from cambridge to serbia

another wild gamut of a day - i guess this is part 2 - i'll backtrack. liam and chris are at a sox/royals game. i actually have an early evening to myself. am i kicking back? no, i'm blogging. had a nice chat with P at the cambridge commons - she was so glowing about how impressed she is with everything i do/have done - including being a mama in this program - ah, still not sure how to walk this line.

earlier, went to an info session for the phd program. it was discouraging and depressing - i definitely don't want to do the harvard public policy program - too much quant and you have to do quite well - uh, like straight a's - and they definitely tried to talk you out of it - and were very down on midcareer's going for it - the director didn't quite say it like this but it came out like if you've spent this much time in your life not doing research, we won't believe that you really do want to do it. the shor. dir. also tried to talk me out of it - that it's a waste of time and opportunity cost.

so after my chat with the shorenstein director, i walked across the charles river - well, i'm not that saintly - on the bridge, of course. i've never been to that part of town/campus, so it was a nice adventure and break - though ever executing a specific task - to pick up cheap computer software for my laptop that just came in - yahoo! so as you walk south on jfk drive, the magnificent and opulent business school hides behind mature trees to the left hand side. on the right, is the harvard athletic complex, including their football stadium that looks like a cheap roman cathedral. immediately afterwards, i was in the 'hood. definitely the other side of the tracks. bye bye cute cambridge streets and shops, hello low-income housing and boston strip malls. not surprising given our society of contrasts but a good wake-up call for me.

after i walked back, i ran into the guy from serbia who was in my econ class, and the sweet turkish guy. the serbian dude in the class was the most ultra free market proponent i've ever heard - he sounded incredibly naive. i was taken aback, then, when i heard them talk about their experiences at the business school. as k school students we can take classes at the business school, the law school, anywhere at the faculty of arts or sciences or even mit or fletcher at tufts. one student they know had walked out of a class when another student raved about how great it is there are so many poor people so he could get rich. yikes. ok, that's a big he said she said he said, but what was interesting was how serbian dude was so critical of that belief.

he then launched into an incredible and wonderful critique of u.s. boards of directors - corporate governance was a class they were both thinking of taking, but they realized since they weren't richie riches by birth they would never make it to that level, so what's the point? he also gave a seething description of the us aid (after i mentioned the golf war) - and their involvement in serbia with some harvard bus school prof who has some business cluster theory he got some big us aid grant - $25 million - to implement in serbia - which, as the dude pointed out - is basically a monopoly. but rather than give the money to local serbian businesses (the theory is that if three table companies, for example are competing and not doing well that they can pool their resources and make a kick-ass table by one of them specializing in the legs, one in the table top and another in, oh, i don'g know - though, as the dude pointed out it's a oligopoly, really) the harvard prof got his friend's company (or was it himself?) a big kickback - they then called in booz allen hamilton to do consulting - i.e. do nothing - and they got a nice 40% off the top. i was very impressed when one he said that one of these institutions offered him a job but he refused out of principle.

and to think the u.s. could have made him a free market leader - i mean u.s. brown noser - but look what they've got instead.