Forgive me a little name-dropping, but a college fraternity brother of mine has made a news splash that fits with my unfashionable view of the value of liberal arts education.

While our governor pushes computer programming, while some Republicans in the legislature deride the value of college generally, my former classmate has placed a $75 million bet on the value of philosophy. (Marco Rubio famously said during his presidential campaign that the country needed fewer philosophers and more welders.)

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My classmate and fraternity brother at Washington and Lee, Bill Miller of Baltimore, sees it differently. He’s made a $75 million gift to the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins University, where he completed courses but not the dissertation for a Ph.D. following an undergraduate education focused on business.  Miller, who now heads his own investment management company, beat the market 15 years running during his years as a mutual fund manager at Baltimore-based Legg Mason. He made some disastrous picks too in the financial sector, but bounced back

His belief in the value of philosophy dovetails with my own view that a broad education, even one without direct vocational skill training, can be its own reward. That’s what Miller says in an interesting article about his gift in the New York Times.

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He credits philosophical training in his stock picking.

He was an early believer in Amazon, investing heavily at a time when most analysts were highly skeptical.

“There was a huge amount of confirmation bias going on with Amazon,” he said. “There was an inability to do what Wittgenstein talked about in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’: crisscrossing the landscape from many angles, investigating in many different ways.”
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In recent years Mr. Miller, who said his firm currently has $2.5 billion under management (considerably less than the funds he oversaw at Legg Mason, with which he ended ties in 2016), has invested heavily in Bitcoin.

The cryptocurrency has inspired a nascent philosophical literature, to complement more in-flight friendly reading like Bitcoin Magazine. In addition to books on the history and sociology of money, Mr. Miller said he had been reading the Berkeley philosopher John Searle’s 1995 book “The Construction of Social Reality,” which looks at how objective social realities form, grow and change.

“It is particularly insightful when trying to understand new social facts and structures such as crypto assets,” Mr. Miller said.

I’ll leave cryptocurrency to Miller. I took a strictly vocational major in both college and grad school — journalism — and you can see how that turned out as a money move. But even Bill Miller says money isn’t the only metric.

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Philosophy, he added, “has made a huge difference both to my life outside business, in terms of adding a great degree of richness and knowledge, and to the actual decisions I’ve made in investing.”

Now who’ll step up for the French Department?

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