17 ms·

The collapse of the econ PhD job market

233 points by Ozarkian 1y ago

cjbgkagh 1y ago
Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the economy.
- postflopclarity 1y ago
  the people with economics PhDs are not the people in control of economic policy.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    They're frequently the "oh ffs don't do that" folks, even.
- mothballed 1y ago
  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 that included the great depression held quite different or even opposing views to Friedman.
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    My sampling of my interactions with young PhD economists is that they were all Neo-Keynesian, the only people I’ve met who are of the Austrian school were Engineers. I don’t doubt that the economics profession has been shaped by politics but it appears they are and have been rather willing participants.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Economics involves studying how the economy should be managed, it is an inherently political field. Declaring one school political and another non-political is itself a political sleight of hand.
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        > Declaring one school political and another non-political If I were to make a distinction it would be that Austrian is a Positive Theory and Neo-Keynesian is a Normative theory, and I think it’s fair to say that normative theories are more open to political influence than positive ones.
      - hapless 1y ago
        One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.
        mothballed 1y ago
        I'm pretty sure UNLV still has Hoppe and they only let go of Rothbard because he died. Which pairs pretty well with the pretty laissez-faire roots of Nevada.
        luther07 1y ago
        Also Grove City College has been dedicated to the Austrian School since 1956 apparently, when they hired Hans Sennholz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sennholz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sennholz
    - nemo44x 1y ago
      It’s not surprising that aspiring economists prefer the theory which loads them with power.
    - deleted 1y ago
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  - hapless 1y ago
    Ludwig Von Mises was never qualified for a university appointment. Even today he would never have a chance at a reputable economics department -- only GMU gives any credence to that kind of witch doctor nonsense.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      It's amazing Hayek won a Nobel after being the student of such a washout.
      - hapless 1y ago
        People, both then and now, are fond of Hayek and Von Mises works in anti-communist polemic. At no point were they reputable economists.
        mothballed 1y ago
        What on earth are you talking about? Hayek won a Nobel prize for works in economics but isn't a reputable economist? Friedrich August von Hayek The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974 Born: 8 May 1899, Vienna, Austria Died: 23 March 1992, Freiburg, Germany Prize motivation: “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/facts/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - cyberax 1y ago
    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 explained by that, it's just because the government interferes with the perfection of markets.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      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.
      - reducesuffering 1y ago
        Keynesian Bernanke on famed Austrian Milton Friedman: "Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology." https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021108/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...
        linguae 1y ago
        Milton Friedman was not part of the Austrian School. Rather, he was part of the Chicago School. While both schools promote free market economics, there are differences. In fact, one of the biggest differences has to do with their views on central banking, with the Austrian School generally being against fractional-reserve currencies while the Chicago School being more sympathetic. Milton Friedman was a monetarist.
        sarchertech 1y ago
  - reducesuffering 1y ago
    Bernanke's opposing views on the Great Depression?? "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." - Bernanke https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021108/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Read "Conflicting Lessons of the Great Depression"[] chapter of Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner for a summary of differing or opposing viewpoints. From the introduction: ...As Bernanke, while still only a member of the Fed’s board of governors, said in an address at a ninetieth-birthday celebration for Friedman: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again” (2002b). This seeming similarity, however, disguises significant differences in Friedman’s and Bernanke’s approaches to financial crises... https://www.sjsu.edu/people/tom.means/courses/econsymposium/s1/tir_15_04_1_hummel.pdf https://www.sjsu.edu/people/tom.means/courses/econsymposium/...
neom 1y ago
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 going on here?
- rawgabbit 1y ago
  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 for an explanation and a cure. For better or worse, the elites believe they have an answer. My understanding is that the consensus is that government must move heaven and earth to keep the financial machinery (banks and payment services)flowing. To prevent a chain reaction where the collapse of a big bank would lead to the preventable closures of many businesses and loss of jobs.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    > 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.
    - corimaith 1y ago
      >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). This is completely wrong. Weimar Germany endured significant troubles in the early years due to political instability and reparations, but managed to overcome them with American loans and rewrite some terms for a decade or so of "Golden Years" before the Wall Street Crash, in which loans were withdrawn and the unemployment then rapidly rose. So while the Treaty played a role, the Great Depression is the direct cause for Weimar Germany's eventual collapse. If they had 10 more years to recover, or if certain political moves were done differently, Fascism likely could have avoided.
dleeftink 1y ago
A specific market collapse, or a general one? --- Quick edit: I also dislike the persistent narrative of 'guaranteed' placement for certain degrees and occupations. This assumes a stagnant market and skill-set that does not at all hold for current-day markets.
- closetohome 1y ago
  The "people think they're guaranteed a job" narrative is because the author is a right-wing journalist who "exposes" academics.
- cinntaile 1y ago
  That will depend on if it fits the narrative or not.
danbrooks 1y ago
Academic hiring has taken a big hit with the uncertainty and decline in federal funding.
- abirch 1y ago
  Many academics that I've talked with say that their departments are cutting back to 50% of last year's PhD enrollment due to budget cuts and uncertainty. These were in biology and chemistry.
- Loughla 1y ago
  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.
  - Brybry 1y ago
    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-president-donald-j-trump-modernizes-american-workforce-programs-for-the-high-paying-skilled-trade-jobs-of-the-future/#:~:text=focus%20on%20registered%20apprenticeships https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/preparing-americans-for-high-paying-skilled-trade-jobs-of-the-future/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/prep... [3] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf#page=626 https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
  - giardini 1y ago
    Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating ED..."< That would be a hard act to follow.
    - Loughla 1y ago
black_13 1y ago
[dead]
logicalfails 1y ago
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
- asciident 1y ago
  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 them or imputing them from public sources so it's not that impressive anymore. Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
  - logicalfails 1y ago
    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...
    - bonsai_spool 1y ago
      > 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
      - logicalfails 1y ago
        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
DisKarlito 1y ago
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.
- DebtDeflation 1y ago
  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 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.
  - Onavo 1y ago
    Then why aren't all the quant shops snapping them up? It's not like their hiring needs are affected much by changes in the macro economy (except maybe trading volume and liquidity).
    - krackers 1y ago
      Borrowing a line from Rentec, probably because they'd rather prefer pure-math or physics people not "tainted" by economic dogma
      - ls612 1y ago
        On the other hand Cliff Asness and AQR are perfectly happy to rake in money by using the "dogma" as you describe it to analyze and trade in financial markets.
    - DebtDeflation 1y ago
William_BB 1y ago
