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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

#301

Post by nxm »

lkrubner wrote: post #256

"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…

Stimulus was required at beginning to avoid a recession. Biden came in when economy was well recovering and overheated the economy, especially with his 2nd stimulus bill resulting in very high inflation

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#302

Post by fluorinerocket »

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…

It's fine to want to solve interesting math problems for the sake of it I suppose but they shouldn't be so certain about things when telling politicians what policies will work

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#303

Post by ttonelli »

nxm wrote: post #301
lkrubner wrote: post #256

"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…

Stimulus was required at beginning to avoid a recession. Biden came in when economy was well recovering and overheated the economy, especially with his 2nd stimulus bill resulting in very high inflation

Right, so much stimulus that it caused inflation all over the world!

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#304

Post by oscaracso »

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.

Do you think it is charity? The PI hires a student and the student works for them, typically 3-5 years on a salary of around $35,000, often very extensive hours. If the student is talented and dedicated you can conduct more and better research than if they are not. A large proportion of the most talented and dedicated candidates will not be American. It is not a 'huge favor' it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#305

Post by blackbear_ »

giardini wrote: post #266
searine wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an excess PhD level citizens is every free countries wet dream. Its bonkers that people think it is somehow a negative. It is a recipe for innovation. Most of those people want to do things with their knowledge, not teach classes. Most go to business who use that knowledge to innovate and increase profit. Businesses literally get an excess of highly educated workers for (almost) free, and for some reason the M…

We've always had an excess of PhD's. They're made to purpose for university instruction or research. But there are far more PhDs than appropriate jobs: https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ Scroll down to the graph under "Not So Very Serious Stuff".

The purpose of a PhD is not to train people for "appropriate jobs". PhD students perform a large part of academic research, and while most of it is grunt work and produces incremental results, some brilliant people end up discovering a gold nugget and carrying their field forward many times over.

Innovation is hard, most ideas do not pan out, and most people aren't made for it. It really is a number's game: to stay competitive and innovative as a country you need enough people pushing against the frontier, including taking bets that are too risky for the private sector.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#306

Post by jltsiren »

drnick1 wrote: post #130
William_BB wrote: post #13

The article is focused exclusively on the US. What about the rest of the world? From what I've heard, it's a similar situation?

Academic salaries in the US are much higher than anywhere else. That's where every academic wants to work. Consider this, many places in Europe pay their junior faculty as little as PhD candidates in the US.

This claim makes no sense.

Academic salaries are higher in the US than in most other countries. But they are also unusually low relative to the cost of living and industry salaries. In many meaningful ways (such as home ownership), American academics enjoy a lower standard of living than their colleagues in Europe.

Moving to another country is a huge sacrifice and involves significant risks. Most people, including most academics, are not particularly motivated by high incomes. What they seek instead is stability. And that used to be the main reason why American universities were able to lure PhDs from other wealthy countries.

Because academic salaries are unusually low in the US relative to the alternatives, there is less competition for academic jobs and grants. If you take the subset of academics who are willing to move to another country, they are more likely to find a permanent position in the US than elsewhere. Less competition means that any particular candidate is more likely to be the top one for any particular position.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#307

Post by erxam »

corimaith wrote: post #245
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most logical option Well for whom? Another aspect of this problem is an economic solution can have winners and losers. An economic policy that invokes slavery as solution to labor issues may actually be 'logical' but clearly puts the interests of one group over another. Economics is just the science resource allocation after all. People have some serious biases when it comes to deciding policy on who gets what…

I've asking multiple posters to give a specific policy example to critique and so far all of you have been unable to do so, instead dancing around and critiquing vague notions of a possibility of bias without giving concrete examples. Very postmodern, but this is why actual policymakers don't listen to critique like this.

Milei's government slashed the national health care budget by 48 percent in real terms and fired over 2,000 Health Ministry workers — 1,400 in just a few days in January. These drastic moves were part of Milei's broader plan to shrink the state and remake Argentina's debt-ridden economy.

Among the most dramatic cutbacks was the dismantling of the National Cancer Institute, which halted early detection programs for breast and cervical cancer. Funding was also frozen for immunization campaigns, severely disrupting vaccine access during Argentina's first measles outbreak in decades. The National Directorate for HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis lost 40 percent of its staff and 76 percent of its budget, delaying diagnosis and treatment across the country. Emergency contraception and abortion pill distribution have also stopped.

Prescription drug prices and private health insurance premiums have surged by 250 percent and 118 percent, respectively, according to official data.

https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278391265/mileis-austeri...

Obviously, this is an article from the political side of things (I tried to cut out value judgements), but these are decisions made by actual economists like José Luis Espert, Agustín Etchebarne, Federico Sturzenegger, Alberto Benegas Lynch and probably a million others I'm not aware of.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#308

Post by altairprime »

giardini wrote: post #282
altairprime wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intelligence doesn’t imply wisdom, nor correctness, nor even common sense. You have to be able to do a certain amount of mental gymnastics to certify as an economics PhD, is all. That doesn’t affect the odds of whether economics is ultimately found to be a waste of time and money, though it’s useful enough at delaying a possible reckoning.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#309

Post by cyberax »

Findeton wrote: post #247
cyberax wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Austrian School of economics doesn't use it Well, yeah. They're basically a cult with three rules: 1. The market is perfect. 2. If the market is not perfect, then it's the fault of the government. 3. If you have any questions, see 1.

No, they don't say that the market is perfect. And if you want a cult, that's the current keynesian economics. Anyway, I don't see any way around not using math. Because value is subjective and that means it's a ranking system of preferences, not based in nominal values.

You can mathematically analyze subjective rankings. That's not at all a problem for model building.

What makes the Austrian economics "school" a cult is not the complexity of models. It's their rejection of models altogether and a refusal to make testable predictions.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#310

Post by jostylr »

cyberax wrote: post #222
Findeton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Austrian School of economics doesn't use it Well, yeah. They're basically a cult with three rules: 1. The market is perfect. 2. If the market is not perfect, then it's the fault of the government. 3. If you have any questions, see 1.

As far as I can tell, Austrians believe that analyzing based on individual preferences and actions is the key. I haven't made it very far into Mises Human Action, but I gather that was the starting point and Mises developed many theorems based on that. So if you say that allowing individuals to maximize their preferred choices given the constraints around them is "the market" and artificially restricting those choices, using acts or threats of violence, is "the government", then yes, I suppose that is their framework. One of the main things they would probably push back against is the notion to think of the market or government as independently existing entities. The government is just a collection of individuals who use violence to impose their will on others in a way that most of the society is agreeable to, at least to some extent, and, because they are individuals, they have their own preferences and actions which can also be analyzed in this framework. If you think people in the market do things that are nasty when all the actions are voluntary (and that certainly can happen), shouldn't you be even more skeptical of those who are willing to engage in violence to force the things they want to come to be to happen?

Austrians would also object to the notion of something being perfect. But they do analyze situations in which an external force interferes with the normal voluntary flow of actions and generally find that the stated outcomes (probably not the actual desired outcomes) of those external forces is generally not met. For example, rent control is often argued for as about helping more people to be housed and, empirically, that usually is not what happens when rent control is enforced. One could argue that the real intent of rent control is about making life better for the well-connected at the expense of the less well-connected and that probably does happen regularly.

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