Academic • Consultant • Entrepreneur
I have an old high school friend whose college admissions essay argued that humans are incapable of altruism. It worked; apparently ivy league admissions staff are a cynical bunch. I think back to my friend's essay when I hear arguments about human nature. In the last few years I've been encouraged by the amount of research suggesting that humans do not, in fact, always …
Continue reading "Can humans be altruistic? Or are we all jerks?"
In our public policy theory class, we began with a discussion about the absence of an overarching theory of public policy. I learned pretty quickly that other social science disciplines--economics perhaps excluded--lack one as well. Why? Three potential reasons: We tend to understand things atomistically/essentially, rather than relationally. Whereas I intuitively understand human behavior as a product of …
Continue reading "That’s all well and good in practice, but how do humans work in theory?"
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"
Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D. 