Academic • Consultant • Entrepreneur
I have a pretty unhealthy relationship with my phone. I'm not alone, and that’s no surprise: The machines are designed not to make us happy, but to maximize the amount of time we spend on them. And I'm not the first person to complain about how the device sucks you in or how other people …
Continue reading "Your phone doesn’t have to make you crazy–hold on, lemme respond to this text"
How do Presidents make big decisions in a complex, chaotic, ambiguous world? Not how we might expect, says LBJ School historian Jeremi Suri in a forthcoming book about US Presidents. We tend to see presidents as commanding, clear-sighted demigods--especially dead ones whom history has ranked highly. "But the presidents we are writing about are not the presidents that existed," argues Suri. President are compromisers, …
Continue reading "West Winging it: What do presidents and entrepreneurs have in common?"
At a recent house party full of psychology PhDs, I saw something marvelous: an eight-inch tall tattoo of Sigmund Freud, the turn-of-the-twentieth century psychologist--an image whose origin I can't trace, but which the Internet seems to have titled "What is on a man's mind?" The tattoo's owner explained why she liked Freud so much, even …
At the recommendation of Tim Hannigan, winner of Canada's Most Well Read Men Under 40 award, I am currently reading How We Think by John Dewey. It's old--written in 1910--but as Philosophy Ph.D-to-be and my older brother Robert would say, most of the best stuff is. The book argues that the primary role of education, and perhaps by extension the highest …
(Or: Excerpts from a sample PhD application) What does it take to apply successfully to a PhD program? I still have no idea, despite having done it once. Regardless, below is some of what I included in my PhD proposal to the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. This is already out …
This summer I read the 2015 Mother Jones expose of privately run prisons in the United States (thanks Ben Mayer). Two things I learned: 1. Private prisons may be the worst thing going in America, Donald J. Trump included. 2. Private prison stocks are probably included in your retirement fund, as are mine. I asked my Facebook …
Wait, hold on--don't actually watch The Walking Dead. It's terrible. But it is a guilty pleasure for me and for my brother, a PhD student in philosophy and religion. I watch it to get him to explain to me the difference between Rousseau and Hobbes, and to laugh at yankees who fail at Southern accents. Here's …
Continue reading "Want to understand the US election? Watch the Walking Dead"
In the fall of 2014, I put together my first academic syllabus for a course on social entrepreneurship at the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. It consisted primarily of articles from Stanford Social Innovation Review, chapters from Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money by Jed Emerson and Antony Bugg-Levine, …
Continue reading "The Research Gap in Social Entrepreneurship"
Impact investing is a new and growing field in which financial institutions and individuals invest their money not only for financial return, but also for social and environmental impact. The field is in such a state of rapid growth that Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, two central players in this arena, recently described impact investing …
Continue reading "Visualizing the GIIN Impact Investing Network with Neo4j"
The future of PFS,” argue V. Kasturi Rangan and Lisa A. Chase [in The Payoff of Pay For Success], “lies in aligning with impact-seeking investors, not return-seeking investors.” Should it? Or should Pay-For-Success (PFS) designers continue to make an effort to bring return-seeking capital to the table? Based on the principles of the organizational theory …
Continue reading "Response to “The Payoff of Pay-for-Success”"
Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D. 