The article is focused exclusively on the US. What about the rest of the world? From what I've heard, it's a similar situation?
- drnick1 1y ago
  Academic salaries in the US are much higher than anywhere else. That's where every academic wants to work. Consider this, many places in Europe pay their junior faculty as little as PhD candidates in the US.
  - jltsiren 1y ago
    This claim makes no sense. Academic salaries are higher in the US than in most other countries. But they are also unusually low relative to the cost of living and industry salaries. In many meaningful ways (such as home ownership), American academics enjoy a lower standard of living than their colleagues in Europe. Moving to another country is a huge sacrifice and involves significant risks. Most people, including most academics, are not particularly motivated by high incomes. What they seek instead is stability. And that used to be the main reason why American universities were able to lure PhDs from other wealthy countries. Because academic salaries are unusually low in the US relative to the alternatives, there is less competition for academic jobs and grants. If you take the subset of academics who are willing to move to another country, they are more likely to find a permanent position in the US than elsewhere. Less competition means that any particular candidate is more likely to be the top one for any particular position.
mannyv 1y ago
At some level you can run all the econometric models you want to get an answer, but you can just ask an LLM and you'll probably get an answer that's just as accurate.
- jgalt212 1y ago
  Only if you're dealing with easily available and clean data. And that's a big if. A commenter below was talking data science skills, and I think if you have data science skills and econometric skills you're probably in good shape job-wise.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  you probably want a qualified economist running the AI to leverage productivity and assess/assert that output is high quality
llmslave 1y ago
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 society
- nextworddev 1y ago
  Doubtful the AI democratizes this. If anything it centralizes power and capital even more.
- _9ptr 1y ago
  One of the more salutary effects of AI will be the removal of bad journalism and bad science (bad in the sense of slop).
  - contagiousflow 1y ago
    Can I ask you why you think that will happen?
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      Because the job can be done by AI. Yes, I was unprecise to the point of being wrong.
      - contagiousflow 1y ago
        Why wouldn't you assume that AI doing it would only increase the amount of bad journalism and bad science? If the cost of something goes down shouldn't the amount of it increase?
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    Wrong. The bad journalism just now uses AI.
thro484krjok 1y ago
[flagged]
ls612 1y ago
I was on the market last year as a fairly strong candidate, my advisors expected me to get a good tenure track job in a Finance department. I had first round interviews at multiple top 10 departments before things really went pear-shaped. Here's what actually happened. The market looked pretty normal until November 5th, and then after that things went downhill. First the Fed Board of Governors stopped hiring (some regional banks kept hiring but had their offers explode on Jan 20). Then in January universities which had already done their first round interviews started imposing hiring freezes and cancelling flyouts. At the same time the Federal Government completely stopped hiring with DOGE coming in. Private sector hiring has been down for a few years since the ZIRP era ended so that part isn't new. In the end I got a postdoc at a pretty good US university and will go on the market again in 2026-2027 with a much stronger portfolio than I had last year. Hopefully that will be enough for me, but I know for many others they may not be so lucky.
- zzleeper 1y ago
  Good luck; we probably crossed paths (I was helping a bit on the hiring side at some point). A postdoc is a really great option, I've seen lots of people do that before going for a bschool so it can definitely can work. BTW one other thing besides what you mentioned is not just the freeze but the firings. FDIC lost 30% of staff, BOG is going to reduce maybe 10%, CFPB is no more, etc. so the market is actually being flooded with senior economists. They won't compete directly with the posts you want but still flood the market.
complex_pi 1y ago
Welcome to the world. A PhD guarantees nothing, tenured position barely exist anymore. Weird that economists did not realize this yet...
- paulpauper 1y ago
  agree. All job markets are 'bad'. The number of openings is greatly exceeded by people applying. this is true for pretty much everything.
- hyperbovine 1y ago
  A lot of the trends identified in this article are ubiquitous across academia, and in fact much worse in humanities -- having 99 TT positions open in a year would make my friends in the English department swoon! It's just that economics, as a field, is better at making charts and loudly complaining about things.
kenjackson 1y ago
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.
- pempem 1y ago
  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.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      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.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        > That's not a great way to survive. Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.
        gjsman-1000 1y ago
        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.
bawana 1y ago
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.
- higginsniggins 1y ago
  Dont forget the worlds oldest profession.
  - matthewfcarlson 1y ago
    AI girlfriends are coming for that too
  - whatever1 1y ago
    Thank god TikTok and Insta are grooming us already. We will be ready!
- lumost 1y ago
  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.
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    > 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.
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jmyeet 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
- jcbrand 1y ago
  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.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > 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. This is kinda like the difference between climate science vs. weather forecasting. Being good at making short-term returns without giving a shit about the long-term damage it does is not the same as economic policy.
lvl155 1y ago
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.
- jrajav 1y ago
  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.
  - lvl155 1y ago
    It has everything to do with it considering where things are with current admin. Also why do you think people are sacrificing so much to study in the US? It’s mostly funded. They even get stipends. We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. But you seem to think that they’re doing us a huge favor. What an odd way to think about it.
    - bdhe 1y ago
      > We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. If they are the best and brightest of the world and typically stay back and contribute significantly above the median employee to US industry or even start their own companies, why is it framed in such a negative way?
      - throw-the-towel 1y ago
SoftTalker 1y ago
The "Dismal Science"? It has never been a science. You can't run controlled experiments outside of small microeconomic scenarios, so nothing is falsifiable or repeatable. It's all just arguing about correlation and causation.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  This is like saying meteorology is not a science. I'm sure you believe in climate change, and climatology is even more removed than meteorology... I've consistently found that people talking about the unscientific nature of economics are actually just upset with what it says, similar to people who are upset with what climatology says.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Weather reports are really accurate. Economic forecasts less so.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Weather reports have the luxury of only needing to forecast out a week, and only very accurate for coming 1-3 days.
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    I agree with you that it means large amounts of agreed upon science would not fit that definition of science. Don’t you agree that’s an interesting and consistent observation though?
- tzs 1y ago
  By that argument in addition to meteorology that another commenter already mentioned (and more generally atmospheric science), astronomy, most of geology, cosmology, astrophysics, most planetary science, most oceanography, and seismology are not sciences.
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jeffbee 1y ago
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.
Jun8 1y ago
Excellent book review by Noah Smith that is relevant: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-doughnut-economics 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."
lenerdenator 1y ago
