Use Case Books

[Rachelle Kun]

I am preparing for my interviews at several consulting firms. I already prepared many cases from older casebooks but I would be grateful if anyone can share with me casebooks from wharton 2019 to 2023 because I am finding it very difficult to find them online.

2. After you've learned the basics, practice cases with peers to polish your case solving process and acquire understanding of a wide range of industries and problem types;

Is there a particular reason you are looking for them? It appears you have studied already quite a few cases from other books. Just a friendly tip, it's not the masses of cases you have cracked before, it is the quality and feedback you received along the journey. Feel free to ping me for a free coffee chat so I can give you a quick readiness check. Warm regards, Freddy

Now, remember, much more important than just reading a "hard" McKinsey case or having a friend case you in it, is actually how you're cased. I can make the easiest case be your worst nightmare (as can any other coach). Make sure that, if you're really trying to get pushed hard and get prepared for the toughest cases, you're looking at hiring a coach...delivery is truly key here!

Many effective altruists and rationalists oppose reading books. This position is easily mocked, but as someone who is familiar with the way academia and publishing work, I think it has a lot to recommend to it. According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried,

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say. My experience is that is rarely the case. People generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than that, but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV and gets you invited on TV shows and podcasts.

For the reasons given, I think we can use more careful thought about when and how often you should read books in their entirety. Saying you should read fewer books makes an individual sound lazy, which is why people rarely give that advice. But we should take opportunity costs seriously. Given all the other things you could be reading like scientific papers and news magazines, not to mention other things you could be doing with your time, which non-fiction books are worth reading cover-to-cover? I argue that there are three categories of works that you may consider digesting in full.

Most people I think would say no, regardless of how smart he is. We might be fascinated by the Amazon philosopher, but wisdom one can learn from requires some baseline level of knowledge. If you reject the possibility that the Amazon philosopher has great insights into the modern world, on what basis would you trust Ancient Greece?

I would add textbooks to the list of books that are worth reading. Not always, but often its the best way to learn a complex new field. Open to suggestions of alternative formats, like reading papers--though if you want an intro & problems, textbooks are still great.

I don\u2019t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that\u2026If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

To take one example, the last book I finished was David Sinclair\u2019s Lifespan. It has three parts, and the last of them is nothing but two chapters about his political and social views, where he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what\u2019s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality.

There is no particular reason that the world\u2019s foremost expert on aging should be expected to have anything new or interesting to say on these topics, and he doesn\u2019t. I would\u2019ve skipped these chapters, except for the fact that I was planning on writing a book review and felt obligated to slog through them. It\u2019s not that a professor at Harvard Medical School can\u2019t have interesting political views, it\u2019s that Sinclair\u2019s opinions are a boring m\u00E9lange of what one would find across Atlantic think pieces. But for some reason he feels the need to pontificate on various topics that have nothing to do with his area of expertise.

Why? Most likely, he\u2019s simply filling up space. Either he thought the book needed some padding, or maybe he felt the urge to preach about single-payer healthcare and decided to trap readers into hearing his views after he lured them in with the anti-aging stuff.

The vast majority of books are like this in some way. Any Substack essay I have written could\u2019ve been a book if I had the time or inclination to make it into one. You can always add more anecdotes or examples, or elaborate on how your idea relates to adjacent ideas, or find some new way to test your theory. You can also just repeat the same arguments ad infinitum. I\u2019ve previously noted how Sinclair kept harping on his optimism regarding how we\u2019re going to cure aging again and again, constantly making the same points while using slightly different words.

My experience in political science is that what will often happen is that an academic will get a paper published in a major journal. Then it becomes easy to sell a book to a publisher in which you just present the results of that paper and add a bunch of useless words. Something like this is the norm, not the exception. From talking to economists, I gather that they\u2019re pretty negative on books, and this is one of the many ways they\u2019re more sensible than other academics.

The issue here is opportunity cost. Let\u2019s say you want to learn about why people form the political opinions they hold. You might read a 300-page book. Or, for the same amount of time and effort, you might read two chapters of that book that are 20 pages each, plus 15 different articles that are 15 pages each, plus say 5 Wikipedia articles that are the equivalent of another 35 pages. Something like the latter is usually the better path. And most academic articles are, to be frank, full of filler too, so you\u2019re probably better off skipping the intro and conclusion of many of them. Substacks and Tweets are actually efficient methods of transferring information because you cut out so much of the useless fluff people include when they\u2019re trying to build a CV.

It\u2019s not that nothing can be learned from reading the 300-page book. It\u2019s just that reading the book is a large commitment, and puts you at the mercy of one author, who probably took way too long to make his points for reasons of ego and career interest.

When learning history, one can always decide at how granular of a level to investigate an era, topic, or important figure. Most social science or political science books are padded with filler because there are only so many interesting things you can say about most ideas. But history is different; you can always go into more detail about World War II, or the life stories of Ottoman sultans, or the fall of Rome. Even a thousand-page book on a historical topic can only capture a small slice of reality. The returns to reading history are somewhat linear \u2014 five hundred pages on World War II give you more insight than a 5-page summary, which gives you more than 5 paragraphs. If you were inclined to read 5,000 pages, you\u2019d get more still, but we generally don\u2019t have the time for that. Most things are not like this. I can\u2019t say the same for, say, Jonathan Haidt\u2019s Moral Foundations Theory. I think it can be explained in a few paragraphs, plus some charts. I loved David Reich\u2019s Who We Are, which used the tools of paleoanthropology to go into the history of various major regions of the world. Unlike with Sinclair\u2019s book, it didn\u2019t feel that much of my time was wasted.

You may want to read Kant, Plato, and the Bible, because many people have been reading them for a very long time, and you want to be a participant in the wider culture. I don\u2019t believe in the \u201Cwisdom\u201D to be found in Great Books (see below). But I want to understand my fellow man. A large portion of people who live under the same polity as I do think that the Bible is the literal word of God, so it\u2019s useful to get a glimpse into their reality. Similar things could be said about the Koran or the writings of Confucius. It\u2019s like how one reason to read the NYT is that everyone else is reading it. So not only do you get the value of the news itself, but also insights into what\u2019s considered culturally and socially important.

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