I'm sympathetic but torn. I do time series econometrics, partly because macro is important but unrealistic like you say. But I've grown more sympathetic to ma

I'm sympathetic but torn. I do time series econometrics, partly because macro is important but unrealistic like you say. But I've grown more sympathetic to macro over the last few years. For better or worse, it's a field that only really gets model validation during crises, and as a field it's been pretty willing to overhaul its methodology following a crisis: Sims's "Macroeconomics and Reality" was written in 1980, basically had the message, "macroeconomists suck," and is now entrenched methodology. The RBC stuff was written in the 80s and is now also entrenched. There's been a stretch of relative calm (people learned something from LTCM, etc, but since it didn't cripple the economy it didn't inspire quite the same urgency as the financial crisis). So, as far as the agent-based modeling goes, now's the opportunity for people working on it to show that they can answer questions macroeconomists are interested in better than DSGE type models. I'm not very familiar with that literature, but I don't think that there's been much emphasis on things like predicting aggregate unemployment, output, etc. or understanding the effects of monetary policy, but there's been more emphasis on individual markets. VARs and DSGE models are ubiquitous because they outperformed the previous models, not because the underlying theory is especially beautiful or interesting. But, yeah, I definitely agree that you should not get an Econ PhD unless you want to learn how to do research in Economics. 4-6 years of salary and job advancement is a lot to give up, even if you could be sure of getting the job you want after graduation. And the celibacy. Edit: just to clarify what I meant by "as a field it's been pretty willing to overhaul its methodology." I don't expect that a lot of established people will radically change their research agenda, although some will. But I do expect to see a change in what grad students and assistant profs work on compared to what you'd see w/out the financial crisis. So the research will change, even if a lot of the same people keep putting out the same papers.