>For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm. So, the field is being consumed by the ideology it espoused? Automation and leaner government budgets were pushed hard by a number of schools of economic thought. Of particular note is this section: > REASON 4: Lying About Inflation If you were there during the pandemic money printing, you remember the sequence all too well: first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation, then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” and finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all. Each step was wrong, and each was delivered with smug certainty. Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust. This isn't about protecting Democratic policy narratives. Arguably the single worst thing for inflation, the Paycheck Protection Program, happened under Trump. You had business owners taking out loans for pretty much anything and everything they thought they could possibly justify as business-related, no matter how tenuous that justification was, and then of course the government forgave massive amounts of it. Since business owners already tend to have more money and capital, this fueled their consumption of then-scarce products and services even more. Laws of supply-and-demand kicked in, which shouldn't be hard for the author to understand. Ultimately the inflation that happened during the pandemic was due to the fact that for the last 45-ish years, the US has been running deficits not just in the public sector, but the private sector as well. Our economy is designed to run on debt that suddenly, people couldn't pay on time. They then looked to the government to offer a backstop, and since federal, state, and local governments have no "rainy day" fund to speak of, the federal government had to fire up the money printers.
nothrowaways 1y ago
The scientific community needs a new safe haven. It would be 1. A country specifically tailor made for scientists and engineers. 2. A country with no first class citizens Something like Switzerland or Dubai for science and engineering, but made from scratch.
- glitchc 1y ago
  And who would do the remaining jobs? I assume scientists are too busy and important to farm, build infrastructure (roads, bridges) or provide healthcare.
  - nothrowaways 1y ago
    It did not say scientist-only. HN is deteriorating smh.
    - the_sleaze_ 1y ago
      It was greenspans favorite book after all
- TMWNN 1y ago
  >2. A country with no first class citizens Wait. A country that does not favor its own citizens? At all? Why even have "citizenship" at all? Put another way, why would anyone want to move there to become a citizen of said country? Good grief. This reminds me of the heights (depths) of /r/redditisland.
  - nothrowaways 1y ago
    Do you even understand what first class citizen means?
awesome_dude 1y ago
The biggest problem research has is that its almost never clear what the result will be to the bottom line. People complain bitterly about two things with research 1. That it's looking at obvious things and they could have told the answer (What's really happened is some researcher has actually looked into some common school of thought to check its reliability) 2. That there's no "use" for the thing be researched (it's absurd). This type of research is really "document phenomena, try to understand it" the use of that phenomena is often not clear for decades, or centuries (our cryptographic systems currently rely on research into math that was once considered absolutely worthless)
declan_roberts 1y ago
I'm struggling to understand why we have any current h-1b economist position when that job market is in "free-fall"? The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF CHICAGO can't find an American economist? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=2025 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=...
- codyklimdev 1y ago
  Why hire an American who will ask for benefits, significant time off, work/life balance, etc. when you can hire an H-1B that you can treat like an indentured servant?
  - kypro 1y ago
    Plus most PhD have spent their whole life in education and haven't got any real work experience.
- altairprime 1y ago
  What intelligent economist would take work from this administration? There aren’t many unintelligent economists, and it’s not the sort of thing you can fake your way to a PhD in. With the U.S. branch of the field run aground on its refusal to identify the causal link from shareholder profits to inflation, failure to deliver solutions that don’t decrease profits is a certainty. So it makes perfect sense that they’d seek competent help offshore: any untried port in a storm of your own making.
  - giardini 1y ago
    altairprime says >"There aren’t many unintelligent economists..."< How can you tell? Hell, with a few notable exceptions, maybe the entire field is largely a waste of time and money. "Show me a successful economist and I'll show you a man who has not made an accurate forecast" - attributed to former United States Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
    - altairprime 1y ago
bArray 1y ago
Can confirm that UK computer science PhD positions decrease too. This is largely due to departments and grants tightening their belts.
zackmorris 1y ago
Well ya, when the richest and most powerful people/corporations/nations in the world actively work against established economic theory. Trickle down economics, austerity, regressive tax policies, tariffs, appeasement, lax antitrust enforcement, slashing capital gains and inheritance tax, privatization of natural monopolies, quantitative easing instead of holding investment firms accountable, foreign aid for war instead of peace, defunding public universities to manufacture a student loan crisis, public sector layoffs, subsidizing extractive industries instead of renewables, sub-minimum wage in restaurants/farms/prisons, underpaying teachers and healthcare workers, rent seeking, payola, collusion, duopoly, usury, unpaid domestic labor, wage slavery.. And the inevitable aftermath of wishing the worst for others: stagflation, underemployment, civil unrest, eventually recession, depression and a raid on concentrated wealth if/when supply-side economics collapses because nobody has any money to buy anything anymore. In spite of overwhelming evidence of public and private abuses, nobody cares what the experts think anymore. Because it's obvious to everyone that so much is wrong. People who try to help get blamed, people who participate in the grift get rewarded as things get worse. Unfortunately as wealth inequality consumes us under self-colonization, all liberal arts degrees trend towards worthless. We're left with declining service work after passing peak wages and peak employment due to the rise of AI. Spending the rest of our lives fighting over scraps after the rug was already pulled out from under us due to the Dot Bomb, Housing Bubble, pandemic, private equity driving housing costs to the point of insanity and a trade war of choice. Or we could like, follow economic theory and stuff. Do the opposite of everything I just mentioned. Can't have the Econ PhDs telling us that!
youainti 1y ago
This turned out longer than I expected. TL:DR; I'm not sure what he is trying to do, but he gets some things right, some things wrong, and some things are not applicable. Points 1-2 seem to match what I am seeing as an Econ PhD student on the market and what I am hearing from others. Point 3 may be happening, but this assumes that AI is going to be doing this in a way capable of producing research AND that there is a limited amount of research to be done. As someone who has used various AI agents as help in cleaning data, exactly what he suggested it does, I suspect that this will increase the value of the positions that use Econ PhDs because they can now do more. The thing that bothers me most about this post is his point 4, and it seems so wrong to me to the degree it makes me wonder about the rest of it. I don't know what he got the following perspective. 1. first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation 2. then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” 3. finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all In contrast, I've seen something different. 1. I saw debate over how people would save/spend rebate checks and how that would feed through to the economy. Some people speculated that it wouldn't lead to inflation based on the results of the 2008-2009 recession. Additionally, most economists I spoke to thought that the supply shocks due to the pandemic would lead to temporary inflation. If he got the impression that there was a "confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation", I would like to know who he was listening to. 2. The inflation during the pandemic _was_ transitory. Take a look at [0-2], mildly different views of one measure of inflation. The high inflation period due to the pandemic is over. Persistent inflation at the Year over Year levels seen early in the pandemic would mean we're seeing 7% inflation, not the 3%ish we're actually seeing. Federal interest rate targets would probably be in the 7APY-9APY region as a result. Part of the confusion here is due to the difference between inflation and price levels. Inflation is the rate of change of price levels. Yes we underwent inflation, and the higher prices accrued[2], but inflation rates dropped and we still paid the previously inflated prices. That is normal. The 2020 inflation bout did come at the end of a period with absurdly low inflation though; the decade between 2010 and 2020 had deals such as the $5 footlong from subway and the $5 hot and ready from little ceasars last almost the whole decade. Looking at [0] again, that time had historically low inflation. So suddenly being exposed to relatively high inflation was novel and painful. 