Word: crunchers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hollywood didn't want to be left out, so filmmakers green-lighted Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon, who does watch TV, makes it sexy to be a number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here...
...learned "to mumble with great incoherence." Nor does he buy the wildest new-economy talk. He dismisses as "less than credible" any idea that "we need no longer be concerned about the risk that inflation can rise again." Greenspan is on guard, a renowned numbers cruncher who keeps tabs on the most obscure corners of the economy. Robin Leigh-Pemberton, former governor of the Bank of England, once remarked that at conferences Greenspan was likely to back up his predictions by citing such obscure data as vacuum-cleaner sales in Iowa...
...Vineyard in 1972. Many of Hendrickson's scenes and anecdotes first appeared in the Washington Post in the mid-'80s. Here the journalist looks further into McNamara's brilliant careers at the Harvard Business School and the Ford Motor Co. The record reveals a top-of-the-line number cruncher steeped in the values of corporate loyalty. But as Secretary of Defense, his mistakes cost lives, not shareholder dividends. And yet his responsibilities required a level of abstraction and analysis that seems to have put him on another planet. Hendrickson emphasizes this distance by frequently interrupting his biography with stories...
...number cruncher has calculated that just five minutes a day of O.J. office gossip would have cost the country $27 billion in lost productivity, but surely there's been more gossip than that. Add in the daydreaming, lapses in concentration and visits to psychiatrists for post-O.J. trial letdown syndrome, and you have a serious recessionary undertow...
Hagstrom's detailed description of Buffett's modus operandi has caused a bit of confusion among Buffett followers. Inspired by the book, a number cruncher at Standard & Poor's took all the attributes of a Buffett-type investment (consistent profitability, high return on equity, etc.) and programmed a computer to spit out the names of the companies that qualified. Thirty did, but only two of those stocks are actually found in Buffett's portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway. As the Standard & Poor's computer sees it, most of Buffett's biggest holdings, with the exception of U.S. Tobacco and Coca-Cola...