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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

#41

Post by nxobject »

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.

The opportunities are in applications that lead to job opportunities in other departments, especially with the rise of secondary data analysis in other fields… I would sell myself as as a methodologist in a field of application, rather than an economist first.

For example, I do health systems research in an academic medical center. I work with a health economics research unit that doesn’t mint PhDs, but does hire at all stages of the academic career, and there’s been a lot of mobility for their “alums” - just not in traditional Econ departments.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#42

Post by eej71 »

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…

Its the old axiom best expressed by the philosopher Sir Michael Tyson - "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#43

Post by Retric »

ls612 wrote: post #32
DebtDeflation wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The theory you are discussing (grad micro 101 equilibrium existence) is not actually crazy if you think about what the mathematical assumptions actually imply. Really the economic assumptions boil down to "small changes in prices lead to small changes in demand" and the math is just rigorously defining small in terms of a general topology.

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.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#44

Post by bawana »

This highlights an unspoken danger of AI. People are up in arms about AI taking jobs in Human Resources, customer service, low level coding, etc. But education will take a massive hit. PhD, masters and even BS degrees will be devastated. Unless an individual has documented real benefits to a bottom line of some business, the CV will be window dressing. The only field that will continue to offer steady employment will be crime.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#46

Post by jmyeet »

I watched a video by Gary Stevenson the other day and it sheds light on our current issues.

He was a trader for Citibank and for awhile their highest paid trader. He essentially made a fortune (mostly for the bank but also for himself) by betting that after the 2008 GFC inequality would only increase, that we wouldn't go back to "normal".

He says that the best economists in the world are traders. Why? Because they have this big number over their head, their profit and loss ("P&L") that everyone at the bank can see. It also defines their bonus. All the finance and econ people in college are trying to become traders.

Then you have journalists. Any of them with an econ background have basically failed to become traders. Journalists self-select to reflect the views of their organization, famously articulated by Noam Chomsky in an interview [1].

And then you have Econ PhDs. Their only paths are to go work for academia, to produce more Econ PhDs or to work for think tanks and the like, essentially no different to the journalists. They play the same role medical researchers working for the tobacco did in the 20th century.

You see this with the dominance in Western economics academia of the Austrian School [2], which isn't precisely the same as neoliberalism but the differences are nuanced.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#47

Post by thatguy0900 »

_9ptr wrote: post #28
llmslave wrote: post #21

Economics is largely a prestige circle jerk. Anyone outside the top ivy departments has near zero chance of publishing research that gets traction. There is a small cabal of people that perpetuate this behavior. The field also just isnt that useful There are many careers like this, including management consulting and high finance. The hope is that AI flips the script and democratizes these important functions in soci…

One of the more salutary effects of AI will be the removal of bad journalism and bad science (bad in the sense of slop).

People in power (including the people running these Ai companies) love bad journalism and bad science.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#48

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

To the extent that a single person can cause economists' predictions to be off, those predictions were never good in the first place. We will always have unstable people in power, it's just human nature. If your predictions can't hold up in the face of that, then you need to refine them.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#49

Post by mothballed »

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…

There was an electric vehicle stock I was watching for awhile (WKHS) hoping for a good time to short. All their reports showed what I believed was an unviable vehicle, there was simply no way to produce it that was anywhere near gross margin positive and they didn't have the money nor access to capital to lose hundreds of millions proving that out. All the economics of the company was going to zero, and they had a ticking time bomb of debt they were about to default on.

Shortly before this debt time-bomb went off, Trump magically showed up tweeting in support of the company and alluded to a deal getting pulled off with GM. [] Of course, this ended up being spun off as Lordstown motors, a company that has failed horribly, including Hindenburg Research publishing a video of one of the few trucks they had literally catching on fire on the road while the CEO was simultaneously claiming they had hundreds of millions of dollars in solid orders (later fined by the SEC for that and barred from being an executive of a company for N years).

I still don't understand how Trump magically got involved with this penny stock at the 11th hour, but I can tell you I feel something very fishy happened there.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/08/trump-tweet-sends-penny-stoc...

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#50

Post by pempem »

kenjackson wrote: post #40

UCSD this year said they are not taking any new math PhD students due to the fiscal situation. The world of academia is in more flux than I've seen in recent memory.

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.
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