<p>None of the MIT Engineering people are as successful as following Harvard DEAS people even though MIT eingieering is 30 times bigger than Harvard DEAS</p>
<p>Bill Gates (richest man in the world)
Steven Balmer ( CEO of Microsoft the most successful software engineering firm)
Black Fischer (Founder of Financial Engineering and Partner of Goldman Sachs)
Ann Wang ( Inventor of Magnetic memory device)</p>
<p>Bill Gates is not a DEAS graduate. Until you stop speaking nonsense (and after, too) people will just laugh at you.</p>
<p>And just for the record, Mr. Wang's name is An, not Ann.</p>
<p>Look at this </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates</a></p>
<p>Yes? So what? It says he dropped out of Harvard in his second year. He certainly didn't graduate in DEAS or anything else.</p>
<p>Since Gates did not even spend two full years at Harvard, it's hard to argue that Harvard trained him to do anything much. And you can't argue that he "chose Harvard over MIT" because you have no evidence that he got into MIT.</p>
<p>I have a hard time giving Bill Gates credit for being an excellent engineer - he really isn't an engineer at all. He is rich and famous for marketing software very well, but there's plenty of speculation about how much of it was really his idea to begin with. </p>
<p>Besides, most people don't choose engineering with money alone in mind. Few engineers starve, but if you want only to become filthy rich, it's a much surer bet to get a law/medicine/MBA degree, particularly from a prestigious school. </p>
<p>Bill Gates can't really be called anything but a special case. It takes something different to drop out of a prestigious school and pursue your own idea... Harvard didn't teach him to do that, or nobody would ever graduate. Comparing his business success to that of MIT engineers is simply not valid. Harvard has its presidents and Mr Gates; MIT has its Feynmans and Kofi Annan.</p>
<p>I would add that Steve Ballmer graduated with a degree in Applied Math, not engineering. So to claim that Ballmer is an 'engineer' is to compare apples to oranges. Ballmer has freely admitted that he isn't an engineer, and never has been. </p>
<p>I don't particularly know why the point of Fischer Black keeps getting raised. How is he any better than MIT grad Robert Merton, who was the other co-inventor (with Blac and Myron Scholes) of financial engineering, and who actually won the Nobel Prize in Economics for it? </p>
<p>Furthermore, the point of An Wang is a truly poor one, as Wang Labs is no longer a powerful company. </p>
<p>If you want to talk about success, then let's talk about MIT grad Amar Bose, who is a billionaire. Let's talk about Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi, who founded Qualcomm. Let's talk about the Koch brothers, who run Koch Industries (the largest privately held company in the country). Both Charles and David Koch are worth $12 billion each, according to Forbes. </p>
<p>All of these people are MIT engineers. </p>
<p>So, mdx49 has still never shown an actual person who graduated with a Harvard ENGINEERING degree who is more successful than these MIT engineers. As has been said before, Bill Gates never graduated at all, Steve Ballmer and Fischer Black graduated in Applied Math, and An Wang graduated in Applied Physics. None of this is ENGINEERING.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cross registration is useful in some cases, but it lacks the flexibility of being a fulltime Harvard student.</p>
<p>The point is, Ben, a larger and more comprehensive engineering program at Harvard may reduce the significance of MIT's principal trump card in the cross-admit game.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This works both ways. That's why MIT has been building up its non-engineering programs as well. It wasn't that long ago when the Economics department at MIT was a no-name department. Now it is one of the best in the world. I see that MIT has been pouring extensive resources into other departments such as PoliSci (already now a highly respectable #10 in the USNews grad survey), philosophy, architecture, the Media Lab, and the Sloan School. </p>
<p>So just as Harvard is improving its engineering capabilities, MIT is improving its non-engineering capabilities. I doubt that these schools will ever truly have the same capabilities in my lifetime, but they will be more similar to each other than they were before.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It wasn't that long ago when the Economics department at MIT was a no-name department.
