1) I'm not sure what he means by PhDs that work? 2) I don't necessarily disagree with this. I know there used to tons of cushy analyst jobs and world bank/IMF/

1) I'm not sure what he means by PhDs that work? 2) I don't necessarily disagree with this. I know there used to tons of cushy analyst jobs and world bank/IMF/UN positions that hired Econ PhDs. Not sure if the world has changed in this regard. 3) One of the things that make life easy for Econ PhDs is the lack of a publishing treadmill. In CS, if you don't get 3 [magic number alert!] papers at a decent conference, few respectable advisors let you graduate. In Econ, my understanding is that exceedingly few people publish a journal paper by the time they graduate (please don't argue about Econ grads that write conference papers ... Econ Journal papers are equivalent to CS Conference paper when it comes to metrics like credit). Many people can write a hundred pages that their advisor+committee is happy with. It takes an order of magnitude more effort to get 100 pages that make your advisor+committee happy and also three random reviewers in your field. An important, ending thought: the reason I didn't pursue a career in Economics was that I didn't get to build stuff. This is how I get my kicks in life. A CS PhD isn't designed to make you a better builder but it often does! Frankly, my biggest problem is that I need to stop building and get into the higher-level business of managing others to build, and higher value algorithmic stuff. The love of building is what holds me back I fear :(