3. I can see how this might seem like a thing. There was a whole issue where the CPI levels and the costs of living (felt inflation) differed a whole lot. There are reasons for this, such as changing consumption patterns (which change faster than the CPI basket of goods), and is due to the fact that CPI is trying to measure how prices change in a method that is comparable across time. It is not trying to measure how expensive the lives of consumers are. Especially when you use the typically presented measures of CPI which does not include food or energy (these are excluded because they are volatile). Add in income cuts and rising food prices and suddenly the budget situation of most Americans was getting more difficult. So yeah, there was a disconnect between households experience and the measures of inflation. This wasn't lying, this was people not understanding how economic statistics work and then misusing them. Finally, the author may be ideologically motivated, e.g. [3] where he stated: "You can participate in this societal trend, dear math world, by kicking this deranged, murderous tranny out of your ranks. Don’t let him infect the next generation of students with the woke mind virus — or, at the very least, don’t hire him in your department, where he will surely be a magnet for lawsuits." > For clarity, the use of the word "murderous" is due to the discussion about some posts by a math PhD student that are somewhat threatening. The use is on topic. I bring this up not to attack the author but to raise questions about the author's rhetorical goals. I start by stating that I don't actually know what he is trying to achieve. If his point is that the Econ Job market is has been rough the last 3 years and is getting worse; that is well known among economists and hopefully is known by those looking at doing a PhD in economics. The point he explains at the introduction and conclusion is that an econ PhD doesn't have the same returns or guarantees it used to (e.g. compared to 10 years ago). That is true and points 1-2 are all that is needed to make that point. It also seems like he may be trying to call into question the value of some or all of the following: academic economists, economic training, or higher education. If that is his goal, then 1-2 are beside the point, 3 is speculation and only somewhat pertinent, and 4 is applicable but wrong. The phrasing in the title seems to point to this. Is this a complete collapse? I don't know. We'll know in 5 years though. [0]: ANNUAL CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA [1]: MONTHLY CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N [2]: CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (Price levels) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL [3]: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-university https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...
AlexCornila 1y ago
Well the economic framework they have been trained for is collapsing so there’s that
whycome 1y ago
There's that one guy who used it to become prime Minister of Canada. Not even a politician.
tomhowsalterego 1y ago
Econ PhDs sound fucking useless. They would have served the economy better being plumbers, welders and machinists.
pessimizer 1y ago
The need for think tanks is gone, there's no need to convince the public of anything anymore, you can just do it. Trump is wildly unpopular, and he's the most popular leader in the west. Still, the most authoritarian and neoliberal trash can simply be rammed through by these "centrist" melts with 15% approval ratings. The way they used to keep them in power is by running a Nazi against them and making you choose, now people (rightfully) prefer the Nazis because at least they believe in something. So now they lawfare the Nazis so they can run unopposed (or NPC-opposed), or blackmail and bribe them into becoming centrists themselves. If we can put Al Qaeda in a suit and lap at his feet, we can certainly make Meloni into a Euro-warrior. No need to convince anyone of anything, no need to have the support of a majority of the public, no restraints on infinite accumulation... what do you need some crypto-freshwater "why homelessness is actually the most accurate sign of prosperity" freak any more? Can't they just call Cass Sunstein? Did the numbers ever really matter? These guys specialized in telling you why the numbers were deceptive, and the real problem was any restraint on predators. Academic economics is newly-pointless marketing of ideas popular (i.e. profitable) among elites (i.e. their bosses.) They are entirely unconcerned about the wealth of nations (nationalism!) or the wealth of citizens (communism!). When comfortable monopolies dominate, and the process of democracy is devalued ("dumb people shouldn't vote, we should follow the consensus!"), the market for marketing goes down. It's funny how he pretends he thinks lying about inflation was decisive, as if the people affected by inflation get to hire economists, or wouldn't be more interested in becoming an economist to prove a bunch of liars wrong. Lying about inflation, or whatever else, is the job. The real message: "If you're a Democrat considering your rebrand, hire me as an advisor. I'll be your Ezra Klein, but with math!"
thatguymike 1y ago
Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)
chmorgan_ 1y ago
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chokominto 1y ago
Did they do extrapolation using paint? Omg
- estetlinus 1y ago
  Thank you for noticing. What on EARTH was that abomination?
lkrubner 1y ago
"Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust." This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 when the President was a Republican, the majority of all economists are Republican, but somehow this writer blames this on Democrats? The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.
- dsjoerg 1y ago
  > the majority of all economists are Republican citation for that please? quick Gemini work gives me the opposite so could you please back that up? Federal Reserve Economists: A 2022 analysis of voter registration data found the ratio of Democrat to Republican economists at the Federal Reserve System to be 10.4 to 1. American Economic Association (AEA) Members: Studies have found the D:R ratio among AEA members to be around 4:1 or 3.8:1. Economics Faculty: One study reported that Democrats outnumber Republicans 4.5:1 among economics faculty at 40 leading universities. General Survey of Economists: A 2003 survey of American Economic Association members found the voting ratio of Democrat to Republican to be 2.5:1. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=Likewise%2C%20I%20find%20that%20economists,System%20(48.5%3A1). https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat... https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20Langbert%20(2020),working%20outside%20academia%20and%20government. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat... https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=Previous%20studies%20look%20at%20the,faculty%20at%2040%20leading%20universities. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat...
  - snapplebobapple 1y ago
    I did a couple economics degrees at a decent school in Canada in a conservative province and even there 80% of the people were left wing wackadoos so I call bs.
tmaly 1y ago
Given all the revisions in the government numbers, people are waking up to the reality that most of these numbers do not reflect reality.
- erxam 1y ago
  Economics has always been the art of finding new, nicer ways of saying "fuck the poor". I'm glad more and more people see that it's complete bunk.
fastaguy88 1y ago
When I think of things being in free-fall, I think of them going down. Not going up more slowly.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Reminds me of my favorite monetary econ Youtuber who lives in Poland: https://youtube.com/@econlessons https://youtube.com/@econlessons
coolThingsFirst 1y ago
So like CS degrees
imtringued 1y ago
One of the biggest paradoxes in economics is that economists cannot justify their own existence. They are like historians without history.
AngryData 1y ago
I think a big part of the problem is people are recognizing that many modern economic theories and models are kind of trash and failing to make accurate predictions today. Challenging popular economic theory will often get someone labelled a crackpot, regardless of how good or bad their models and predictions are. And the field and players that are in play and have some power to influence or change policies are deeply embroiled with political dogma and will fight tooth and nail against anything that might make their previously established beliefs and education obsolete or god forbid show they were just straight up wrong from the start.
more_corn 1y ago
This article is reasonable sounding bullshit. The logical house of cards is built upon several tenuous or flat out outrageous assumptions that do not resemble reality. I can’t take the author seriously.
juleiie 1y ago
Economists are “scientists” as much as parapsychologists. There are several conflicting market theories and no one knows how it precisely works or they would be insanely rich from the stock market. When were economists right once before some event? They always claim they have seen it coming after the dust settles. Virtually useless job akin to future tellers

