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The collapse of the econ PhD job market

chrisbrunet.com

361–370 of 386 posts

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think our impasse is for some reason you have this idea that PI's hate their work / are gaming the system. I just don't understand where you are coming from. Maybe that's true sometimes, but most all PIs I have worked with are not gaming the system. They are just working on a decades-long line of inquiry. >I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished,…

> you have this idea that PI's hate their work / are gaming the system. That’s actually not what I said. > If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for. My claim is not about good or bad. My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public. > This is grants 101 You seem to agree s…

> My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.

There is a gap between how software is written and how it is used by the public.

Clearly computers are flawed and need a complete rework.

>Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.

Software is a illuminati scam perpetrated by bitter typesetters forced to get funding in a system they don't believe in. Anyone who says otherwise is in on it.

>Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.

Are they flawless, no. Have they done more public good than any organization in history (or at least top 3)? yes.

And your response is to poo-poo the whole system because you had a bad time in your PhD. Sad.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#362
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: la…

> Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high.

The 70% "indirect cost" number had latched into my brain. I was willing to concede this point, but it looks like 50, 60, 70% are accurate as of 2025 [0].

While there exist institutions with only 30% indirect cost, every single not-especially-prestigious university in my region are retaining 60% or more.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48540

> As of May 2025, indirect cost reimbursements for [institutions of higher education (IHE)] are typically determined by an indirect cost rate that is pre-negotiated with the federal government and varies by IHE—ranging from 30% to 70%.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#363

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

The note about economists and data science in the article felt weird, because data science as a title was invented to get non-CS PhDs to do analyst work because they wanted smarter people doing it.

The point of hiring an economics PhD in industry is largely not because they learnt something but because it's a strong and expensive signal.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#364
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You don’t have to wait for care in America??? Wow!

Such a joke right? It's hard to find a good time to schedule most things if you are scheduled properly. My mom had some surgery were they said we aren't sure the day of your surgery but just in case be prepared. We'll let you know the night before, hope you are ready.

Also care speed isn't that bad in Europe, I went to a few clinics while I was there with short notice and didn't have any issues. Same as America honestly, the price difference though was way better though.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#365
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

As opposed to what? Access being limited to those who can afford exorbitant prices, and medical tourism?

Medical care will always be limited in the real world, no matter the system. There's a bunch of possibilities:

Limiting what you can be treated for (EU)

Oh and this is horrible too. When the government is forced to implement limits such as this, they always carve out their own care as a special case (yes, Parlementarians and government officials have different, better, health care, especially when it comes to long-term care, coverage outside of your own country and emergencies. The UN has it's own system as well, for example), and they impose limits.

In Belgium there's a joke. There's 2 treatments in Belgium that are not like everything else when it comes to national health insurance: anorexia for teenagers and a certain congenital disease. They are covered despite it being a BIG negative in terms of money for the insurance/state. This is strange, it doesn't match what they "usually" do at all. Now one might go and check if what the daughter of the prime minister is in treatment for (she's a teenager). One might check what the daughter of 2 prime ministers back, French side, is in treatment for (she's much older, which is strange, given that given the particular congenital disease life expectation ... without gene treatment which is normally a no-no for the national insurance. Just look up "Baby Pia" to see how much they fight it normally). I resent identifying the patients involved to this degree, but obviously their family relation to currently in power politicians matters a whole lot in this case.

From everyone else "reasonableness" is required: for example moral limits. E.g. political decisions about organ replacement: no organ replacements allowed if you've been treated for drug addiction at any point in your life. No gene treatments, no matter how life-saving they will be. Strict (and quickly changing) limits to psychological care, as politically convenient at the time. Using changes in coverage to guarantee jobs. Etc.

Limiting how much is covered (US)

Basically you paid in X, you get Which do you want?

In practice, of course, to some extent both systems are limited in both ways. You cannot get treatment for absolutely anything in the US, and you cannot really exceed what you pay in for coverage in the EU (you can, however, in both system get insurance to cover you not working for a decade). But the emphasis of the different systems is very different. Mostly the above classification is true.

What was pretty popular when it was available was medical care, limited to cheaper care. Making sure you get expertise when dealing with a broken leg or pregnancy or ... but for example explicitly excluding psychiatric problems (which are really expensive). However, this means the government has to provide a place to live for people who cannot live by themselves and so the government always insists this is included in private insurance. The problem, of course, is that it's both necessary for some people and easy to abuse to get long-term care without a job. Since the government doesn't want to pay for this largely but not entirely abuse of the system, they force it into the insurance.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#366
post #237
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the difficulty. We don't have (and likely won't ever have) the ability to read people's thoughts and say what they were thinking when they made their choices. In order to do any analysis of human choices you must impose assumptions on the process because otherwise you can say that "they were thinking xyz" and there is no way to falsify that. Economics chooses to impose assumptions that peoples obser…

Rationality isn’t an option because it’s wrong. There’s literally zero reason to invest any time into models using it whatsoever when the opportunity to look for something that actually works exists. You don’t need to read people’s minds to predict their behavior at sufficient granularity to be useful. Economics is blessed with plenty of opportunities to collect high quality real world data without needing to conduct…

> There’s literally zero reason to invest any time into models using it whatsoever

This is dumb. There are plenty of cases where predicting the rational outcome and measuring an empirical gap from it reveals opportunity.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#367
post #239
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Newtonian mechanics isn't an option because it is wrong. There’s literally zero reason to invest any time into models using it whatsoever when the opportunity to look for something that actually works exists." Do you see the issue here when I frame it this way? The core microeconomic assumption of people having preferences which are complete, reflexive and transitive (these are formal mathematical definitions! They…

> Do you see the issue here when I frame it this way? Honestly no. Newton mechanics can be accurate to 20 decimal places, that’s currently indistinguishable from reality in relevant and well understood contexts. Making Newtonian Mechanics actually useful. The core microeconomic assumption is never anywhere close to that accurate. It works except XYZ which doesn’t apply is acceptable, it never works isn’t.

> core microeconomic assumption

Rational choice isn’t an assumption for most microeconomic models once they’ve been developed.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just yesterday I was talking with some friends about the disaster that neoliberalism has been.

I see billionaires as "water-balloon" (wealth) hoarders, and I see taxes on the rich as thorns on bushes. If the politicians ever wanted to make "trickle down" work, then we need thornier bushes and to make it impossible for rich people to not go through thorny bushes.

But the whole deregulation craze has made it so that the billionaires don't even need people to help them protect their "water-balloons"...

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure it's that professors skew left, and science professors skew less to the left than other professors.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#370

"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…

Here is another shocker, this writer is also Republican, he used to write for The American Conservative.
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