At Oxford, my chosen program was unforgiving. The watchword of the famous PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) program was rigor: any sloppy argument or imprecise claim would get picked apart politely by a skeptical professor or fellow student. It was the ideal prescription for someone like me, reared on a humanities curriculum in which a stirring phrase carried as much weight as a precise argument. The missing piece in my formal education had been the analytical side of things, which to my Oxford faculty was the element that mattered most.
I was forced to learn the British tradition of analytical philosophy, which breaks down the meaning of the words we throw around casually yet with conviction in debates about ethics and politics, sometimes without knowing what we are talking about. Under the gaze of the Oxford dons, every question was handled with the utmost precision, to get to the bottom of what was really intended by a term or an idea in the course of an argument.
For example, in a philosophical debate over the nature of free will, we were required to confront just how difficult it is to define what “free will” even means. We considered one definition: that a freely chosen act is one taken by someone who could have done otherwise. It felt intuitively like a good way of describing free will: if I did something, and could have done something else, then clearly I made this choice freely. But then, another philosopher pointed out, what if you chose to stay in a room all day because you wanted to, but without your knowing it the door was locked from the outside? It turns out you could not have done otherwise, but we also would believe this choice was a free one, so clearly a more precise definition had to be found . . . and the refinements and arguments would go from here.
I’m not sure I ever got to the bottom of free will, but these kinds of analyses and arguments cultivated a healthy sense of clarity. After years of painting, with broad verbal brushes, the kind of beautiful images that earn good grades in certain American college literature courses, I now had to make sure that every sentence and idea was precise, clearly defined, and airtight, in order to survive the skepticism of a British critic.
In the process, I learned more rigorous ways to explain the moral intuitions I already had about politics and society. Sitting in one of Oxford’s ancient libraries, I learned the theories of John Rawls (who, ironically, taught at Harvard). Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.
Like most good philosophy in the analytical tradition, it gave precise expression to something we already understand intuitively. For example, it gives us one way to explain why we know that racial equality is a feature of a just society: even a prejudiced group of people would probably all insist on a racially equal society if they were asked to design in advance a world into which they would soon be born, without knowing which race life’s lottery would assign them at birth. It was a compelling way of thinking about fairness, and not hard to connect to debates about racial and income inequality in our politics back home. And, because nothing there was endorsed as “correct” but only as worth studying and picking apart, I was then led to Robert Nozick’s impressive conserva tive critique of Rawls—followed by Gerald Cohen’s equally impressive socialist critique of Nozick.
In ethics, I studied the debates between Kantians, who believe that your motivation is the most important thing in deciding whether you are doing good, and utilitarians, who look only to the outcome of your deeds, not your intent. Years later, in office, I would think of these debates often, knowing that government often requires you to think as a utilitarian—to try to bring about the “greatest good for the greatest number”—even if your personal philosophy is more Kantian, Christian, or otherwise grounded in something besides the cold math of utilitarian ethics. Meanwhile, studying international relations as part of the “Politics” leg of the PPE program, I learned to trace in detail what happened when a few colonial powers promised, to more than one group of people, the same small patches of Middle Eastern land. And I learned to debate the remarkable finding by political scientists that truly democratic countries almost never go to war with one another.
Most new and useful of all, perhaps, was a rigorous training in economics. I had taken an economics course in college, but had known nothing like the intensity of the tutorials at Pembroke College. These one-on-one or two-on-one sessions with faculty were the backbone of instruction at Oxford. In the case of my economics course, they felt less like the friendly and personalized instruction conjured up by the word “tutorial,” and more like a weekly oral exam on whatever I had managed to teach myself in the preceding six days. But the system worked.
Racing to catch up to my second-year peers, I mastered the basics of supply and demand, utility, preferences, auction theory, and market equilibrium. I learned to admire the theoretical elegance of the free market under perfect conditions. Then I began to learn about all of the situations in which those perfect conditions break down, and all of the ways markets get skewed in the real world. One calculus equation at a time, I came to understand in thorough mathematical detail why supply and demand cannot be expected to deliver fair prices or efficient outcomes in many situations. Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.
The two years passed quickly, rushing toward the handful of days in June of 2007 when, in keeping with the Oxford tradition, I donned a white bow tie, suit, and gown to walk to the giant hall they call the Examination Schools. There, hundreds of students at a time would sit for each of the eight three-hour exams that would account for the entirety of our grades. Exiting the last exam, I received a pie in the face from a group of jubilant friends (also per tradition), and spent the next few days waiting for the results.
When they were finally posted, on a big sheet of paper with everyone’s names on them outside the Exam Schools, I checked several times to make sure I wasn’t misreading. I had finished with a “First,” the highest grade in their remarkably simple (and very British) system of First, Second Upper, Second Lower, and Third Class degrees. To an English undergraduate, this single grade becomes a mark you carry for the rest of your life, shaping career opportunities for decades. Knowing I would head back to America meant that there was less at stake for me in the grade, but I took pride in it even while sensing that the time had come to learn what wasn’t on the page and get an education in the real world, if there was such a thing. Which is why I went to McKinsey.