You Can’t Have PPE Curriculum Without Bitcoin

In 1920, the toffs at the University of Oxford decided that those students with ambitions of entering public service needed a better degree to equip them for a modern, post-War world. They reasoned that, in order to understand social phenomena and govern effectively, you must have a firm grasp of philosophy, ethics and reasoning, politics and its history, and finally, economics.

The degree known as “philosophy, politics and economics” (PPE) would be born, and first delivered at Oxford in 1921, with no less than an Oscar winner, a princess, two Nobel Laureates, three British Prime Ministers, 12 non-U.K. prime ministers (representing Australia, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand), three foreign presidents (representing Ghana, Peru and Pakistan), and hundreds of other highly-senior members of public service all graduating. This excludes all the alumni from the hundreds of world-leading universities that now also provide a PPE degree.

Whether or not the degree has fulfilled the ambitions of its creators could be debated, but the logic of the program is sound. In order to understand complicated social phenomena, your knowledge needs to be deep and broad. In the 1920s, philosophy, politics and economics were probably enough to do the trick, but in October 2021, 13 years after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, understanding of exponential technologies and how they’re built and adopted is now a critical fourth pillar.