The collapse of the econ PhD job market • Hacker News Board

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#91

Post by sarchertech » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #69

mothballed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tends to go the other way around; politicians and academia pick economists that favor the way they'd like economics to be managed. Consider that Ludwig Von Mises, one of the most famous economists never held a tenure track position. And Milton Friedman won a nobel prize, including a study of monetary history that damned the fed for helping bring on the great depression -- later nobel prize to Bernanke for works th…

Von Mises was a hack. He got accolades as a form of early affirmative action, to somehow balance all the Keynesian economists getting awards. The whole Austrian "school" of economists basically _prides_ itself on not making predictions but using their dogma to explain whatever happens later. They always have an explanation why everything is a result of rational decisions of individuals. And if anything can't be expla…

The Austrian school is economics for people who never learned calculus.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have interesting things to say now and then, but it’s mostly just a collection of folk wisdom.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#92

Post by michaelt » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

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.

Most phd programmes are very, very low fat when it comes to salaries.

An academic CS department has to attract PhD level talent in hot areas like ML while only paying $30k a year.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#93

Post by gjsman-1000 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #67

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.

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#94

Post by bonsai_spool » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

logicalfails wrote: post #88

bonsai_spool wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I'm not disagreeing with you, and I also know political economists from that time who complain that their discipline is changing. It just has very little to do with what this article is discussing.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#95

Post by Jun8 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

Excellent book review by Noah Smith that is relevant: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-doughnut-economics.

"Here’s a very short, oversimplified history of modern economics. In the 1960s and 1970s, a particular way of thinking about economics crystallized in academic departments, and basically took over the top journals. It was very math-heavy, and it modeled the economy as the sum of a bunch of rational human agents buying and selling things in a market.

The people who invented these methods (Paul Samuelson, Ken Arrow, etc.) were not very libertarian at all. But in the 70s and 80s a bunch of conservative-leaning economists used the models to claim that free markets were great. The models turned out to be pretty useful for saying “free markets are great”, simply because math is hard — it’s a lot easier to mathematically model a simple, well-functioning market than it is to model a complex world where markets are only part of the story, and where markets themselves have lots of pieces that break down and don’t work. So the intellectual hegemony of this type of mathematical model sort of dovetailed with the rise of libertarian ideology, neoliberal policy, and so on."

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#96

Post by UncleOxidant » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

rawgabbit wrote: post #52

neom wrote: post #3

I still couldn't quite grasp the underlying issue. People are not studying economics so schools are not creating those positions, but then it seemed to draw the line to people not studying economics due to the lack of positions in academia, so chicken and egg? I guess it's just that it compounds with the hiring freezes in the public sector mentioned? I came away feeling unsatisfied, is there a bigger cultural thing g…

When I was growing up the fear of WW3 was ever present and occupied the minds of intellectuals. One of the big questions was how can we prevent another Great Depression. The Great Depression was blamed for the rise of Fascism in Europe (the collapse of Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler). There was genuine fear that Communism would also take root in the US during the Great Depression. People looked to economists f…

> The Great Depression was blamed for the rise of Fascism in Europe (the collapse of Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler).

Fascism in Europe was already well underway when the Great Depression started in '29. Weimar Germany collapsed due to the terms of Treaty of Versailles which essentially broke Germany's economy (Germany was essentially already in a depression well before the US). However, there was a very real fear in the US that the downturn that would later become known as The Great Depression would lead to fascism in the US.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#97

Post by coliveira » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

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…

You lost me when you mentioned management consulting and high finance as important functions in society.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#98

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93

reactordev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.

> That's not a great way to survive.

Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#99

Post by bonsai_spool » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93

reactordev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.

> pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity

I'm not sure what 'half' means here. It's neither true that men make up half of applicants (which are really what we should be focusing on), nor that so-called 'conservatives' make up half of this population.

Re: The collapse of the econ PhD job market

#100

Post by gjsman-1000 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #98

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral purity, at the same time as birth rate decline post-2008 began hitting, while raising prices +93% on average since 2008. That's not a great way to survive.

> That's not a great way to survive. Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.

At this point, we might be just fine. The academics won't be, but they were the ones telling everyone to wait on having kids in the first place. Demographic trickle down, biting the hand that feeds academia, is a big part of this story.

At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.