Podcast • October 4, 2014

Jeremy Grantham: In a Climate of Risk

Jeremy Grantham is a Boston financier who has found himself in the thick of the fight over climate change for more than twenty years. He’s the founder and chief strategist of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo, or GMO, which manages ...

Jeremy Grantham is a Boston financier who has found himself in the thick of the fight over climate change for more than twenty years. He’s the founder and chief strategist of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo, or GMO, which manages $112 billion in assets.

When we spoke to him in his Rowes Wharf office, overlooking Boston Harbor, Grantham calls himself a “scatterbrained” investor working with a third-rate education. If, after raising the alarm loudly and very early about the catastrophic market bubbles of 1999 and 2008, he’s become one of America’s most prominent financial strategists, it’s a tribute to natural patience and a conservatism that he chalks up to a Yorkshire childhood and a Quaker grandfather. But Grantham’s also glad to carry weight in the world of feverish investment. His quarterly letters have become must-reads, offering a warier look, going deeper into the future, than one usually finds on Wall Street. (His latest is here.)

Grantham discovered the fragility and beauty of the natural world on family trips into old and ravaged forests of the Amazon basin and Borneo. Now his family foundation is engaged in a farsighted effort to fight climate-skeptical “propaganda” with propaganda of its own: funding change-now messages from groups like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund. It’s the “race of our lives”, he wrote: against short-term psychology and an entrenched fossil-fuel economy. Grantham is troubled by the long odds, but still he’s trying to draw money and mass attention to an existential risk — before it’s too late to do anything about it. Call it the biggest short.

Photo credit: Remco Bohle.

May 12, 2014

Dealing in Dreams

We're drilling down on the essential question around the higher ed challenge - namely why does it cost so much, and it is it worth it in the end? Here are 1500 American colleges and universities plotted by their 4-year sticker price on the x-axis and 30-year net return on investment (based on the median salary of graduates) on the y-axis.

It just seems absurd, to pay 60 grand a year so that you can read Rousseau. I mean I can read Rousseau right here. Hell, I can hire sometime to read it to me, teach me French, and then read it to me in French for that kind of money. It’s absolutely nuts!

By Kunal Jasty

We’re drilling down on the essential question around the higher ed challenge – namely why does it cost so much, and it is it worth it in the end?

Here are 1500 American colleges and universities plotted by their 4-year sticker price on the x-axis and 30-year net return on investment (based on the median salary of graduates) on the y-axis. All data is taken from Payscale’s annual report on the earnings of college graduates. Look to the top right of the graph for high-price schools with high future salaries, the bottom right for high-priced schools with low future salaries, and the top left for (relatively) affordable schools with high future salaries.

Notes:

  • Payscale has a great explanation of their methodology on their website.
  • The dataset is by no means perfect, but I believe it is accurate enough for illustrative purposes.
  • We’re not taking into account the net price of colleges (i.e. financial aid and grant aid).
  • Future earnings by no means the only way to judge a college or the “college experience.” It’s hard to put a price on the value of a college education, but I believe the average earnings of graduates is an extremely important data point.
  • Thank you to nsonnad for providing invaluable code examples.