233 points by Ozarkian 1y ago

cjbgkagh 1y ago

Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the economy.

postflopclarity 1y ago
the people with economics PhDs are not the people in control of economic policy.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  They're frequently the "oh ffs don't do that" folks, even.
mothballed 1y ago
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 that included the great depression held quite different or even opposing views to Friedman.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  My sampling of my interactions with young PhD economists is that they were all Neo-Keynesian, the only people I’ve met who are of the Austrian school were Engineers. I don’t doubt that the economics profession has been shaped by politics but it appears they are and have been rather willing participants.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Economics involves studying how the economy should be managed, it is an inherently political field. Declaring one school political and another non-political is itself a political sleight of hand.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      > Declaring one school political and another non-political If I were to make a distinction it would be that Austrian is a Positive Theory and Neo-Keynesian is a Normative theory, and I think it’s fair to say that normative theories are more open to political influence than positive ones.
    - hapless 1y ago
      One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.
      - mothballed 1y ago
        I'm pretty sure UNLV still has Hoppe and they only let go of Rothbard because he died. Which pairs pretty well with the pretty laissez-faire roots of Nevada.
      - luther07 1y ago
        Also Grove City College has been dedicated to the Austrian School since 1956 apparently, when they hired Hans Sennholz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sennholz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sennholz
  - nemo44x 1y ago
    It’s not surprising that aspiring economists prefer the theory which loads them with power.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1y ago
- hapless 1y ago
  Ludwig Von Mises was never qualified for a university appointment. Even today he would never have a chance at a reputable economics department -- only GMU gives any credence to that kind of witch doctor nonsense.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    It's amazing Hayek won a Nobel after being the student of such a washout.
    - hapless 1y ago
      People, both then and now, are fond of Hayek and Von Mises works in anti-communist polemic. At no point were they reputable economists.
      - mothballed 1y ago
        What on earth are you talking about? Hayek won a Nobel prize for works in economics but isn't a reputable economist? Friedrich August von Hayek The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974 Born: 8 May 1899, Vienna, Austria Died: 23 March 1992, Freiburg, Germany Prize motivation: “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/facts/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...
- deleted 1y ago
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- cyberax 1y ago
  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 explained by that, it's just because the government interferes with the perfection of markets.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    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.
    - reducesuffering 1y ago
      Keynesian Bernanke on famed Austrian Milton Friedman: "Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology." https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021108/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...
      - linguae 1y ago
        Milton Friedman was not part of the Austrian School. Rather, he was part of the Chicago School. While both schools promote free market economics, there are differences. In fact, one of the biggest differences has to do with their views on central banking, with the Austrian School generally being against fractional-reserve currencies while the Chicago School being more sympathetic. Milton Friedman was a monetarist.
        sarchertech 1y ago
- reducesuffering 1y ago
  Bernanke's opposing views on the Great Depression?? "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." - Bernanke https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021108/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...
  - mothballed 1y ago
    Read "Conflicting Lessons of the Great Depression"[] chapter of Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner for a summary of differing or opposing viewpoints. From the introduction: ...As Bernanke, while still only a member of the Fed’s board of governors, said in an address at a ninetieth-birthday celebration for Friedman: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again” (2002b). This seeming similarity, however, disguises significant differences in Friedman’s and Bernanke’s approaches to financial crises... https://www.sjsu.edu/people/tom.means/courses/econsymposium/s1/tir_15_04_1_hummel.pdf https://www.sjsu.edu/people/tom.means/courses/econsymposium/...

neom 1y ago

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 going on here?

rawgabbit 1y ago
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 for an explanation and a cure. For better or worse, the elites believe they have an answer. My understanding is that the consensus is that government must move heaven and earth to keep the financial machinery (banks and payment services)flowing. To prevent a chain reaction where the collapse of a big bank would lead to the preventable closures of many businesses and loss of jobs.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  > 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.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    >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). This is completely wrong. Weimar Germany endured significant troubles in the early years due to political instability and reparations, but managed to overcome them with American loans and rewrite some terms for a decade or so of "Golden Years" before the Wall Street Crash, in which loans were withdrawn and the unemployment then rapidly rose. So while the Treaty played a role, the Great Depression is the direct cause for Weimar Germany's eventual collapse. If they had 10 more years to recover, or if certain political moves were done differently, Fascism likely could have avoided.

dleeftink 1y ago

A specific market collapse, or a general one? --- Quick edit: I also dislike the persistent narrative of 'guaranteed' placement for certain degrees and occupations. This assumes a stagnant market and skill-set that does not at all hold for current-day markets.

closetohome 1y ago
The "people think they're guaranteed a job" narrative is because the author is a right-wing journalist who "exposes" academics.
cinntaile 1y ago
That will depend on if it fits the narrative or not.

danbrooks 1y ago

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

abirch 1y ago
Many academics that I've talked with say that their departments are cutting back to 50% of last year's PhD enrollment due to budget cuts and uncertainty. These were in biology and chemistry.
Loughla 1y ago
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.
- Brybry 1y ago
  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-president-donald-j-trump-modernizes-american-workforce-programs-for-the-high-paying-skilled-trade-jobs-of-the-future/#:~:text=focus%20on%20registered%20apprenticeships https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/preparing-americans-for-high-paying-skilled-trade-jobs-of-the-future/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/prep... [3] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf#page=626 https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
- giardini 1y ago
  Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating ED..."< That would be a hard act to follow.
  - Loughla 1y ago

black_13 1y ago

[dead]

logicalfails 1y ago

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

asciident 1y ago
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 them or imputing them from public sources so it's not that impressive anymore. Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
- logicalfails 1y ago
  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...
  - bonsai_spool 1y ago
    > 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
    - logicalfails 1y ago
      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

DisKarlito 1y ago

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.

