Peter Diamond

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 ...

In my high school days, I worked at a Dairy Queen near my home. The owner was very peculiar, and almost always scheduled the same two people together, forming four groups of two. For the purpose of anonymity, I'll refer to my partner as Jake. The owner spent a lot of time out of the store, and would compensate for his complete lack of monitoring and assistance by implementing extremely thorough random inspections. If anything was even slightly amiss at the store, we'd receive a very stern talking to and a threat to keep our pay. I now know that that's illegal, but at the time Jake and I took that threat very seriously. The point is that we had to be extremely careful when it came to maintaining the store. With only two workers in the store a majority of the time, one person would handle the in-store customers and the register, and a less lucky person would handle the drive-thru. During one particularly slow summer midday shift, I take off the headset and tell Jake that ...

During my Freshman year and most of my Sophomore year, I was part of a music RSO which will henceforth be referred to under the pseudonym 'Rockappella'. For some background, this group was composed of a tight-nit group of arts students eager to entertain both strangers and each other. It had a very simple structure, with merely a president (who was referred to as "Benevolent Leader", as per Rockappella tradition) and a treasurer (nicknamed "Dollars" - also tradition), the only two positions an RSO is required to have. The group was very self-contained, and all decisions made regarding Rockappella's policies were put to a simple majority vote and everyone liked it that way, as we all feared that any actual power structure would lead to chaos. We did, however, coordinate with the network of the dozens of other choirs, bands, and a cappella groups on campus, so as not to set conflicting performance dates or reserve the same space. Without going into too muc...

Peter Diamond was born on April 29th, 1940 in New York City. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for his work in the fields of labor economics and social security, and more recently for being a Nobel Laureate. Also, as a fun fact, he once served as a professor to recent Fed chairman Ben Bernake. Over the course of his career, Diamond served on various economics and econ-adjacent boards and committees, including the Econometric Society, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Economic Association. In 2010, Peter Diamond was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (alongside Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides). Their theory regarded how government policy can effect various market inefficiencies, specifically in the housing market. This was especially important as the effects of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis were still being felt in America....

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