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The collapse of the econ PhD job market

chrisbrunet.com

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Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#161

Post by Retric »

kergonath wrote: post #129
Retric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small price changes don’t necessarily lead to small results. There’s a reason companies advertise 19.99 not 20 which has been experimentally verified many times. People simply act irrationally, which is a fundamental issue when trying to treat economics as math.

Matter is not continuous and yet we don’t need atoms to predict how a metal sheet will bend. There are a lot of sound theories about how to deal with discontinuity, and how the problem solves itself when numbers get large enough. Or think of it like weather and climate: we cannot predict that there will be a thunderstorm on a given day 2 months from now, but we can be fairly confident that in x years, the average glo…

> Matter is not continuous and yet we don’t need atoms to predict how a metal sheet will bend.

At sufficient detail atomic structure has a huge impact on how a metal sheet bends. Metallurgy seriously investigates at this level.

Hand waving details is fine when discussing with friends, it’s not a sound foundation for serious academic research.

Also, the degree to which the weather is unpredictable 2+ weeks out is somewhat overblown. It generally snows in DC several days a year yet the odds it snows in DC 2 weeks from now is essentially zero not ~4/365. Similarly you can more accurately predict thunderstorms than a pure guess 2 months from now. We may call it climate, but a physical model of earths tilt, prevailing winds, CO2, etc is better than just historic data.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#162

Post by 141205 »

jrajav wrote: post #73
lvl155 wrote: post #61

I know this is controversial but there are so many foreign students in the PhD programs across the country. Some programs actually favor non-US students. Some professors quite explicitly pick their own race despite that being highly illegal. I think higher ed in the US became a major scam.

What does this have to do with anything here? The only common thread is that it's related to PhDs. You just have a bone to pick with our higher education being so desirable that people upend their lives to come and participate in it at great expense? This has been a significant source of soft power for the US, as both a self-reinforcing function ensuring we attract and retain top research talent, and by seeding Ameri…

I'd like to know about your experience in modern academe. I've gone to top-ranked schools in America (UT Austin, Stanford). My experience with the average foreign graduate student is not "top research talent." Most of the time you have a mid-level grifter that wants a green card, a work visa, or something else that simply lets them immigrate here. The work that they produce in exchange for that is low quality. The decline in the quality of graduate degrees may in many ways mirror the issues that tech workers have had with H-1Bs: they were intended to attract high quality talent, but became a corrupt racket.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#163

Post by abdullahkhalids »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #20
DisKarlito wrote: post #10

Economics 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…

I just went through the DSGE wiki page [1]. It says the following about the model, which if true, then I can see why it is an completely unserious model.

> Below is an example of the set of assumptions a DSGE is built upon:

    > Perfect competition in all markets
    > All prices adjust instantaneously
    > Rational expectations
    > No asymmetric information
    > The competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal
    > Firms are identical and price takers
    > Infinitely lived identical price-taking households
> to which the following frictions are added:

    > Distortionary taxes (Labour taxes) – to account for not lump-sum taxation
    > Habit persistence (the period utility function depends on a quasi-difference of consumption)
    > Adjustment costs on investments – to make investments less volatile
    > Labour adjustment costs – to account for costs firms face when changing the level of employment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_stochastic_general_equ...

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#164

Post by jrochkind1 »

supportengineer wrote: post #136
kenjackson wrote: post #40

UCSD this year said they are not taking any new math PhD students due to the fiscal situation. The world of academia is in more flux than I've seen in recent memory.

Their acceptance rate is in the 25% range. Clearly the demand is there, so why is there a "fiscal situation"? In the mid 90's I went to a university that had cafeteria-style food, and dorms with no air conditioning. You don't need Waygu beef and massages in order to teach students. There shouldn't be any "fiscal situation" in higher education. What is a university anyway? It's some buildings and classrooms with profe…

I agree with you about the excesses of university luxury, but the fact that it's just teachers and students is what makes it expensive in fact.

As technology and labor-saving devices make everything more productive, human labor gets relatively more expensive over time. It's more expensive than it was 30 years ago, much more than 60 years ago.

Any business that relies on specifically human labor that can't be automated has more and more trouble being profitable, at least at prices that any but the rich can afford.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#165

Post by avdelazeri »

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…

Cargo cult mathematics

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#166

Post by FrustratedMonky »

reactordev wrote: post #67
pempem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some long horizon impact. Really just wildly unfortunate to see a disruption that feels unique. It's not due to war, even if academics could 'flee' to another institution, its a discarding of the prioritization of knowledge generation. The thing humanity has been built on.

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

Yeah, where do people think Technology Growth comes from. GOP is all Growth, Growth, Growth, will save us, but hey lets poison the well from which it flows.

All AI growth today, is actually from Academia from 20 years ago.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#167

Post by lordnacho »

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, I did stats as part of economics around then, and it's nothing like modern DS. It overlaps a fair bit, but in practice the classical stats student is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

The practice of working with huge datasets manipulated by computers is valuable enough that you need separate training in it.

I don't know what's in a modern stats degree though, I would assume they try to turn it into DS.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#168

Post by corimaith »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #105
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.

Academia didn't choose trickle-down policy. Quite the opposite -- that was you guys, after you purged all the leftist economists in the McCarthy era. In fact, the think-tank driven economics departments of recent years are so notoriously to the right of most academic faculty that this is a point of frequent conflict.

This is just partisan conspirational nonsense. Modern Economics took the useful things from Marx and left the rest in the dustbin of history like it should. Nor do Economists advocate for "trickle-down" theory, the answer has more to do with where one is on the laffer curve.

Economists clash frequently with other fields like social sciences because such fields continue to use unfalsifiable and highly flawed epistemic tools like dialectics to advocate for debunked theories like World Systems Theory.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#169

Post by thisisit »

gbacon wrote: post #83
pempem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some long horizon impact. Really just wildly unfortunate to see a disruption that feels unique. It's not due to war, even if academics could 'flee' to another institution, its a discarding of the prioritization of knowledge generation. The thing humanity has been built on.

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

This seems to be the default defense - Is there no fraud/fat/waste etc in this thing which is being harmed?

It sounds like people don't understand bureaucracy is always imperfect. If it was perfect then you don't need to create another agency called DOGE while having Congressional Budget Office and do exactly the same things.

The question should be is there fraud/fat/waste which has a meaningful impact? If not then it changing it wouldn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that anecdotal evidence rules supreme and there are enemies every where.

"Data doesn't support a meaningful impact? I saw it with my own eyes so it should be true and the person reporting the data must have Democrat agenda"

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#170

Post by yongjik »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #80
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

> This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding federal funding'

Yeah it's more like "clamp down on higher education."

I've said it multiple times, Trump and his folks see higher education as the enemy, the anti-Christ that corrupts their vision of America. Protests and admin bureaucracy (give me a fucking break) are just convenient excuses.

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