Peter Diamond

Before we get into how the various choices within a college education affect income risk, there's a big decision that occurs right before that has a huge affect on income risk: the decision to go to college in the first place. Regardless of career path or major or anything, college is EXPENSIVE. By investing money into a college education (or, more likely, taking out student loans to pay for it), you are betting that the salaries open to you as a college graduate are larger enough than what you'd get with a high school education that it outweighs your student debt and the opportunity cost of all the time you're spending at a university instead of working. Now, obviously, everyone taking this class has made the exact same choice for this, but it's definitely important to consider how going to college affects your income risk. If income risk was the primary motivator for everyone in this class, then we can assume, at least for this group of people, that getting a degree r...

In looking back at my four "real" blog posts (discounting the post about my economists and the test post, of course), I haven't really noticed a lot in terms of themes. I like to tell stories, and I definitely like to infuse humor into those stories, but I've really tries to be varied in terms of the experiences and the settings of the blog posts. Outside of primarily involving organizations, there aren't a lot of recurring connections. In terms of class material, however, I've noticed that the topic of management appears in most of them, and not just the one where the prompt specifically asks about it. In Transaction Costs and Organization in the World of Music , I discussed an RSO's free-form management style. Despite having an official president, virtually every single decision was done as a group of equals which had its own pros and cons. In Opportunism in the Workplace , I lamented my former boss's invisibility. In Sale Team Six , the week where...

Illinibucks ™ : the chaotic new currency that UIUC introduced in the year 2017 for the purpose of relieving allocation issues with on-campus services. Immediately, the questions everyone asked were be "what services are these used for?" and "how should I, Peter Diamond, use my Illinibucks™?" and of course "what would this actually affect?" What are they used for? The short answer is: anything that involves priority or queues. The long answer is: look at this list. Registration : Tired of waiting to get your time ticket and register after all the courses you want have already filled up? You can spend Illinibucks™ to shoot right to the front of the line! Don't miss out on all those great classes just because you're a Freshman! Advising : Advising appointments are always (in my experience) on a first-come-first-serve basis. With Illinibucks™ you can bypass this and get advising as soon as you want. This also reduces the amount of time you nee...

During the June between my Sophomore and Junior years here at the University of Illinois, I was hired for a "market research" job. I was told I'd be part of an elite team of young go-getters who set their own goals, excel in person-to-person marketing, are highly self-motivated, and are extremely susceptible to business jargon brainwashing like that. Naturally, as an ignorant student hungry for anything that said "paid internship", I accepted. Now, just to be clear, this was a commission-only door-to-door sales job with a multi-level marketing structure to it. You'd start out on the lowest rung (Future Leader), be assigned to a team led by someone in the second-lowest rung (Leader), and once you proved yourself to be a completely mindless drone who believed 100% in the system (and made a lot of money for the fourth-level employees), you'd be promoted to Leader, where you work for a third level employee (Assistant Manager) and your goal is just to hire ...