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 ...

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....