Live data from Hacker News

The collapse of the econ PhD job market

chrisbrunet.com

341–350 of 386 posts

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the majority of all economists are Republican citation for that please? quick Gemini work gives me the opposite so could you please back that up? Federal Reserve Economists: A 2022 analysis of voter registration data found the ratio of Democrat to Republican economists at the Federal Reserve System to be 10.4 to 1. American Economic Association (AEA) Members: Studies have found the D:R ratio among AEA members to be…

Yep, I did one of my two majors in Econ, and from that my politics moved left. Single payer is more about better results for less money than "giving something away". The income multiplier, the additional circulation to money for the 12 months after it was received. For the bottom 60 % the money gets spent quickly and locally. Give extra to a multimillionaire they will be in much less of a hurry to spend it, and they…

Isn't single payer just a cop-out? A way to allow government (and every economist hopes: they personally) to simple force outcomes on both medical providers and consumers?

Because that will destroy medical care rather than save it. Just look what's happening in Europe (the waiting lists, and the game of attempting to force neighboring countries to carry the costs of training medical personnel)

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, that does not mean all models are equal.

Economics both describe and prescribe, so those models should be evaluated on their predictive power and on whether they have actually done any good.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#344

"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 at the Fed skew Democrat 10 to 1. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat... . In a 2006 study of economists, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2.5 to 1: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf Although it’s not really a partisan issue. Establishment republicans and establish democrats both support the central banking system.

Worth noting this might be more indicative of the state of modern US politics than any bias within the profession. Science professions as a whole overwhelmingly skew Democrat, it's not hard to imagine why.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#346

"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…

Chris Brunet is part of the Canadian turned American Alt-Right movement having been a worked at the Daily Caller and "The American Conservative" [0]. Sort of like a Canadian and less sharp Oren Cass, and basically the same ideological pipeline that created "Rebel News". He attempted a pre-doc at UChicago but didn't stand out, and had similar issues at his other conservative employers along with his personality. One o…

>they lacked the mathematical and computational sophistication needed in modern Econ.

From where I'm coming from, no amount of mathematical sophistication is going to save an economist from facing reality.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#347
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs to be stressed. It's not just uncertainty of grants. That's a given, even when fed is stable. Schools are questioning basic financial aid now. If Trump follows through on eliminating ED, no one is confident that there's a plan for any of the essential services and payments. . . Because there's never really been a plan for anything else. Higher education is scared right now.

Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating ED..." That would be a hard act to follow.

What?

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#348

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…

One of the more disturbing things is that economists both believe in it and don't believe in it.

Like, the standard Arrow Debreu market assumes that you don't carry over money balances from one day to the next, yet economists will vehemently argue in favor of being able to violate Arrow Debreu markets, but the market is in equilibrium anyway.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 choice…

If I were to summarize the insights of economic schools of thought, then we get: 1. Keynesianism: "Your spending is my income, so when there's not enough spending, the government needs to step in". 2. Monetarism: "The monetary supply directly controls the economy and is the primary reason for economic phenomena". 3. Austrian economy: the market god, the market is king, all hail the market. The first two approaches pr…

Abusive monopolies without the imposition of violence (either by the government or the company) lasting for a long time horizon? Yes, that would seem implausible in a free market. For example, if someone controlled the water pipes and charged a $1000 for a cup of water, then someone would find a way to bring in water for less and would start contracting to build their own pipes, maybe locking in long term contracts with people given the time horizon of construction. That threat alone keeps the prices low. But I also live in a city with city run water and sewage where the infrastructure is falling apart and the cost is on the order of 2k a year for normal water usage and actually would be about 1500 if no water was used. Sewage overflows, water goes brown and federal intervention is required. So a little competition might actually be useful.

As for pollution, have you looked at the history of state run industries and their pollution record? How well does the US military manage its pollution, particularly prior to the EPA when the public consciousness shifted? How many of the worst private polluters were in the service of the government (such as for the military)? There are also tales of the communist countries and their abuse of the environment. And in the context of a democracy, one would assume that if it is faithful to what people want, then to have pollution controls requires at least 50%+ of the population to want them. That sounds like a strong market incentive to provide that not to mention actual destructive pollution can be subject to claims by those injured by the polluters. While it was before the largest amount of industrial pollution, there was a time in the US before the government got involved where pollution was restricted by such considerations. Companies did not like that so the government started to regulate in order to protect the polluters. Time and time again, actual government legislation is used to either protect the guilty or it comes in when 90% of a problem has already been resolved.

Also, the first two economic schools of thought you list do not make any basic sense. If it is just spending, then why would there be boom bust signals? Why doesn't everyone just keep spending? Something else must cause a reduction in spending which ought to be pretty important. If monetary supply is the only control for the economy, then set it and forget it on the trajectory you want. Since there doesn't seem to be a stable path, then some other factor is important to consider.

For either of them, why not just print up a million dollars for every person? Do you suddenly have a supply of million dollars worth of goods for everyone? No. There is real wealth that has to be produced and that is why futzing around with money is not good enough.

The information coordinating function is that of prices which requires a relatively stable money supply for accurate signals. If the money supply is artificially tampered with, then the entrepreneurs make bad bets, thinking that either there are more resources then there are (inflationary monetary supply, boom period) or there are less (deflationary monetary supply, spending contraction). The first case leads to half-completed projects when actual resources run out across the economy (bust). This leads to recession/depression which is a time to realign the resource allocation to what is actually desired if government stays out of the way. Compare the 1920 economic downturn (hands-off government, rebounds quickly) to the 1929-1940s economic depression (heavy government intervention under both Hoover and even more Roosevelt). In the second with deflationary, it is idle resources that are the result, they get cheaper, and eventually leading to a boom. There aren't too many examples I am aware of of this though there is a train of thought that the late 1920s had inflation (to help the British with their war debt?) and then the Fed reversed course and starting deflating the money supply cause quite the shock. In any event, both are examples of problematic time periods during the price readjustment to the new value of money.

The main reason the government inflates money is so that they can spend without explicit taxing (inflation is an implicit tax for those that do not get the first rounds of the money printed) and allows for the wealth to borrow to acquire assets, where asset prices inflate with the money supply while the debt burden deflates with inflation. This is specifically to help rich people get much, much richer.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#350
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth comes from many sources. The supply-side economics wing of the GOP would claim that lower taxes and smaller, less intrusive government will allow for a higher private sector growth rate. There may be some truth to that, although the effects are probably limited compared to the development of disruptive new technologies.

They would claim that, and they would be wrong. As has been repeatedly and exhaustively demonstrated.

Amen, trickle down economics is the worst meme ever created.
Post reply on HN