7 ms·
Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
- helsinkiandrew 4y agohttps://archive.ph/9QeDN https://archive.ph/9QeDN
- Apocryphon 4y agoAn article about economists in The Economist, how about that.
- 0x737368 4y agoWait until you see an article about an up and coming scientist in the New Scientist!
- DavidPiper 4y agoUgh if that trend continues soon we'll be hearing about hackers on Hacker News.
- tech_tuna 4y agoYo economist dawg
- denkmoon 4y agoAre we seeing the final phase of Sillycon Valley?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- goodpoint 4y agoMost likely!
- cardanome 4y agoThe whole area running out of fresh water. Not exactly the place even more people should be flocking to. It will be an absolute shit-show in the coming years.
- raverbashing 4y agoDon't worry, the NIMBYs will oppose any works to help solve this problem. Or global warming floods.
- tremon 4y agoWe should desalinate the oceans then. No NIMBYs there to oppose the work, and plenty of fresh water when the floods come.
- engineer_22 4y agoDesal needs a lot of power. Like nuclear scale power. So it's hard to get those projects to go.
- CalRobert 4y agoMaybe we should give it to people instead of lawns and orchards.
- tech_tuna 4y agoIn the First World, that's called "xeriscaping".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- divbzero 4y agoDoes anyone recognize where that photograph was taken?
- thunderbong 4y agoI did an image search and got this - Vista Point overlooking San Jose https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&insightstoken=bcid_S2euNYklUKAE.g*ccid_Z641iSVQ&form=INCOH2&iss=SBIUPLOADGET&pc=1VIV&ptag=ICO-c9d0fc87&selectedindex=0&id=-1901795507&ccid=Z641iSVQ&exph=337&expw=600&vt=2&sim=11 https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&insightstok... https://www.dreamstime.com/vista-point-overlooking-san-jose-heart-silicon-valley-south-francisco-bay-area-california-image148597662 https://www.dreamstime.com/vista-point-overlooking-san-jose-...
- jhpankow 4y agoYep. You can see Reed-Hillview airport on the left and 680 on the right.
- hnsch2412 4y agoWell, that was a short article...
- personjerry 4y agoI wrote a blog post about something similar - I think historians are next https://www.personjerry.com/posts/the-future-historians-of-silicon-valley/ https://www.personjerry.com/posts/the-future-historians-of-s...
- hytdstd 4y agoI'm really skeptical of your argument. To start with, you mention that many presidents majored in History-- but the prestige came from the law degree that followed, not the history B.A. (which maybe is popular due to history's focus on political events). Secondly, you suggest that the study of History centers around high level decision-making. I'm not really sure about that. Assuming you're right, this is also the case in business school, where the decisions being analyzed happen to concern private enterprise rather than the government. I do like your point about the relevance of Silicon Valley history. But I suspect that it's much more important to be obsessive and passionate about a piece of technology than to know the story behind previous attempts. Palmer Lucky rebooted VR with incredible dedication to the product, not an academic understanding of the field.
- winReInstall 4y agoThe basic assumption of history being made by decision makers is wrong. Such history is made - under good circumstances, yes. If a surplus exists and no internal oppossition rears its head, due to economic stress. As soon as the economic limits of a system are reached though, leaders are just as the population under the influence of the "physics of the situation". Which is shaped by human instincts, retardations reacting to a percieved "world turned hostile". Meaning, as soon as things go bad, the decision space is very harshly restricted and the consequences are often very much out of control for those in power deciding. If humanity were a vessel, as soon as storm draws closer, the steering wheel breaks.
- bombcar 4y agoThis is broadly correct - the truly great leaders of history are rarely studied, because they noticed the current situation well in advance and adjusted things to avoid it. Same how the best ship captains are the ones who never entered the storm, not the ones that somehow survived.
- jansan 4y agoEconomists are usually a little bit late to the party.
- ralphmelish 4y agoExactly. People like Hal Varian or Susan Athey contributed nothing. That is why all this companies have Chief Economists and hire Econ PhD on a regular basis...
- fredgrott 4y agoTaleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future. If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
- nostrademons 4y agoDepends how deeply Taleb understands his own theories. You build antifragile systems by creating networks where the failure of any one component is not just expected, but actively welcomed and designed for. Distributed systems engineers understand this intuitively; any highly reliable system is constantly failing internally, but the system is set up with multiple independent paths to success, such that failure just routes traffic to the non-failing components. Silicon Valley as a whole is also set up according to this principle. Startups are supposed to fail; big companies are supposed to fail; individual municipalities are supposed to fail. The genius of Silicon Valley is in rapid experimentation and routing all the raw materials for these entities into new configurations that are succeeding. When a giant like Sun Microsystems or Western Digital goes under, the engineers all quit and work for Google. When Google goes under, they'll work for whatever the hot company of 2030 is. Same goes for capital (the early investors in Google have long since cashed out and are actively looking for the next big thing, while the bagholders will be retail investors in the rest of the country who don't know any better) and geography (the center of Silicon Valley has historically moved around between roughly Scotts Valley to San Francisco on a 5-10 year timescale). And California laws & culture are setup to encourage this, with the ban on non-compete agreements, lax enforcement of trade secret laws, people always searching for the next big thing, customers willing to try the next big thing, lawyers/accountants/engineers willing to work for stock, etc.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago> lax enforcement of trade secret laws Then how did Anthony Levandowski end up in prison?
- 4y ago
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoThe whole reason SV exploded was that people were doing things instead of waiting for the theory to show it can work. That's how software has innovated for 30 years: by practice. Giving a price to an economist, the opposite of somebody practicing and producing, is a signal something is going wrong.
