Andrei Stoica

The difference between Saudi Arabia's wealth and Venezuela’s poverty is mainly that Venezuela's national oil company PDVSA is dysfunctional, but Saudi Aramco isn't. Two-thirds of native Saudis work for the government. The profligacy of the Saudi economy is underwritten by oil exports by Saudi Aramco, which has a special arrangement for autonomy in... See more

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering,... See more

Notably, a coalition is not an ideology. It does not demand internal coherence or consistency; it does not need to reflect deep-rooted principles. Rather, coalitions devise a strategic and often temporary alignment around a limited set of common goals—in this case, propelling technology forward.

Coalitions are the bedrock of politics, especially in... See more

Not long after arriving at George Mason, Cowen read “Sexual Personae”by Camille Paglia, a buccaneering polemic about Western art across millennia. Although he didn’t agree with Paglia’s ideas, he saw this was the kind of book he wanted to write. Within months he was drafting a lively, popular history of markets and high culture. In 2003 he and... See more

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by... See more

Case Study: The Aquarium of PMs

One extreme example is the “Aquarium of PMs” model. Imagine a division where all the engineers sit on one side together, and all the PMs/designers sit on the other side.

This is also reflected in the weekly cadence of meetings—product meets more with product (as a group) than it does with engineers.

When initiatives

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