21–30 of 386 posts
There are many careers like this, including management consulting and high finance. The hope is that AI flips the script and democratizes these important functions in society
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.
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…
At 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.
Economics is largely a prestige circle jerk. Anyone outside the top ivy departments has near zero chance of publishing research that gets traction. There is a small cabal of people that perpetuate this behavior. The field also just isnt that useful There are many careers like this, including management consulting and high finance. The hope is that AI flips the script and democratizes these important functions in soci…
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…
Then why aren't all the quant shops snapping them up? It's not like their hiring needs are affected much by changes in the macro economy (except maybe trading volume and liquidity).
My 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 the…
"The whole damn field is turning into a bunch of Data Monkeys"
Referring to the rise of CS and DS minded economists in the field. His top student was a computer science major...
Economics is largely a prestige circle jerk. Anyone outside the top ivy departments has near zero chance of publishing research that gets traction. There is a small cabal of people that perpetuate this behavior. The field also just isnt that useful There are many careers like this, including management consulting and high finance. The hope is that AI flips the script and democratizes these important functions in soci…
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.