An Academic Capitalist View of Life

The title is an insouciant play on S. Radhakrishnan’s An Idealist View of Life.

Not surprisingly, my post is nothing like his book!

Last week, I gave a talk at TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Charter Member (CM) Dinner event in Pittsburgh.

It was at Lucca, next to CMU. So, I just walked over after work.

I wanted to playfully contrast Academia with Entrepreneurship.

I have done this previously in An Essay on Operations Management.

I decided to use a religious framing, contrasting Hinduism with Protestants, to caricature academia with business folks.

Academia: Entrepreneurship= Brahmin: Calvinism

I also thought Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism will be good plugs.😊

Hope you enjoy the video!  (Warning: Not suitable for the Puritans!)