[/quote]
sakky -- I agree with you about everything but the above is just false. Ever since Samuelson (over 50 years ago) MIT has been a pretty big deal in econ. And that's pretty much the entire lifetime of economics as a serious science. Trust me on this one.</p>
<p>Ha! I have to profoundly disagree. </p>
<p>I'll put it to you this way. Before Paul Samuelson had even finished his Ph.D. from Harvard (and began teaching at MIT), economics had already gone through the dark heart of Marxism, which was challenged by the Austrian School and neoclassical economics, and which was then itself challenged by Keynesian economics. Heck, it was in the 1930's, while Samuelson was still in school, when one of the great debates in economics occurred - John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesian school vs. Freidrich von Hayek and the Austrian School, a battle that at the time was clearly won by Keynes, although Hayek's ideas made a powerful comeback in the last 30 years. In fact, Samuelson started his academic career as a major proponent of Keynes, to the point that he developed the concept of the "Keynesian Cross". If Keynes had never been born, Samuelson may never have become an economist at all.</p>
<p>Look, way before Samuelson, the concepts of supply and demand, consumer/producer surplus and deadweight loss, marginal utility, opportunity cost, comparative advantage, micro vs. macro-economics, the notion of labor vs. capital as factors of production (and the discredited labor theory of capital that is at the heart of Marxism), monopolization vs. perfect competition, the multiplier effect , the connection between money supply and inflation, central banking and interest rates, etc. - all of these concepts that we now take for granted as the heart of economics were all developed before Samuelson had appeared on the stage.</p>
<p>In fact, I think Paul Samuelson was once famously challenged by Julian Simon to state one thing that economists have proved that was not intuitively obvious. Samuelson came back with Ricardo's idea of comparative advantage. This just shows that there was clearly a lot of economics happening before Samuelson's time. </p>
<p>Look, I think perhaps the dispute is with the notion of economics as a 'serious science'. Yet the fact is, economics is not a true science, and never will be, for one simple reason - it is nearly impossible to perform controlled experiments in economics with concomitant hypotheses and predictions, the way you can in the true sciences. This is particularly important when you consider such things as the McCloskey critique. While economics has become more rigorous and "science-ish", it's hard for me to see how it could ever be a true science.</p>
<p>Look, I'll put it to you this way. Most economists working today would not recognize anything done before 1940 as similar to what they do today. The words were similar, but the actual methods and paradigms that characterize the research had nothing in common with today. This is like arguing with the statement "real physics started with Newton" by saying that people talked about motion and force before that. Yes, they did, but that doesn't contradict the statement.</p>
<p>I agree with you that there were departments of economics before Samuelson, but they did not do what is now known as economics. Comparitive advantage is in fact pretty trivial and intuitive (Samuelson's disagreement notwithstanding), but the vast majority of economics done since then isn't -- it's deep and complex and not at all obvious.</p>
<p>Your statement about the lack of experiments and testable predictions is completely and ridiculously wrong. There is a wide field today called experimental economics. You should Google it. Lest you complain that it's small and useless, you should be aware of the following:</p>
<p>When the FCC wanted to sell radio spectrum to telecom firms, they hired economists (including a professor of mine) to design an auction with incentive schemes based on auction theory. These theories were then tested with real subjects using experiments in the laboratory. The theories were adjusted and then the incentive schemes were let loose in a real auction. The resulting event netted more than 10 billion dollars, when previous government auctions for similarly valuable assets netted tiny fractions of that.</p>
<p>How's that for theory, predictions, experiments, and applications? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, inaccurate sakky. ;-)</p>
<p>However you care to describe it, economics is still much of an art than science. Many economists have introduced elegant mathematical rigor and science-based, observable/measurable/controllable rigor into economic theories with varying degrees of success. So far, only marginally successful economic models are those spawned from the elementary algebraic math such as general statistics with randomness- I can only say that they are still shooting in the dark. On the other hand, Engineering has a solid foundation on math and science.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Economists are like philosophers. They argue, quibble, seldom agree on anything, always agree to disagree. They are not worthy of their water excerpt from Holy Scribe found on Wallach IV
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Rabban, if you think the kinds of nonparametric statistical models routinely used by the Fed to set economic policy are "elementary", then please respond accordingly and I'll give you a three question quiz about this "elementary stuff" that will completely floor you.</p>
<p>It's really quite annoying when people speak without knowing anything about the subject in question.</p>
<p>Ben, I could'nt help but notice your a mere undergrad ? taking some economics class here and there? thinking you know your stuffs? Buddy, I have a news for you - you are still a baby. Review your words !!!.</p>
<p>By the way, if you think nonparametric statistical modes are something that "wows" someone ? puhahaha your post is so elementary as be laughable ;)</p>
<p>Remember there always*is* a cloud #9.</p>
<p>Rabban, you are singularly one of the most annoying posters on these boards. I typically don't get that blunt because I am here to be helpful, but looking at a few of your recent posts makes this clear beyond doubt.</p>
<p>Your refusal to actually take up my offer to answer some simple quiz questions speaks volumes about the fact that you don't know crap, about advanced statistics or anything else.</p>
<p>Incidentally, one reason that I can speak with a tiny bit of authority about economics is that I've coauthored papers with tenured professors for scholarly journals. You haven't finished high school. So why don't you try a little humility. It'll do you some good.</p>
<p>Great. And what have you ever done? ;-)</p>
<p>Having conclusively embarrassed yourself, I think your work here is done. Go troll somewhere else, obnoxious twit.</p>
<p>By the way, to anyone else reading, I really do apologize to you and to myself for wasting my time on this guy. Sometimes it requires more patience than I have to ignore the trolls. But I am done with him now.</p>
<p>Man, I live for these debates. </p>
<p>To review:
Someone mentioned Harvard would compete with MIT. Everyone shunned this contention. Byerly said that Harvard has a broad educational atmosphere. sakky contends that MIT does too. Something was said about economics. sakky replied with 3 paragraphs about Samuelson (even though we weren't even remotely talking about economic theory). Ben Golub feared his internet-ego was at risk and decided to throw out some fancy words (and told sakky to smoke something). Rabban made some funny posts, and Golub got mad.</p>
<p>Did I cover it?</p>
<p>Except for the "Everyone shunned this contention." comment. That's not how I read the responses -- I read that some felt it would have an effect on the decisions of cross-admits, some felt that it would take a very long time to establish a similarly competitive school, and others had a "the more the merrier!" tone to their responses.</p>
<p>And you forgot the mdx49 troll, singing again the praises of Bill Gates.</p>
<p>I think it goes without saying that cross-admits who are interested in engineering will go with MIT, those more interested in a liberal education will go with Harvard. Thus, nothing much will change.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, my review omitted mdx49 haha.</p>
<p>Wait...calling someone else else a "baby" on a college discussion forum is...funny?</p>
<p>I...don't get it.</p>