Given all the revisions in the government numbers, people are waking up to the reality that most of these numbers do not reflect reality.
The collapse of the econ PhD job market
281–290 of 386 posts
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#282I'm struggling to understand why we have any current h-1b economist position when that job market is in "free-fall"? The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF CHICAGO can't find an American economist? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=...
What intelligent economist would take work from this administration? There aren’t many unintelligent economists, and it’s not the sort of thing you can fake your way to a PhD in. With the U.S. branch of the field run aground on its refusal to identify the causal link from shareholder profits to inflation, failure to deliver solutions that don’t decrease profits is a certainty. So it makes perfect sense that they’d se…
altairprime says >"There aren’t many unintelligent economists..."How can you tell? Hell, with a few notable exceptions, maybe the entire field is largely a waste of time and money.
"Show me a successful economist and I'll show you a man who has not made an accurate forecast" - attributed to former United States Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Economic theory in western nations is so hilariously skewed towards free market capitalist think that obvious models are just straight up missed, or sometimes obviously wrong conclusions are drawn. Most economics start with the understanding that the answer or cause is something about free market forces, and then work backwards. For example, when talking about the economics of healthcare (or anything else, but lets s…
> the conversation is approached from the get-go under the assumption that:
1. Healthcare is already a free market.
2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free market
Nobody does this.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#284Earlier 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.
Oddly, the actual threat to knowledge generation? Institutions that absorb societal-scale science budgets while perpetuating systemic fraud. Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every research grant. Institutions demand published work even when results do not warrant it, and demote professors honest enough to document a null result. The peer review system then rubber stamps papers with no actual rev…
> Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every research grant.
Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high. See e.g.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
"Yet the average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27% and 28% over time."
and a lot of that is simply because nobody wants to do the detailed accounting for things like: lab electricity usage, janitorial services, misc supplies.
> The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud.
This is dramatic nonsense; a simple made up number.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#285"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 post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 w…
Economists always do this shit. They talk about the unimpeded free market being some sort of saintly state of being, convince governments to implode themselves, everything goes to shit and… guess what? Apparently the economists had nothing to do with any of it?
Also, just calling the majority of economists 'Republican' doesn't explain it completely. The truth is that the Austrian School of Economics (Mises, Friedman, Hoppe) IS economics, and every single successful economist believes 100% in their gospel.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#286"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 post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 w…
He should add “Economists confidently making wishful-thinking based proclamations without a shred of evidence or even a plausible logical path.“ to the list!
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But, economists will just assume it is, because they assume everything is a free market, and then apply free market dynamics. Basically, they skip step 1, and go to step 1000. Which economist are you referring to here? It's hard to even see what specific policy conclusions you're critiquing here, beyond a vague strawman against "free market assumptions".
That isn't a vague strawman, that's a great point. Economists work from assumptions, which can be flawed in two ways: they can be blatantly wrong (see the work Kahneman and Tversky did on the rational individual hypothesis) and they can be unfalsifiable (you can't always gather data about the assumption itself). There is a good essay on this from Tirole (yet a very mainstream economist) here: https://www.tse-fr.eu/si…
> Economists work from assumptions
All models start with givens…
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#288Given all the revisions in the government numbers, people are waking up to the reality that most of these numbers do not reflect reality.
Economics has always been the art of finding new, nicer ways of saying "fuck the poor".
I'm glad more and more people see that it's complete bunk.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#289"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 post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 w…
The problem is not with economists, running modern economy is kind of like managing a state-owned corporation that can't just drop the none-performative ones, there are going to be unsolvable ills, cycling between imperfect plausible solutions, and a necessary change of path or thinking is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, everytime.
Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market
#290"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 post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 w…
Hilariously wrong to anyone who has spent any portion of their career working with actual economists. Every working economist is at the very least classic liberal/neo-liberal. It is the basis of the profession. Political economists don’t really exist now, even if they did they’d be liberal or anarcho/liberal. They worship in the church of free trade and unrestrained immigration. The most famous and influential media economists for those who are not familiar with economics or haven’t interacted with economists are people like Krugman and Robert Reich, or Larry Summers for the better educated. All deep blue democrats. Some economists may lean right and many tend to side against democrats but that’s because they all rightly fear government debt and socialism. They fear it less than tarrifs or tightened border security if you poll them. The most famous economist of all time is Marx!