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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 primar

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
    - bonsai_spool 1y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you, and I also know political economists from that time who complain that their discipline is changing. It just has very little to do with what this article is discussing.
1980phipsi 1y ago
Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. Twenty years ago if you were interested in what is now called data science, you were getting a degree with some kind of exposure to applied statistics. Economics is one of those disciplines (through econometrics).
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  > Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. It was called statistics
  - mjhay 1y ago
    No. Data science is different than statistics, because it is done on computers. It also uses machine learning algorithms instead of statistical algorithms. These advances, and the shedding of generations of restrictive cruft - frees data scientists to craft answers that their bosses want to hear - proving the superiority of data science over statistics.
    - mathteddybear 1y ago
      yeah, we called that data mining, decision systems, and whatnot... mapreduce was as fresh and hot as the Paul Graham's essays book... folks were using Java over python, due to some open source library from around the globe... essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it
      - selimthegrim 1y ago
        You might have missed the /s
  - lordnacho 1y ago
    No, I did stats as part of economics around then, and it's nothing like modern DS. It overlaps a fair bit, but in practice the classical stats student is bringing a knife to a gunfight. The practice of working with huge datasets manipulated by computers is valuable enough that you need separate training in it. I don't know what's in a modern stats degree though, I would assume they try to turn it into DS.

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
  - bonsai_spool 1y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, and I also know political economists from that time who complain that their discipline is changing. It just has very little to do with what this article is discussing.

1980phipsi 1y ago

Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. Twenty years ago if you were interested in what is now called data science, you were getting a degree with some kind of exposure to applied statistics. Economics is one of those disciplines (through econometrics).

SJC_Hacker 1y ago
> Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. It was called statistics
- mjhay 1y ago
  No. Data science is different than statistics, because it is done on computers. It also uses machine learning algorithms instead of statistical algorithms. These advances, and the shedding of generations of restrictive cruft - frees data scientists to craft answers that their bosses want to hear - proving the superiority of data science over statistics.
  - mathteddybear 1y ago
    yeah, we called that data mining, decision systems, and whatnot... mapreduce was as fresh and hot as the Paul Graham's essays book... folks were using Java over python, due to some open source library from around the globe... essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it
    - selimthegrim 1y ago
      You might have missed the /s
- lordnacho 1y ago
  No, I did stats as part of economics around then, and it's nothing like modern DS. It overlaps a fair bit, but in practice the classical stats student is bringing a knife to a gunfight. The practice of working with huge datasets manipulated by computers is valuable enough that you need separate training in it. I don't know what's in a modern stats degree though, I would assume they try to turn it into DS.