to say even anything about my writing, which is even worse- is often unclear, so let me try and distill it to the key questions I am posing.

Can you think of someone for whom the 'risk/return profile of an mba' is not good? Can you think why that someone may be you?

That is all I am asking.

BTW, I agree. I can NEVER live up to the reputation of the many nobel laureates that have once attended Chicago. I can only hope that I do not tarnish their name any further, as I seem to have begun to do already, in your mind. I am also not naive enough to think that I am not a product of Wharton, where I have spent the last two years. After all, I am only one man, who finds himself powerless to be shaped by his environment wherever he goes. In addition I am not as well versed in statistics as you are. It is good that we agree that 'there are statistically sound ways to get to the 'average', but it's PRACTICAL use may be in question because sometimes it is the margin that matters'- a simple fact that everyone else probably learnt in Econ 101, but that I was, I am somewhat ashamed to admit, unable to understand until recently.

Like I said, everyone is different. You are quite clearly smarter than I, particularly in statistics (I have no idea what MCMC or gmm is, and worse, I don't even know who hansen is- in contrast you know all of my Econ 101 ideas). I only hope that you can have patience and pardon my muddling through some of these issues.

I can also only hope that like you one day I understand what I was told, but perhaps have not fully understood the implications of, in Econ 101. For instance I think of simple trading rules... The CAPM, I was told, suggests that to get higher expected return, you need to take on higher risk. Yet the Sharpe Ratio seems to suggest that sometimes you can do 'win-win' trades. These both seem to be simple trading rules, yet to my simple mind, they seem to be contradictory. Applied to an MBA, sometimes it seems to take on higher risk like CAPM might suggest might be to give up taking an MBA. Yet the Sharpe Ratio would suggest that maybe the MBA is the high return/low risk trade that we all want.

I honestly, honestly wish I saw things as clearly as you. Sometimes it makes me so confused that I can't even convince myself, let alone hope to try and answer the questions of others. Which btw is another reason I post on these forums. Perhaps by interacting with others better than myself (like you), I can start to understand things that to others might be 'knowledge 101', but for me seems to be something I can never understand.

Given your busy schedule, with a need to work on Saturday, I do appreciate your willingness to correct. It is the availability of different views on this forum that helps keep everyone informed. Again, I am but a man, who is often found to be wrong. So I do appreciate it when others show me a different path.

Lastly, with regards to my alma mater, I suspect that Robert Lucas may say that he is engaged in a systematic quest for the truth, rather than in a dogmatic reluctance to stray from expectations and rationality. Perhaps in his time, he had found that the quest for the truth led him to need to force others to more adequately consider expectations and rationality. Having succeeded in this, he may then have suggested that times have now changed, and his quest is now to remind us that people are not always rational.

But as you have pointed out, having spent two years at Wharton perhaps I am no longer a very good gauge of what Chicago represents- if I ever was able to claim such a thing in the first place. So I stand willing to be corrected.

Jason

windboy

Lucas is increditble and I had the honor of sitting directly opposite to him once in a seminar at Booth. it was an awe inspiring experience. Las Peter Hansen is an econ professor at Chicago, whom many think is the next most promising candidate for Nobel prize from UChicago, though he was trained in Minnisota. He wrote a famous paper on GMM in 1982, besides his many contributions in finance such as the equity premium puzzle.

I visit this forum and contribute some comments, simply because: 1) I was once also in the shoes of those who are making similar decisions as to whether pursuing MBA/PhD/Masters in the US, and 2) I hope more Chinese will be successful outside China.

I was trying to give a shortcut comment regarding the value/risk of a MBA programe, with some handwaving argument. In terms of robust ways to analyze the issue, CAPM certainly is not the solution: 1) it is a static 1-period model; 2) risk/return profile of doing an mba is not a normal distribution. ICAPM may offer some help, though it is also problem-ladden.

The return distribution of a MBA is highly positively skewed, to my knowledge. it is a good point understanding the subtle difference of statistical features of an individual in the sample/population and the whole sample/popul thereof. However, statistics will become a meaningless subject/tool if this difference is stressed to the extreme. A deeper assumption of any statistical inference is the theory of ergodicity, as we can not make repeated experiments on one individual..anyway, in simple words, we have to look at the 'average' applicant/consumer/client for information, though each is uniquely different from each..

last point I will make is that mba programe won't fundamentally change you. it will only reinforce what you have already had and bring out more of your potentials. so put it in a very naive way: 70% chance that you will be more successful out of a top mba; 25% you will be on par as without an mba; 5% you will lose your investment in mba as your return from it in the first couple of years will be negative.

cannedpineapple

Interesting, I had a different impression, that professors like John List and Steven Levitt, who are leading the charge on behavioural (non-rational) economics, are at the vanguard of new research, a school of economics represented by relatively recent nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman. But I don't even know who Las Peter Hansen is, so this just goes to show how limited my views are.

I too was once in the shoes of those making such decisions. Perhaps you and I are good examples: you think that most can benefit (though not all), I think that most do not benefit (though not all). The difference may come from different perspectives. You start with an assumption: "I have a goal, I know it, and now I want to achieve it..." My assumption is, "I have a goal, but it is very probably wrong. Let me spend more time thinking about it first". A lot of my skepticism is born from watching how a very diverse MBA population very quickly, within a few weeks, settles on looking for certain banking/consulting/pe/vc jobs, whether or not that's what they wanted in the first place. A lot of your confidence, perhaps, is born from seeing these same people later graduate, see that they've made mistakes, and then change jobs- while still benefiting from the MBA.

Again, I appreciate different viewpoints, simply because I am often wrong. Always glad to find people smarter than I. How else can I learn?

Thanks again for your efforts on a Saturday.

BTW, at the risk of shaming my alma mater further, I may surprise you for having graduated from Chicago, but I know in my heart that Chicago made me who I am today. Perhaps we just have a different view of what that means. At Chicago many of my friends were sociologists and english majors: these are subjects in which the school is also top-ranked in the world, and subjects in which experts seldom argue that 'everyone is rational'. Yet economists, sociologists and literature professors not only coexisted but also respect one another at Chicago.

I am honestly a little hurt that you would question my worthiness of claiming allegiance to the school I love so much. But that is your opinion, and you are entitled to it.

cannedpineapple

I am upset, and I've written about it here.

http://forum.chasedream.com/North_American_MBA/thread-429418-5-1.html

Please go ahead and discuss the original topic- it is not my intention to sabotage this. I've been trying to add to it; I just thought this aside has gone on long enough, and should be moved somewhere else. Sorry guys!