The collapse of the econ PhD job market • Hacker News Board

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#111

Post by lenerdenator » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

>For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm.

So, the field is being consumed by the ideology it espoused?

Automation and leaner government budgets were pushed hard by a number of schools of economic thought.

Of particular note is this section:

> REASON 4: Lying About Inflation

If you were there during the pandemic money printing, you remember the sequence all too well: first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation, then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” and finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all. Each step was wrong, and each was delivered with smug certainty. Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.

This isn't about protecting Democratic policy narratives. Arguably the single worst thing for inflation, the Paycheck Protection Program, happened under Trump. You had business owners taking out loans for pretty much anything and everything they thought they could possibly justify as business-related, no matter how tenuous that justification was, and then of course the government forgave massive amounts of it. Since business owners already tend to have more money and capital, this fueled their consumption of then-scarce products and services even more. Laws of supply-and-demand kicked in, which shouldn't be hard for the author to understand.

Ultimately the inflation that happened during the pandemic was due to the fact that for the last 45-ish years, the US has been running deficits not just in the public sector, but the private sector as well. Our economy is designed to run on debt that suddenly, people couldn't pay on time. They then looked to the government to offer a backstop, and since federal, state, and local governments have no "rainy day" fund to speak of, the federal government had to fire up the money printers.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#112

Post by mjhay » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #66

1980phipsi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. Twenty years ago if you were interested in what is now called data science, you were getting a degree with some kind of exposure to applied statistics. Economics is one of those disciplines (through econometrics).

> Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. It was called statistics

No. Data science is different than statistics, because it is done on computers. It also uses machine learning algorithms instead of statistical algorithms. These advances, and the shedding of generations of restrictive cruft - frees data scientists to craft answers that their bosses want to hear - proving the superiority of data science over statistics.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#113

Post by jjk166 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

cjbgkagh wrote: post #18

mothballed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's like finding that very few PhD evolutionary biologists are young earth creationists. People who study economics wind up being neo-keynesians because that's what the data supports.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#114

Post by jmugan » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #108

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.

[flagged]

Which side are you talking about?

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#115

Post by awesome_dude » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

kadushka wrote: post #109

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and lecturers. This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

I hope they're cutting their bloated administration departments before cutting classes and lecturers, but I'm not holding my breath.

> bloated administration departments

Can you demonstrate how those administration departments were bloated (in any way)

edit: re-added "administration" which I had, for some reason, neglected to add, thinking that it was obvious that that was what I was talking about.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#116

Post by nothrowaways » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

The scientific community needs a new safe haven. It would be

1. A country specifically tailor made for scientists and engineers.

2. A country with no first class citizens

Something like Switzerland or Dubai for science and engineering, but made from scratch.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#117

Post by Findeton » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #79

DebtDeflation wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a pure math major, and I took several economics classes. The whole field was very baffling for me. The most reliable model was the dead simple IS–LM, which is based on observations. But you don't really need a lot of math for it, so it's boring. As a result, researchers keep trying to generalize the microeconomic behavior of people to derive macroeconomic laws. Like we do with the ideal gas laws. And this produce…

Thing is, the part about using math for economics is highly debatable and that's why Austrian School of economics doesn't use it. From that perspective, we use ranking systems for our preferences, at the individual level, so using math for aggregate behaviour is just not well substantiated. This point of view comes from Carl Menger, which started the whole marginalist revolution.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#118

Post by luther07 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

hapless wrote: post #58

bee_rider wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics involves studying how the economy should be managed, it is an inherently political field. Declaring one school political and another non-political is itself a political sleight of hand.

One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.

Also Grove City College has been dedicated to the Austrian School since 1956 apparently, when they hired Hans Sennholz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sennholz

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#119

Post by nxobject » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #107

gbacon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a broad overgeneralization unless you believe zero fat in grad schools is available for trimming.

The sources of university funding and spending on administration has been broken for a long time. What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors. What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the m…

…and money to go to conferences and summer schools, and money for software licenses (especially in applied programs), and department funds to bring visiting academics, and the following things that get lumped under administration: money for grad student food pantries and childcare because funding streams for PhDs don’t provide for good salaries outright, and job advising centers because the math job market is a crapshoot, and free student health clinics for psychological and physical health because doing a PhD in any condition is rough…

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#120

Post by awesome_dude » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

The biggest problem research has is that its almost never clear what the result will be to the bottom line.

People complain bitterly about two things with research

1. That it's looking at obvious things and they could have told the answer (What's really happened is some researcher has actually looked into some common school of thought to check its reliability)

2. That there's no "use" for the thing be researched (it's absurd). This type of research is really "document phenomena, try to understand it" the use of that phenomena is often not clear for decades, or centuries (our cryptographic systems currently rely on research into math that was once considered absolutely worthless)