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

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#201

Post by kenjackson » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 9:52 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…

"You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing."

People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a breakdown on how you pull this off.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#202

Post by Workaccount2 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #143

Workaccount2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying meteorology is not a science. I'm sure you believe in climate change, and climatology is even more removed than meteorology... I've consistently found that people talking about the unscientific nature of economics are actually just upset with what it says, similar to people who are upset with what climatology says.

Weather reports are really accurate. Economic forecasts less so.

Weather reports have the luxury of only needing to forecast out a week, and only very accurate for coming 1-3 days.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#203

Post by kenjackson » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

kelipso wrote: post #178

barumrho wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Math PhDs are usually paid stipend and pay no tuition, so each additional student is a cost to the school.

And they are primarily funded by outside, usually government, money that professors bring in through grants etc. If government doesn’t fund the professors, they can’t pay grad students. If they can’t pay grad students, then the university has to pay them directly from its own money, but the university can only pay so many grad students.

Through this whole thread, this is really the answer. Students don't just pay their own way. And the model isn't that universities give scholarships to PhD students. PhD students either get TAships (that are paid by the department) or RAships (paid by the professor through their research grants). If the school is losing (or at risk of losing) research grants then the first and easiest thing to go is grad students.

This isn't about administrative bloat or any of that other stuff. It's purely the model to fund grad students is being choked and this is one of the few levers programs have to adjust to it.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#204

Post by awesome_dude » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

kelipso wrote: post #182

awesome_dude wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers" That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the fir…

I know a current professor who has been in the same department for 15 years and the admin bloat thing is definitely real. Just tons of new people employed for who knows what. Maybe the numbers are out there maybe not (who is looking at them?) but it’s definitely not an imaginary thing or made up for political purposes.

An anecdote describing feels is political.

This is why i want hard facts.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#205

Post by jgamman » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:15 PM UTC

ActorNightly wrote: post #37

logicalfails wrote: post #9

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

Its C. the market doesn't follow traditional models anymore. The whole profession was basically centered around putting a dollar amount on risk. For example, lets say I give you a chance of either taking $1k now, or playing a game where you have 1 in 10 chance to win $200k. What would you do? The right answer is "sell" the risk to someone. For example, on the average, if I "buy" the game from 10 people, at a price of…

Orange Guy is the official mascot for NZ elections.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#206

Post by bdhe » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:15 PM UTC

lvl155 wrote: post #123

jrajav wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has everything to do with it considering where things are with current admin. Also why do you think people are sacrificing so much to study in the US? It’s mostly funded. They even get stipends. We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. But you seem to think that they’re doing us a huge favor. What an odd way to think about it.

> We are basically paying them to get their degrees here.

If they are the best and brightest of the world and typically stay back and contribute significantly above the median employee to US industry or even start their own companies, why is it framed in such a negative way?

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#207

Post by fsckboy » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

mannyv wrote: post #19

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.

you probably want a qualified economist running the AI to leverage productivity and assess/assert that output is high quality

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#208

Post by tzs » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

kelipso wrote: post #175

hluska wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny that instead of making points or adding data, you just repeat the same slogan and act like a victim. Many of us have tried to listen for a long time but we have never found any intellectual meat on the slogans. It’s boring.

What’s there to discuss any more? There is data that some ridiculous percentage of academics are on the left, and drastically so for liberal arts departments. “Everyone knows” that they filter against conservatives (maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven). Liberals deny this, so what’s the point of discussing it.…

There was a paper published in 2022 on the political leanings of scientists [1]. Here's the abstract:

> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.

An example they give of the changes in the Republican Party are the Republican position on climate change. For a good illustration at just how much Republicans have changed just take a look at the 2008 Republican Party Platform [2].

They wanted to address climate change by reducing emissions and greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency, promoting EVs and natural gas powered vehicles, and create multi-million dollar prizes for technological developments to eliminate the need for gas powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.

They also talk about the need for renewables to become mainstream and supported long-term energy tax credits to promote that.

Compare to today. Now they are opposed to nearly all of that. The current administration's position is the climate change is a hoax or scam.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3

[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#209

Post by jltsiren » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #167

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Data science is basically a marketing title given to what would have been a joint CS/statistics degree in the past. Maybe a double major, or maybe a major in one and an extensive minor in another. And it's mostly taught by people with a background in CS or statistics.

Like with most other academic fields, there is no clear separation between data science and neighboring fields. Its existence as a field tells more about the organization of undergraduate education in the average university than about the field itself.

The Finnish term for CS translates as "data processing science" or "information processing science". When I was undergrad ~25 years ago, people in the statistics department were arguing that it would have been a more appropriate name for statistics, but CS took it first. The data science perspective was already mainstream back then, as the people in statistics were concerned. But statistics education was still mostly about introductory classes of classical statistics offered to people in other fields.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#210

Post by Retric » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 11:16 PM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #192

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.

Falling back to "people are irrational", in the economic sense of rational (ie not having complete, transitive, and reflexive preferences) quickly leads to any economic claim being unfalsifiable.

Irrational isn’t the same thing as unpredictable.

Biology was forced to deal with the insanity of biochemistry because that’s what is actually happening. Economics can’t get away from the innate complexity of actual humans if it wants to be actually useful for more than just propaganda.