Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the economy.
the people with economics PhDs are not the people in control of economic policy.
They're frequently the "oh ffs don't do that" folks, even.
The collapse of the econ PhD job market
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Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#12Academic hiring has taken a big hit with the uncertainty and decline in federal funding.
Many academics that I've talked with say that their departments are cutting back to 50% of last year's PhD enrollment due to budget cuts and uncertainty. These were in biology and chemistry.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#13The article is focused exclusively on the US. What about the rest of the world? From what I've heard, it's a similar situation?
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#14Academic hiring has taken a big hit with the uncertainty and decline in federal funding.
This needs to be stressed. It's not just uncertainty of grants. That's a given, even when fed is stable.
Schools are questioning basic financial aid now. If Trump follows through on eliminating ED, no one is confident that there's a plan for any of the essential services and payments. . . Because there's never really been a plan for anything else.
Higher education is scared right now.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#15My first thought is wondering if it's one of two things: A. The bottom half of PhD Economists are not being trained in the data science/Big Data side of analysis increasingly needed B. There is less demand for Theory-sided Economists over computationally trained ones
CS and DS people are getting more applied and gaining domain expertise, and can do a lot of economics work now. Academic economists, especially those who primarily do data science / big data, seem to basically be doing Masters-level data science projects for their Ph.D. The hard part in their Ph.D.s is collecting the data, which used to be a very manual job that relied on connections, but more of them are getting them or imputing them from public sources so it's not that impressive anymore.
Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#16A specific market collapse, or a general one? --- Quick edit: I also dislike the persistent narrative of 'guaranteed' placement for certain degrees and occupations. This assumes a stagnant market and skill-set that does not at all hold for current-day markets.
That will depend on if it fits the narrative or not.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#17My first thought is wondering if it's one of two things: A. The bottom half of PhD Economists are not being trained in the data science/Big Data side of analysis increasingly needed B. There is less demand for Theory-sided Economists over computationally trained ones
The bitter lesson is making it so all these people hand designing features with econometric models are being obsoleted by big models and lots of data.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#18Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the economy.
It tends to go the other way around; politicians and academia pick economists that favor the way they'd like economics to be managed. Consider that Ludwig Von Mises, one of the most famous economists never held a tenure track position. And Milton Friedman won a nobel prize, including a study of monetary history that damned the fed for helping bring on the great depression -- later nobel prize to Bernanke for works th…
My sampling of my interactions with young PhD economists is that they were all Neo-Keynesian, the only people I’ve met who are of the Austrian school were Engineers.
I don’t doubt that the economics profession has been shaped by politics but it appears they are and have been rather willing participants.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#19At some level you can run all the econometric models you want to get an answer, but you can just ask an LLM and you'll probably get an answer that's just as accurate.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#20Economics academia has become its own only client. Very few outside academia are interested in vector autoregression models of inflation, DSGE or identification strategies. Traditional macroeconomic data and all the models that complemented it is technical debt.
This. My undergrad was in Economics (a long time ago). There was a time I thought about doing a PhD, but ended up doing an MS in Quant Finance instead. It's hard to believe that anyone can take a DSGE model seriously as a model of how the economy works.
For the unaware - graduate level Economics is nothing like pop Economics, it's essentially an applied math degree. But the math in question is extremely wonky. Mostly using Convex Set Theory and Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem from topology to prove the existence, uniqueness, and stability of a general equilibrium solution for a "market" of price-quantity commodity pairs. The assumptions needed to make it work are literally absurd.