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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

#81

Post by schainks »

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…

What! Tradeskills are clearly in demand and pay great. A good plumber where I live is over $800/hr.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#82

Post by k2enemy »

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…

> Mostly using Convex Set Theory and Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem from topology to prove the existence, uniqueness, and stability of a general equilibrium solution for a "market" of price-quantity commodity pairs. The assumptions needed to make it work are literally absurd.

This is true for the first foundational courses in micro and macro. The profession has moved beyond this and the last forty plus years of research have been looking at various relaxations of these assumptions.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#83

Post by gbacon »

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.

This seems like a broad overgeneralization unless you believe zero fat in grad schools is available for trimming.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#84

Post by raffael_de »

cyberax wrote: post #79
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…

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 produce…

Economists are stuck at a ceteris paribus level of comprehending what's going on. Forget about differential equations.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#85

Post by bonsai_spool »

logicalfails wrote: post #27
asciident wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS and DS people are getting more applied and gaining domain expertise, and can do a lot of economics work now. Academic economists, especially those who primarily do data science / big data, seem to basically be doing Masters-level data science projects for their Ph.D. The hard part in their Ph.D.s is collecting the data, which used to be a very manual job that relied on connections, but more of them are getting the…

In 2017, I listened to a highly cited Political Economist rant about how "The whole damn field is turning into a bunch of Data Monkeys" Referring to the rise of CS and DS minded economists in the field. His top student was a computer science major...

> Political Economist rant about how

Political economists are explicitly less interested in the quantitative side of economics - which is why they call themselves political economists.

Thus, the comment about data makes a lot of sense, and isn't evidence of what is going on with economists

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#86

Post by jeffbee »

Knowledge is not a hot industry right now. Being a confident moron is pretty hot, though. Best thing you can do for your career is get fired for being a jerk, post a lot about that, start a podcast, and maybe, as a stretch goal, choke a guy to death.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#87

Post by Brybry »

Loughla wrote: post #14
danbrooks wrote: post #6

Academic hiring has taken a big hit with the uncertainty and decline in federal funding.

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.

It's the plan they've been saying all along, right? Seems like Trump / Project 2025 want to push apprenticeship programs instead. [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/prep...

[3] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#88

Post by logicalfails »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #85
logicalfails wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2017, I listened to a highly cited Political Economist rant about how "The whole damn field is turning into a bunch of Data Monkeys" Referring to the rise of CS and DS minded economists in the field. His top student was a computer science major...

> Political Economist rant about how Political economists are explicitly less interested in the quantitative side of economics - which is why they call themselves political economists. Thus, the comment about data makes a lot of sense, and isn't evidence of what is going on with economists

His work and department was very quant heavy. I'd say the majority of his students spend most of their time in Python/R cleaning datasets running models

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#89

Post by sarchertech »

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.

The PhD student segregation was blatant even going back a few decades, but it was based on country of origin not race.

You’d have a Chinese professor and all his students were Chinese, an Indian professor and all hers were Indian etc… The American born professors tended to have mostly American born students, but it was a bit more mixed.

It’s hard to know whether this was based on the professor’s preference or the students’.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#90

Post by LPisGood »

gbacon wrote: post #83
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.

This seems like a broad overgeneralization unless you believe zero fat in grad schools is available for trimming.

The fat (insofar as it exists) is almost entirely not in mathematics PhD student funding.

Compared to almost any activity a university could take, it is incredibly cheap to bring in mathematics PhD students.

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