Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


The Tao of Job Searches

In the six months he spent navigating the academic job market, economist Benjamin Ho, PhD ’06, took “small comfort that our theory predicts markets should operate efficiently.” Reporting on his job search in a first-person series for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ho noted that academe eventually may offer job security, but “academics experience plenty of job anxiety, it’s just hyper-compressed.”

To relieve his hyper-anxiety, Ho drew upon the wisdom of everyone from Becker to Buddha, Weber to Winnie-the-Pooh.

Luis Rayo and Gary S. Becker observed that “evolution has led the brain to use emotion to motivate the right choices,” Ho wrote at a low point in his search. “Remarkably, the Rayo-Becker economic view of happiness is compatible with a mathematical take on Buddhism, where happiness equals possessions divided by desire.” Ho made the leap: “If I change my wants to something more easily attainable, then the brain no longer needs to use stress to motivate.”

But hope prevailed. “I trust that there is a rational Weberian bureaucratic system for allocating applicants to jobs ... that each applicant is evaluated fairly and efficiently using the information available.” After reading both the Tao Te Ching and The Tao of Pooh, Ho decided: “One should learn to emulate Winnie-the-Pooh—to focus on simply being, rather than worry about doing. It is better to bend like a reed with the currents of life, accepting and flowing with life’s vicissitudes.”

Life’s currents gently deposited Ho at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management, where he will become an assistant professor of economics in the fall. He is spending the interim year as an economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required to view full article)