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Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

economist.com

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Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#61

Post by mhh__ »

mellavora wrote: post #21
fredgrott wrote: post #16

Taleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future. If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

I find that while he makes good points, he also misrepresents the views and histories of the people he attacks. It is the standard "The common knowledge is wrong, trust me" tactic for establishing yourself as an expert on a topic. For example, he got famous for picking on Black-Scholes. Claiming among other things that he was smarter because he was a trader before he became an academic. Conveniently not mentioning th…

Taleb spends a significant amount of his time precisely dunking on Scholes's time at LTCM and others.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#62

Post by mhh__ »

nindalf wrote: post #27
fredgrott wrote: post #16

Taleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future. If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Taleb is certainly one of the writers of all time. But this blind worship of him is puzzling. His writing has so many obvious flaws. Here are just a few of them from just one book of his - Skin in the Game . He insults "interventionistas", meaning those who advocate military interventions in other countries. He calls them stupid, of being ignorant of reality. He doesn't need to actually examine the facts for and agai…

Taleb is unbelievably important to people who don't know he exists yet.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#64

Post by iamcurious »

nindalf wrote: post #27
fredgrott wrote: post #16

Taleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future. If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Taleb is certainly one of the writers of all time. But this blind worship of him is puzzling. His writing has so many obvious flaws. Here are just a few of them from just one book of his - Skin in the Game . He insults "interventionistas", meaning those who advocate military interventions in other countries. He calls them stupid, of being ignorant of reality. He doesn't need to actually examine the facts for and agai…

I'm glad I read this comment. I had conversations with people who used "skin in the game" and "intellectual yet idiot" constantly, but I always had other books on my to-read list. The added context sheds some light.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#65

Post by rwilson4 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #50

Economists are flocking to jobs because there isn’t one in economics is a more appropriate title.

Or maybe businesses see more of a need for causal reasoning, with or without a controlled, randomized experiment. If you're making a decision, you need to have some model of how your decision affects outcomes you care about. But that model needs to be causal--predictive models can be useful starting points but may also lead you astray due to spurious correlations.

Economists are trained to approach these kinds of problems methodically, so it makes total sense to me that there is high demand.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#66

Post by tomrod »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #59
spaghettiToy wrote: post #45

The time of innovation is over, the time of cashing in and preservation has come? I think of the automotive industry. Big tech will start to diversify, start banks, buy appliance companies, buy suppliers/vertical integration. I believe that happened to Auto in the 60s and 70s, about 20-30 years after the boom. If we (irresponsibly) use that timeline, we should expect dark days for the next 20 years. Most innovation w…

Yes, this is a bad sign IMHO. Economists are like hitmen, they do the dirty work when you are desperate.

Are you thinking about management consultants (hatchet folks) and/or accountants? Economists are nerds that identify margins for improvement/opportunity cost -- they tend to fill strategy / marketing needs for quantification.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#67

Post by chiyc »

nerdponx wrote: post #36
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #20

The whole reason SV exploded was that people were doing things instead of waiting for the theory to show it can work. That's how software has innovated for 30 years: by practice. Giving a price to an economist, the opposite of somebody practicing and producing, is a signal something is going wrong.

There are plenty of economists who do experimental and applied work.

Hiring economists into tech has also been going on for many years at this point. I roomed with a PhD candidate years ago who described fairly established hiring pipelines from Economics PhD programs into industry.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#68

Post by spaghettiToy »

scottLobster wrote: post #54
spaghettiToy wrote: post #45

The time of innovation is over, the time of cashing in and preservation has come? I think of the automotive industry. Big tech will start to diversify, start banks, buy appliance companies, buy suppliers/vertical integration. I believe that happened to Auto in the 60s and 70s, about 20-30 years after the boom. If we (irresponsibly) use that timeline, we should expect dark days for the next 20 years. Most innovation w…

On the contrary, I look forward to innovation that actually has to be profitable at the end. All these bright-colored-plastic startups without a real business model will die, and ageism will lessen as experience and the ability to make money takes precedence over "culture fit" and "vision". Maybe Silicon Valley can even consider working with... the GOVERNMENT!!! You know, those institutions that actually have the aut…

> roll my eyes hard every time some SV engineer has a moral outrage/stages a walkout because they discover their company has a DoD

You have 0 input with how weapons of war will be used in the future. I can't say I disagree.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#69

Post by runnerup »

spaghettiToy wrote: post #45

The time of innovation is over, the time of cashing in and preservation has come? I think of the automotive industry. Big tech will start to diversify, start banks, buy appliance companies, buy suppliers/vertical integration. I believe that happened to Auto in the 60s and 70s, about 20-30 years after the boom. If we (irresponsibly) use that timeline, we should expect dark days for the next 20 years. Most innovation w…

There's a lot to criticize the last 10-20 years of silicon valley for, but I don't inherently see it as negative that there's a continued concentration of diverse high-value labor in an area which has a lot of capital to deploy. It's worked out great in the past whenever areas pulled in a lot of smart people to work together.

I do hope that we move the goalposts closer to "value-creation" rather than "capturing value" but I think the way to do this is to glorify stories of value-creation and apply high taxes to rentiering wherever we find it. Although there is some non-global local value in supporting domestic rentiering of global products/services and ensuring that the outsized/unfair international revenues are re-deployed to domestic initiatives to chase novel value creation.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#70

Post by ls612 »

tomrod wrote: post #58
fnordpiglet wrote: post #50

Economists are flocking to jobs because there isn’t one in economics is a more appropriate title.

Like many things in life, "it depends." The market for new PhDs in economics is wonderful and getting better. I haven't looked at figures in over 7 years, but the general trend has been there are ~900 PhDs minted per year, about 100-200 academic tenure track jobs, and about 1200 industry jobs (that number has probably increased now that NABE, not just AEA/ASSA, handles recruitment conference at-scale for the techonom…

Am in a top PhD program in economics, can confirm for the most part, although the past two years have been relatively tough. Hopefully the Job Market the next couple years will return to trend.
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