philosophy and hedge fund management

We've all heard the jokes about philosophy majors working at McDonald's. But in reality people who study philosophy in college usually have the last laugh. This story about the value of majors provides the details. In addition to pointing out that Stephen Colbert was a philosophy major, the article notes that Ryan Miller attributes part of his success in designing software for a hedge fund to his undergraduate study of Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein (the holy trinity of analytic philosophy, the form of philosophy that relies heavily on symbolic logic and highly abstract reasoning). Miller says that studying analytic philosophy is a lot like hedge fund management (except for the money).

So maybe that's what went wrong at Bear Stearns. If they had spent more time reading the Tractatus or Principia Mathematica, things may have turned out better for them.