Niederhoffering The Curriculum

By Ramesh Akkineni

Charlie Munger says in a lecture - There was a wonderful example of gaming a human system in the career of Victor Niederhoffer in the Economics Department of Harvard. Victor Niederhoffer was the son of a police lieutenant, and he needed to get A’s at Harvard. But he didn’t want to do any serious work at Harvard, because what he really liked doing was one, playing world-class checkers; two, gambling in high-stakes card games, of which he was very good, all hours of the day and night; three, being the squash champion of the United States, which he was for years; and four, being about as good an amateur part-time tennis player as a part-time tennis player could be.

This did not leave much time for getting A’s at Harvard so he went into the Economics Department. You’d think he would have chosen French poetry. But remember, this was a guy who could play championship checkers. He thought he was up to outsmarting the Harvard Economics Department. And he was. He noticed that the graduate students did all the dirty work that would ordinarily go to the professors, and he noticed that because it was so hard to get to be a graduate student at Harvard, they were all very brilliant and organized and hard working. And therefore, by custom in a really advanced graduate course, the professors are always giving an A. So Victor Niederhoffer signed up for nothing but the most advanced super graduate courses in the Harvard Economics Department, and of course, he got A, after A, after A, after A, and was never -- hardly ever, anyway -- near the class. And for a while, Harvard thought they had a new prodigy on their hands. That’s a ridiculous story, but the man has made himself famous. By the way, that will work still. And Niederhoffer is famous; they call that Niederhoffering the curriculum.

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