Pierce Berke

About Pierce Berke

In 7th grade, I emailed Congress about net neutrality. By junior year, I had written a paper arguing against it. The 7th-grade version of me saw corporations threatening open access and felt it was fundamentally wrong. The junior-year version understood that the internet is not a utility, that paid prioritization can reduce congestion, and that antitrust, not prophylactic regulation, is the right tool. It was the same problem with a completely different analysis. The gap between intuition and proof is what I find most interesting.It\'s why I co-founded techandbusiness.org. The net neutrality piece argued that antitrust beats prophylactic regulation, and the causal ML piece argued it represents Big Tech\'s new competitive moat, both positions people pushed back on. The Palantir short and the Michael Burry analysis found audiences that weren\'t expecting an economics argument. 25k views across platforms, and the work that has mattered is the work that made people disagree with the framing.The triple major in Math, Economics, and Computer Science is not credential-stacking. It\'s the only way I know to take a problem seriously. The question I keep returning to is when the distinction between prediction and causal estimation actually changes the decision. Amazon hires economists not to forecast but to isolate what actually caused an outcome, and that difference reshapes competitive strategy. TAing advanced micro added a different skill: getting a student with calculus but not intuition to see that first-order conditions aren\'t a math exercise but a statement of what\'s being traded off.I\'ve also run a landscaping business since I was 14. What started as mowing lawns grew into recurring contracts, seasonal pricing, and multi-year client relationships. Customers in a service business don\'t pay for quality, they pay for reliability. A mediocre job done consistently beats an excellent job done inconsistently, because one bad experience ends the relationship. That\'s what a principal-agent model predicts: when quality is hard to observe, repeated interaction becomes the enforcement mechanism. The classroom got there eventually. The business got there first.The EMT-B cert came from ACEMS at Amherst, J-term 2024. My first volunteer call was an MVA opioid overdose on I-684 outside Katonah. I watched someone get revived and the jaws of life open a mangled door. What I understood was the value of a system where everyone performs their role precisely, communicates clearly, and pulls toward a shared goal. That\'s a coordination problem, and one economics studies too.

Experience

1. Co-founder & Editor-in-chief

   Techandbusiness.Org

   May 2025 — Present

   Co-founded and lead a digital publication exploring how AI and big tech reshape markets and competition. Published 8 articles on topics from IBM-RedHat\'s acquisition strategy to D-Wave quantum computing, growing LinkedIn subscribers from 5 to 100 in 2 months. Launched a companion podcast that hit 1.5K+ views and doubled our click-through rate in the first month. The newsletter is where I take ideas from my economics coursework—principal-agent problems, market structure, causal inference—and test whether they hold up against real industry dynamics.

Education

• Amherst College

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Economics, Mathematics, and Computer Science