DebtDeflation 1y ago
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 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.
- Onavo 1y ago
  Then why aren't all the quant shops snapping them up? It's not like their hiring needs are affected much by changes in the macro economy (except maybe trading volume and liquidity).
  - krackers 1y ago
    Borrowing a line from Rentec, probably because they'd rather prefer pure-math or physics people not "tainted" by economic dogma
    - ls612 1y ago
      On the other hand Cliff Asness and AQR are perfectly happy to rake in money by using the "dogma" as you describe it to analyze and trade in financial markets.
  - DebtDeflation 1y ago

William_BB 1y ago

The article is focused exclusively on the US. What about the rest of the world? From what I've heard, it's a similar situation?

drnick1 1y ago
Academic salaries in the US are much higher than anywhere else. That's where every academic wants to work. Consider this, many places in Europe pay their junior faculty as little as PhD candidates in the US.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  This claim makes no sense. Academic salaries are higher in the US than in most other countries. But they are also unusually low relative to the cost of living and industry salaries. In many meaningful ways (such as home ownership), American academics enjoy a lower standard of living than their colleagues in Europe. Moving to another country is a huge sacrifice and involves significant risks. Most people, including most academics, are not particularly motivated by high incomes. What they seek instead is stability. And that used to be the main reason why American universities were able to lure PhDs from other wealthy countries. Because academic salaries are unusually low in the US relative to the alternatives, there is less competition for academic jobs and grants. If you take the subset of academics who are willing to move to another country, they are more likely to find a permanent position in the US than elsewhere. Less competition means that any particular candidate is more likely to be the top one for any particular position.

mannyv 1y ago

At some level you can run all the econometric models you want to get an answer, but you can just ask an LLM and you'll probably get an answer that's just as accurate.

jgalt212 1y ago
Only if you're dealing with easily available and clean data. And that's a big if. A commenter below was talking data science skills, and I think if you have data science skills and econometric skills you're probably in good shape job-wise.
fsckboy 1y ago
you probably want a qualified economist running the AI to leverage productivity and assess/assert that output is high quality

llmslave 1y ago

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 society

nextworddev 1y ago
Doubtful the AI democratizes this. If anything it centralizes power and capital even more.
_9ptr 1y ago
One of the more salutary effects of AI will be the removal of bad journalism and bad science (bad in the sense of slop).
- contagiousflow 1y ago
  Can I ask you why you think that will happen?
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    Because the job can be done by AI. Yes, I was unprecise to the point of being wrong.
    - contagiousflow 1y ago
      Why wouldn't you assume that AI doing it would only increase the amount of bad journalism and bad science? If the cost of something goes down shouldn't the amount of it increase?
- nextworddev 1y ago
  Wrong. The bad journalism just now uses AI.

thro484krjok 1y ago

[flagged]

ls612 1y ago

I was on the market last year as a fairly strong candidate, my advisors expected me to get a good tenure track job in a Finance department. I had first round interviews at multiple top 10 departments before things really went pear-shaped. Here's what actually happened. The market looked pretty normal until November 5th, and then after that things went downhill. First the Fed Board of Governors stopped hiring (some regional banks kept hiring but had their offers explode on Jan 20). Then in January universities which had already done their first round interviews started imposing hiring freezes and cancelling flyouts. At the same time the Federal Government completely stopped hiring with DOGE coming in. Private sector hiring has been down for a few years since the ZIRP era ended so that part isn't new. In the end I got a postdoc at a pretty good US university and will go on the market again in 2026-2027 with a much stronger portfolio than I had last year. Hopefully that will be enough for me, but I know for many others they may not be so lucky.

zzleeper 1y ago
Good luck; we probably crossed paths (I was helping a bit on the hiring side at some point). A postdoc is a really great option, I've seen lots of people do that before going for a bschool so it can definitely can work. BTW one other thing besides what you mentioned is not just the freeze but the firings. FDIC lost 30% of staff, BOG is going to reduce maybe 10%, CFPB is no more, etc. so the market is actually being flooded with senior economists. They won't compete directly with the posts you want but still flood the market.

complex_pi 1y ago

Welcome to the world. A PhD guarantees nothing, tenured position barely exist anymore. Weird that economists did not realize this yet...

paulpauper 1y ago
agree. All job markets are 'bad'. The number of openings is greatly exceeded by people applying. this is true for pretty much everything.
hyperbovine 1y ago
A lot of the trends identified in this article are ubiquitous across academia, and in fact much worse in humanities -- having 99 TT positions open in a year would make my friends in the English department swoon! It's just that economics, as a field, is better at making charts and loudly complaining about things.

kenjackson 1y ago

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.

pempem 1y ago
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.
- reactordev 1y ago
  It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      > That's not a great way to survive. Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.
      - gjsman-1000 1y ago
        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.

bawana 1y ago

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.

higginsniggins 1y ago
Dont forget the worlds oldest profession.
- matthewfcarlson 1y ago
  AI girlfriends are coming for that too
- whatever1 1y ago
  Thank god TikTok and Insta are grooming us already. We will be ready!
lumost 1y ago
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.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  > 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.

deleted 1y ago

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jmyeet 1y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics

jcbrand 1y ago
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.
ceejayoz 1y ago
> 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. This is kinda like the difference between climate science vs. weather forecasting. Being good at making short-term returns without giving a shit about the long-term damage it does is not the same as economic policy.

lvl155 1y ago

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.

jrajav 1y ago
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.
- lvl155 1y ago
  It has everything to do with it considering where things are with current admin. Also why do you think people are sacrificing so much to study in the US? It’s mostly funded. They even get stipends. We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. But you seem to think that they’re doing us a huge favor. What an odd way to think about it.
  - bdhe 1y ago
    > We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. If they are the best and brightest of the world and typically stay back and contribute significantly above the median employee to US industry or even start their own companies, why is it framed in such a negative way?
    - throw-the-towel 1y ago

SoftTalker 1y ago

The "Dismal Science"? It has never been a science. You can't run controlled experiments outside of small microeconomic scenarios, so nothing is falsifiable or repeatable. It's all just arguing about correlation and causation.

Workaccount2 1y ago
This is like saying meteorology is not a science. I'm sure you believe in climate change, and climatology is even more removed than meteorology... I've consistently found that people talking about the unscientific nature of economics are actually just upset with what it says, similar to people who are upset with what climatology says.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Weather reports are really accurate. Economic forecasts less so.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Weather reports have the luxury of only needing to forecast out a week, and only very accurate for coming 1-3 days.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  I agree with you that it means large amounts of agreed upon science would not fit that definition of science. Don’t you agree that’s an interesting and consistent observation though?
tzs 1y ago
By that argument in addition to meteorology that another commenter already mentioned (and more generally atmospheric science), astronomy, most of geology, cosmology, astrophysics, most planetary science, most oceanography, and seismology are not sciences.

deleted 1y ago

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jeffbee 1y ago

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.