- _visgean 4y agodid you read the article? They showed that the economists are designing experiments that lead to new features.
- hoseja 4y agoImplicitly distrusting the beancounters is not a bad thing.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoHey, accountants aren't economists..
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoIndeed, accountant predictions usually end up being true.
- nerdponx 4y agoThere are plenty of economists who do experimental and applied work.
- chiyc 4y agoHiring economists into tech has also been going on for many years at this point. I roomed with a PhD candidate years ago who described fairly established hiring pipelines from Economics PhD programs into industry.
- quickthrower2 4y ago> The prize, which this year comes with up to two years’ worth of university tuition and a $42,000 stipend, has gone to computer scientists, engineers, physicists and statisticians. Not much better than a PhD stipend in a lot of places.
- lumost 4y agoMeta is effectively funding a top junior engineer to work on something the find interesting for 1/10th the in-house price. Not a bad deal for them.
- amelius 4y agoWishful thinking. Most economists will be replaced by machine learning algorithms sooner than later.
- tomrod 4y agoAs an economist, I welcome this turn of events! This will free up my work time to focus on better margins than the n'th iteration of a linear regression,
- AyyWS 4y agoMy pal with a masters in math writes R and Python. My MBA friend writes .NET at an investment bank. Econ PhDs are probably making machine learning models.
- hcmacro 4y agoTINA — There is no alternative.
- spaghettiToy 4y agoThe time of innovation is over, the time of cashing in and preservation has come? I think of the automotive industry. Big tech will start to diversify, start banks, buy appliance companies, buy suppliers/vertical integration. I believe that happened to Auto in the 60s and 70s, about 20-30 years after the boom. If we (irresponsibly) use that timeline, we should expect dark days for the next 20 years. Most innovation will be outside the US. Then comes the 1990s where tech companies will sober up, cut the free food, and become competitive again. By 2010s they will be innovating again.... 40 years from now. Sorry for the doom prediction, I just saw a pattern.
- tomrod 4y agoNah, there is a ton of fantastic innovation going on, and more to come. Consider that health insurers are now mandated to release their pricing. Maybe the days of FAANG cool are sunseting, but the new availability of data sources (cubesats, etc.) gets the innovation synapses firing for this graybeard.
- scottLobster 4y agoOn the contrary, I look forward to innovation that actually has to be profitable at the end. All these bright-colored-plastic startups without a real business model will die, and ageism will lessen as experience and the ability to make money takes precedence over "culture fit" and "vision". Maybe Silicon Valley can even consider working with... the GOVERNMENT!!! You know, those institutions that actually have the authority to directly solve the problems Silicon Valley tries to make money off of? There's already some signs of this, thankfully. But I still roll my eyes hard every time some SV engineer has a moral outrage/stages a walkout because they discover their company has a DoD contract. It's long past time for SV to be brought back down a couple of levels, maybe not so far as to force them all the way back into the real world, but tree-top-level might be a good idea.
- spaghettiToy 4y ago> roll my eyes hard every time some SV engineer has a moral outrage/stages a walkout because they discover their company has a DoD You have 0 input with how weapons of war will be used in the future. I can't say I disagree.
- gullywhumper 4y agoI remember Marginal Revolution talking about this a while ago (2016): For the moment, Amazon seems to be the most aggressive recruiter of economists. It even has an Amazon Economists website for soliciting résumés. In a video on the site, Patrick Bajari, the company’s chief economist, says the economics team has contributed to decisions that have had “multibillion-dollar impacts” for the company. Another Amazon jobs site lists openings for economists. As of Friday, there were 34. Seeing this emerging job market, the National Association for Business Economics held its first meeting for technology company economists in April in San Francisco. Another is set for October in Silicon Valley. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/09/growing-tech-company-demand-economists.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/09/gr... Here's the original NYT article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/technology/goodbye-ivory-tower-hello-silicon-valley-candy-store.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/technology/goodbye-ivor...
- boringg 4y agoThread comments are predictably doom and gloom about SV. I wish people wouldn't be so predicable, life would be more interesting.
- layer8 4y agoLife is already unpredictable enough I’d say.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoEconomists are flocking to jobs because there isn’t one in economics is a more appropriate title.
- tomrod 4y agoLike many things in life, "it depends." The market for new PhDs in economics is wonderful and getting better. I haven't looked at figures in over 7 years, but the general trend has been there are ~900 PhDs minted per year, about 100-200 academic tenure track jobs, and about 1200 industry jobs (that number has probably increased now that NABE, not just AEA/ASSA, handles recruitment conference at-scale for the techonomics/industry roles). I expect the PhD minting is approximately the same and the economists roles have boomed because economists make for great data scientists, with some reasonable onboarding and tech training. It's a good market, generally.
- rwilson4 4y agoOr maybe businesses see more of a need for causal reasoning, with or without a controlled, randomized experiment. If you're making a decision, you need to have some model of how your decision affects outcomes you care about. But that model needs to be causal--predictive models can be useful starting points but may also lead you astray due to spurious correlations. Economists are trained to approach these kinds of problems methodically, so it makes total sense to me that there is high demand.
- clpm4j 4y agoOr said another way, economists are making a rational decision and choosing the highest paying industry, technology, which happens to be HQ'd in Silicon Valley.
- black_13 4y ago
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoTo pick apart the scraps of the soon dead no doubt...
- egberts1 4y agoThere goes the expansion of hexa-momic as a field. I just see dark patterns.
- irsagent 4y agoSafe to say that a double-degree in economics and computer science could be very valuable to a Silicon Valley firm.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 4y agoI wonder if this is related to the SECs aggressive hiring of economists.