Organization: Bridgewater Associates

Professional area/s: finance

David studied Philosophy at Harvard as an undergrad, focusing on philosophy of language in the Harvard vein (Wittgenstein and Quine). He received his Ph.D. from Princeton, still in philosophy of language, but in the Princeton vein (Kripke and Soames).

Completing his Ph.D. at a time when job opportunities in academia were quickly disappearing as the world imploded due to the 2008 financial crisis, David became increasingly curious about what was actually happening and why. He made the transition to finance in 2010 and joined Bridgewater Associates, a global macro hedge fund whose clients are some of the biggest pools of capital in the world. David says that the nature of the work, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t feel radically different from analytical philosophy: taking seemingly intractable questions about global economies and markets and trying to tackle them by building explicit, rigorous analytical theories.