Jun8 1y ago

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

lenerdenator 1y ago

>For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm. So, the field is being consumed by the ideology it espoused? Automation and leaner government budgets were pushed hard by a number of schools of economic thought. Of particular note is this section: > REASON 4: Lying About Inflation If you were there during the pandemic money printing, you remember the sequence all too well: first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation, then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” and finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all. Each step was wrong, and each was delivered with smug certainty. Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust. This isn't about protecting Democratic policy narratives. Arguably the single worst thing for inflation, the Paycheck Protection Program, happened under Trump. You had business owners taking out loans for pretty much anything and everything they thought they could possibly justify as business-related, no matter how tenuous that justification was, and then of course the government forgave massive amounts of it. Since business owners already tend to have more money and capital, this fueled their consumption of then-scarce products and services even more. Laws of supply-and-demand kicked in, which shouldn't be hard for the author to understand. Ultimately the inflation that happened during the pandemic was due to the fact that for the last 45-ish years, the US has been running deficits not just in the public sector, but the private sector as well. Our economy is designed to run on debt that suddenly, people couldn't pay on time. They then looked to the government to offer a backstop, and since federal, state, and local governments have no "rainy day" fund to speak of, the federal government had to fire up the money printers.

nothrowaways 1y ago

The scientific community needs a new safe haven. It would be 1. A country specifically tailor made for scientists and engineers. 2. A country with no first class citizens Something like Switzerland or Dubai for science and engineering, but made from scratch.

glitchc 1y ago
And who would do the remaining jobs? I assume scientists are too busy and important to farm, build infrastructure (roads, bridges) or provide healthcare.
- nothrowaways 1y ago
  It did not say scientist-only. HN is deteriorating smh.
  - the_sleaze_ 1y ago
    It was greenspans favorite book after all
TMWNN 1y ago
>2. A country with no first class citizens Wait. A country that does not favor its own citizens? At all? Why even have "citizenship" at all? Put another way, why would anyone want to move there to become a citizen of said country? Good grief. This reminds me of the heights (depths) of /r/redditisland.
- nothrowaways 1y ago
  Do you even understand what first class citizen means?

awesome_dude 1y ago

The biggest problem research has is that its almost never clear what the result will be to the bottom line. People complain bitterly about two things with research 1. That it's looking at obvious things and they could have told the answer (What's really happened is some researcher has actually looked into some common school of thought to check its reliability) 2. That there's no "use" for the thing be researched (it's absurd). This type of research is really "document phenomena, try to understand it" the use of that phenomena is often not clear for decades, or centuries (our cryptographic systems currently rely on research into math that was once considered absolutely worthless)

declan_roberts 1y ago

I'm struggling to understand why we have any current h-1b economist position when that job market is in "free-fall"? The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF CHICAGO can't find an American economist? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=2025 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=...

codyklimdev 1y ago
Why hire an American who will ask for benefits, significant time off, work/life balance, etc. when you can hire an H-1B that you can treat like an indentured servant?
- kypro 1y ago
  Plus most PhD have spent their whole life in education and haven't got any real work experience.
altairprime 1y ago
What intelligent economist would take work from this administration? There aren’t many unintelligent economists, and it’s not the sort of thing you can fake your way to a PhD in. With the U.S. branch of the field run aground on its refusal to identify the causal link from shareholder profits to inflation, failure to deliver solutions that don’t decrease profits is a certainty. So it makes perfect sense that they’d seek competent help offshore: any untried port in a storm of your own making.
- giardini 1y ago
  altairprime says >"There aren’t many unintelligent economists..."< How can you tell? Hell, with a few notable exceptions, maybe the entire field is largely a waste of time and money. "Show me a successful economist and I'll show you a man who has not made an accurate forecast" - attributed to former United States Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
  - altairprime 1y ago

bArray 1y ago

Can confirm that UK computer science PhD positions decrease too. This is largely due to departments and grants tightening their belts.

zackmorris 1y ago

Well ya, when the richest and most powerful people/corporations/nations in the world actively work against established economic theory. Trickle down economics, austerity, regressive tax policies, tariffs, appeasement, lax antitrust enforcement, slashing capital gains and inheritance tax, privatization of natural monopolies, quantitative easing instead of holding investment firms accountable, foreign aid for war instead of peace, defunding public universities to manufacture a student loan crisis, public sector layoffs, subsidizing extractive industries instead of renewables, sub-minimum wage in restaurants/farms/prisons, underpaying teachers and healthcare workers, rent seeking, payola, collusion, duopoly, usury, unpaid domestic labor, wage slavery.. And the inevitable aftermath of wishing the worst for others: stagflation, underemployment, civil unrest, eventually recession, depression and a raid on concentrated wealth if/when supply-side economics collapses because nobody has any money to buy anything anymore. In spite of overwhelming evidence of public and private abuses, nobody cares what the experts think anymore. Because it's obvious to everyone that so much is wrong. People who try to help get blamed, people who participate in the grift get rewarded as things get worse. Unfortunately as wealth inequality consumes us under self-colonization, all liberal arts degrees trend towards worthless. We're left with declining service work after passing peak wages and peak employment due to the rise of AI. Spending the rest of our lives fighting over scraps after the rug was already pulled out from under us due to the Dot Bomb, Housing Bubble, pandemic, private equity driving housing costs to the point of insanity and a trade war of choice. Or we could like, follow economic theory and stuff. Do the opposite of everything I just mentioned. Can't have the Econ PhDs telling us that!

youainti 1y ago

This turned out longer than I expected. TL:DR; I'm not sure what he is trying to do, but he gets some things right, some things wrong, and some things are not applicable. Points 1-2 seem to match what I am seeing as an Econ PhD student on the market and what I am hearing from others. Point 3 may be happening, but this assumes that AI is going to be doing this in a way capable of producing research AND that there is a limited amount of research to be done. As someone who has used various AI agents as help in cleaning data, exactly what he suggested it does, I suspect that this will increase the value of the positions that use Econ PhDs because they can now do more. The thing that bothers me most about this post is his point 4, and it seems so wrong to me to the degree it makes me wonder about the rest of it. I don't know what he got the following perspective. 1. first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation 2. then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” 3. finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all In contrast, I've seen something different. 1. I saw debate over how people would save/spend rebate checks and how that would feed through to the economy. Some people speculated that it wouldn't lead to inflation based on the results of the 2008-2009 recession. Additionally, most economists I spoke to thought that the supply shocks due to the pandemic would lead to temporary inflation. If he got the impression that there was a "confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation", I would like to know who he was listening to. 2. The inflation during the pandemic _was_ transitory. Take a look at [0-2], mildly different views of one measure of inflation. The high inflation period due to the pandemic is over. Persistent inflation at the Year over Year levels seen early in the pandemic would mean we're seeing 7% inflation, not the 3%ish we're actually seeing. Federal interest rate targets would probably be in the 7APY-9APY region as a result. Part of the confusion here is due to the difference between inflation and price levels. Inflation is the rate of change of price levels. Yes we underwent inflation, and the higher prices accrued[2], but inflation rates dropped and we still paid the previously inflated prices. That is normal. The 2020 inflation bout did come at the end of a period with absurdly low inflation though; the decade between 2010 and 2020 had deals such as the $5 footlong from subway and the $5 hot and ready from little ceasars last almost the whole decade. Looking at [0] again, that time had historically low inflation. So suddenly being exposed to relatively high inflation was novel and painful. 3. I can see how this might seem like a thing. There was a whole issue where the CPI levels and the costs of living (felt inflation) differed a whole lot. There are reasons for this, such as changing consumption patterns (which change faster than the CPI basket of goods), and is due to the fact that CPI is trying to measure how prices change in a method that is comparable across time. It is not trying to measure how expensive the lives of consumers are. Especially when you use the typically presented measures of CPI which does not include food or energy (these are excluded because they are volatile). Add in income cuts and rising food prices and suddenly the budget situation of most Americans was getting more difficult. So yeah, there was a disconnect between households experience and the measures of inflation. This wasn't lying, this was people not understanding how economic statistics work and then misusing them. Finally, the author may be ideologically motivated, e.g. [3] where he stated: "You can participate in this societal trend, dear math world, by kicking this deranged, murderous tranny out of your ranks. Don’t let him infect the next generation of students with the woke mind virus — or, at the very least, don’t hire him in your department, where he will surely be a magnet for lawsuits." > For clarity, the use of the word "murderous" is due to the discussion about some posts by a math PhD student that are somewhat threatening. The use is on topic. I bring this up not to attack the author but to raise questions about the author's rhetorical goals. I start by stating that I don't actually know what he is trying to achieve. If his point is that the Econ Job market is has been rough the last 3 years and is getting worse; that is well known among economists and hopefully is known by those looking at doing a PhD in economics. The point he explains at the introduction and conclusion is that an econ PhD doesn't have the same returns or guarantees it used to (e.g. compared to 10 years ago). That is true and points 1-2 are all that is needed to make that point. It also seems like he may be trying to call into question the value of some or all of the following: academic economists, economic training, or higher education. If that is his goal, then 1-2 are beside the point, 3 is speculation and only somewhat pertinent, and 4 is applicable but wrong. The phrasing in the title seems to point to this. Is this a complete collapse? I don't know. We'll know in 5 years though. [0]: ANNUAL CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA [1]: MONTHLY CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N [2]: CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (Price levels) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL [3]: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-university https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...

