Contributing writer
Marshall Zhang
Latest Content
What Harvard Gets Us
Navigating love, winning Monopoly, and finding happiness are some of the most important facets of the lives we lead, and to rely solely on intuition or the arts to do so is as futile as it is to rely solely on mathematics.
The Happiness Sale
As we become older and richer, things and experiences that amaze us now will probably lose their luster.
Rights and Obligations
Anyone who’s won a game of Monopoly should intuitively understand that safe strategies are rarely the best strategies.
Discount, For Good or For Tech
If one job can perceptibly offer us more latitude to grow, learn, and set ourselves up for a successful career in the long-term than another, nearly any signing bonus of realistic size should be close to a non-factor in our decision calculus.
Letter to the Editor: Harvard's Anti-Finance Problem
The world-changers that the author wishes to see ought to seek to do the greatest good for the world, not only in the years immediately following graduation but also over their entire lives.
Love in the Time of Dice Games
While we are comfortable using mathematics to quantify risk everywhere from the stock market to weather forecasts, it strikes most as an affront to even suggest that economics and statistics could say anything about the institution of love.
The Meaning in the (Financial) Mathematics
There is a fundamental disconnect between the theory we learn and the way we live our lives; with apologies to Oscar Wilde and Phillip Fisher, it’s all too easy to know the mathematics of everything and the meaning of nothing.
Risk, Returns, and Hot Breakfast
While it is true that Harvard’s returns have been outpaced by some of its competitors, calls for pay cuts and accusations of scandal on the basis of a single return metric demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways in which investment managers should be evaluated.