"But it wasn’t so long before I discovered three things. First, the graduate students I was with were not as smart, on average, as the early entrants whom I had hung out with at Shimer. (Indeed, it is not clear to me that I have ever been with a brighter set of people than those early entrants – although we are not talking here about maturity.) Second, I was better at thinking about politics than most of my graduate student peers. Finally, Shimer had taught me critical skills, and how to write. In a sense, Shimer proved itself to me at Harvard."