AlexCornila 1y ago

Well the economic framework they have been trained for is collapsing so there’s that

whycome 1y ago

There's that one guy who used it to become prime Minister of Canada. Not even a politician.

tomhowsalterego 1y ago

Econ PhDs sound fucking useless. They would have served the economy better being plumbers, welders and machinists.

pessimizer 1y ago

The need for think tanks is gone, there's no need to convince the public of anything anymore, you can just do it. Trump is wildly unpopular, and he's the most popular leader in the west. Still, the most authoritarian and neoliberal trash can simply be rammed through by these "centrist" melts with 15% approval ratings. The way they used to keep them in power is by running a Nazi against them and making you choose, now people (rightfully) prefer the Nazis because at least they believe in something. So now they lawfare the Nazis so they can run unopposed (or NPC-opposed), or blackmail and bribe them into becoming centrists themselves. If we can put Al Qaeda in a suit and lap at his feet, we can certainly make Meloni into a Euro-warrior. No need to convince anyone of anything, no need to have the support of a majority of the public, no restraints on infinite accumulation... what do you need some crypto-freshwater "why homelessness is actually the most accurate sign of prosperity" freak any more? Can't they just call Cass Sunstein? Did the numbers ever really matter? These guys specialized in telling you why the numbers were deceptive, and the real problem was any restraint on predators. Academic economics is newly-pointless marketing of ideas popular (i.e. profitable) among elites (i.e. their bosses.) They are entirely unconcerned about the wealth of nations (nationalism!) or the wealth of citizens (communism!). When comfortable monopolies dominate, and the process of democracy is devalued ("dumb people shouldn't vote, we should follow the consensus!"), the market for marketing goes down. It's funny how he pretends he thinks lying about inflation was decisive, as if the people affected by inflation get to hire economists, or wouldn't be more interested in becoming an economist to prove a bunch of liars wrong. Lying about inflation, or whatever else, is the job. The real message: "If you're a Democrat considering your rebrand, hire me as an advisor. I'll be your Ezra Klein, but with math!"

thatguymike 1y ago

Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)

chmorgan_ 1y ago

[dead]

chokominto 1y ago

Did they do extrapolation using paint? Omg

estetlinus 1y ago
Thank you for noticing. What on EARTH was that abomination?

lkrubner 1y ago

"Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust." This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 when the President was a Republican, the majority of all economists are Republican, but somehow this writer blames this on Democrats? The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.

dsjoerg 1y ago
> the majority of all economists are Republican citation for that please? quick Gemini work gives me the opposite so could you please back that up? Federal Reserve Economists: A 2022 analysis of voter registration data found the ratio of Democrat to Republican economists at the Federal Reserve System to be 10.4 to 1. American Economic Association (AEA) Members: Studies have found the D:R ratio among AEA members to be around 4:1 or 3.8:1. Economics Faculty: One study reported that Democrats outnumber Republicans 4.5:1 among economics faculty at 40 leading universities. General Survey of Economists: A 2003 survey of American Economic Association members found the voting ratio of Democrat to Republican to be 2.5:1. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=Likewise%2C%20I%20find%20that%20economists,System%20(48.5%3A1). https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat... https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20Langbert%20(2020),working%20outside%20academia%20and%20government. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat... https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliations-of-federal-reserve-economists/#:~:text=Previous%20studies%20look%20at%20the,faculty%20at%2040%20leading%20universities. https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat...
- snapplebobapple 1y ago
  I did a couple economics degrees at a decent school in Canada in a conservative province and even there 80% of the people were left wing wackadoos so I call bs.

tmaly 1y ago

Given all the revisions in the government numbers, people are waking up to the reality that most of these numbers do not reflect reality.

erxam 1y ago
Economics has always been the art of finding new, nicer ways of saying "fuck the poor". I'm glad more and more people see that it's complete bunk.

fastaguy88 1y ago

When I think of things being in free-fall, I think of them going down. Not going up more slowly.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Reminds me of my favorite monetary econ Youtuber who lives in Poland: https://youtube.com/@econlessons https://youtube.com/@econlessons

coolThingsFirst 1y ago

So like CS degrees

imtringued 1y ago

One of the biggest paradoxes in economics is that economists cannot justify their own existence. They are like historians without history.

AngryData 1y ago

I think a big part of the problem is people are recognizing that many modern economic theories and models are kind of trash and failing to make accurate predictions today. Challenging popular economic theory will often get someone labelled a crackpot, regardless of how good or bad their models and predictions are. And the field and players that are in play and have some power to influence or change policies are deeply embroiled with political dogma and will fight tooth and nail against anything that might make their previously established beliefs and education obsolete or god forbid show they were just straight up wrong from the start.

more_corn 1y ago

This article is reasonable sounding bullshit. The logical house of cards is built upon several tenuous or flat out outrageous assumptions that do not resemble reality. I can’t take the author seriously.

juleiie 1y ago

Economists are “scientists” as much as parapsychologists. There are several conflicting market theories and no one knows how it precisely works or they would be insanely rich from the stock market. When were economists right once before some event? They always claim they have seen it coming after the dust settles. Virtually useless job akin to future tellers