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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

#71

Post by aprilthird2021 »

pempem wrote: post #50
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.

Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and lecturers.

This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#72

Post by SJC_Hacker »

lumost wrote: post #55
bawana wrote: post #44

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…

This does point to one of the problems the article highlights. The US graduates 1385 PhDs in economics for 400 faculty positions. Those faculty positions face global competition. While it's a net benefit to US institutions to have the best tenured professors in the world, the US must also deal with the less than fully employed US PhD graduates.

> The US graduates 1385 PhDs in economics for 400 faculty positions. Those faculty positions face global competition.

If correct thats actually a pretty good ratio. In science you basically don't get a faculty position after the PhD, which lasts 5-7 years. You have to do a postdoc. Used to be 2-3 years, now its more like 5-6. To the extent its rare for any new faculty to be under the age 35.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#73

Post by jrajav »

lvl155 wrote: post #61

I know this is controversial but there are so many foreign students in the PhD programs across the country. Some programs actually favor non-US students. Some professors quite explicitly pick their own race despite that being highly illegal. I think higher ed in the US became a major scam.

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 American-educated intellectuals back to their home countries to increase our global influence. Nothing about this was bad for any party involved.

Of course, with the rampant anti-intellectualism burning a path through our institutions, we're currently doing our best to kill that and make sure we fall behind in every respect.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#74

Post by loire280 »

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…

You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.

As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.

Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#75

Post by jcbrand »

jmyeet wrote: post #46

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 ha…

The Austrian school does not dominate academia, not even close. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to says it's a heterodox school, meaning it's not mainstream.

Academia is dominated by Keynesianism.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#77

Post by kyleee »

lvl155 wrote: post #61

I know this is controversial but there are so many foreign students in the PhD programs across the country. Some programs actually favor non-US students. Some professors quite explicitly pick their own race despite that being highly illegal. I think higher ed in the US became a major scam.

Not to mention the sexual misconduct and coercion

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#79

Post by cyberax »

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…

I'm a pure math major, and I took several economics classes. The whole field was very baffling for me.

The most reliable model was the dead simple IS–LM, which is based on observations. But you don't really need a lot of math for it, so it's boring.

As a result, researchers keep trying to generalize the microeconomic behavior of people to derive macroeconomic laws. Like we do with the ideal gas laws. And this produces reams of beautiful math that you can investigate and tweak endlessly. But it doesn't seem to have a lot of predictive power.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#80

Post by bonsai_spool »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #71
pempem wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and lecturers. This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

> This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding federal funding'

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