[HN Gopher] The collapse of the econ PhD job market
___________________________________________________________________
The collapse of the econ PhD job market
Author : Ozarkian
Score : 187 points
Date : 2025-10-03 16:49 UTC (1 days ago)
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| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Their predecessors should have done a better job managing the
| economy.
| postflopclarity wrote:
| the people with economics PhDs are not the people in control of
| economic policy.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They're frequently the "oh ffs don't do that" folks, even.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| One school consists of every university in the world. The
| other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the
| John Birch Society.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's not surprising that aspiring economists prefer the
| theory which loads them with power.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's like finding that very few PhD evolutionary
| biologists are young earth creationists. People who study
| economics wind up being neo-keynesians because that's what
| the data supports.
| hapless wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's amazing Hayek won a Nobel after being the student of
| such a washout.
| hapless wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/hay...
| cyberax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/2002/20
| 021...
| linguae wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Milton Friedman also rejected one of the central Austrian
| tenets, the business cycle.
| sarchertech wrote:
| As someone else said Friedman wasn't an Austrian. Not
| even close. The only real similarity is that they both
| are proponents of free market capitalism. Friedman was a
| mainstream economist who used mathematical modeling and
| statistical methods. The majority of Austrians don't use
| either and prefer reasoning about individual actions from
| first principles.
| cyberax wrote:
| Friedman was a Chicago monetarist, not just an Austrian
| hack. Pure monetarism doesn't always work, as it ignores
| irrational behavior, but it's not _useless_. Monetary
| models work great in steady-state conditions for fine-
| tuning and in cases where the monetary supply results in
| high inflation.
|
| The 2008 economic crisis demonstrated that brilliantly.
| The IS-LM model correctly predicted the outcome of fiscal
| expansion (lack of inflation, despite trillions in
| stimulus) and the futility of monetary measures (negative
| rates in Europe did not result in economic growth).
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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/2002/20021.
| ..
| mothballed wrote:
| 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
| /...
| neom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| >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.
| lumost wrote:
| There are multiple issues in the Phd/Faculty market. Different
| fields are at different phases of the cycle. The biggest trend
| is that Universities expanded in the 1950s and 60s, and are now
| contracting as population declines. Universities continue to
| increase Phd production despite declining total employment
| numbers as Phd students provide cheap labor. Numerous non-
| tenure track positions have been created to fill the void with
| mixed results.
| ls612 wrote:
| This is the case in many fields but not in Economics. There
| is little incentive to pad out PhD counts for cheap labor
| since the vast majority of the Econ PhD is either taking
| classes in first and second year or working on independent
| research after that. All job market candidates are expected
| to have a solo authored paper on the market with some
| asterisks I won't get into. There is little in the way of big
| labs or PIs who require endless RAs. To the extent we need
| RAs it's often undergrads or predocs doing data cleaning
| stuff.
| dleeftink wrote:
| 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.
| cinntaile wrote:
| That will depend on if it fits the narrative or not.
| closetohome wrote:
| The "people think they're guaranteed a job" narrative is
| because the author is a right-wing journalist who "exposes"
| academics.
| danbrooks wrote:
| Academic hiring has taken a big hit with the uncertainty and
| decline in federal funding.
| abirch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-pr...
|
| [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/2025/04/prep...
|
| [3] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLe
| ade...
| giardini wrote:
| Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating
| ED..."<
|
| That would be a hard act to follow.
| logicalfails wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years
| ago.
|
| It was called statistics
| mjhay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Data science is basically a marketing title given to what
| would have been a joint CS/statistics degree in the past.
| Maybe a double major, or maybe a major in one and an
| extensive minor in another. And it's mostly taught by
| people with a background in CS or statistics.
|
| Like with most other academic fields, there is no clear
| separation between data science and neighboring fields.
| Its existence as a field tells more about the
| organization of undergraduate education in the average
| university than about the field itself.
|
| The Finnish term for CS translates as "data processing
| science" or "information processing science". When I was
| undergrad ~25 years ago, people in the statistics
| department were arguing that it would have been a more
| appropriate name for statistics, but CS took it first.
| The data science perspective was already mainstream back
| then, as the people in statistics were concerned. But
| statistics education was still mostly about introductory
| classes of classical statistics offered to people in
| other fields.
| goalieca wrote:
| Actuarial science perhaps
| narrator wrote:
| The bitter lesson is making it so all these people hand
| designing features with econometric models are being obsoleted
| by big models and lots of data.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Its C. the market doesn't follow traditional models anymore.
|
| The whole profession was basically centered around putting a
| dollar amount on risk.
|
| For example, lets say I give you a chance of either taking $1k
| now, or playing a game where you have 1 in 10 chance to win
| $200k. What would you do? The right answer is "sell" the risk
| to someone. For example, on the average, if I "buy" the game
| from 10 people, at a price of $10k each, I can realistically
| win twice what I spend.
|
| Repeat that over x number of steps and more complex games, and
| that is what the PhDs worked on in terms of pricing.
|
| For most of the time it worked ok. In a few instances (most
| notably the Gaussian Copula that was a large reason for the
| subprime house market crisis in 2007) it didn't.
|
| The problem is that now, its impossible to predict whether
| orange man is going to throw a hissy fit and cause the market
| to go up or down, or if large investors are going to
| artificially prop up stock like they did with Tesla.
| eej71 wrote:
| Its the old axiom best expressed by the philosopher Sir
| Michael Tyson - "Everyone has a plan until they get punched
| in the face".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| To the extent that a single person can cause economists'
| predictions to be off, those predictions were never good in
| the first place. We will _always_ have unstable people in
| power, it 's just human nature. If your predictions can't
| hold up in the face of that, then you need to refine them.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Look up the concept of computational irreduceability
| mothballed wrote:
| There was an electric vehicle stock I was watching for awhile
| (WKHS) hoping for a good time to short. All their reports
| showed what I believed was an unviable vehicle, there was
| simply no way to produce it that was anywhere near gross
| margin positive and they didn't have the money nor access to
| capital to lose hundreds of millions proving that out. All
| the economics of the company was going to zero, and they had
| a ticking time bomb of debt they were about to default on.
|
| Shortly before this debt time-bomb went off, Trump magically
| showed up tweeting in support of the company and alluded to a
| deal getting pulled off with GM. [] Of course, this ended up
| being spun off as Lordstown motors, a company that has failed
| horribly, including Hindenburg Research publishing a video of
| one of the few trucks they had literally catching on fire on
| the road while the CEO was simultaneously claiming they had
| hundreds of millions of dollars in solid orders (later fined
| by the SEC for that and barred from being an executive of a
| company for N years).
|
| I still don't understand how Trump magically got involved
| with this penny stock at the 11th hour, but I can tell you I
| feel something very fishy happened there.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/08/trump-tweet-sends-penny-
| stoc...
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > I feel something very fishy happened there.
|
| The man scammed his own supporters twice with crypto scams.
| He, of course, is not at all opposed to market manipulation
| or other types of financial scams
| loire280 wrote:
| You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but
| not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock
| market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working
| on modeling stock prices.
|
| As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for
| hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal
| funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD
| cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in
| crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff
| sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide
| another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that
| hasn't panned out.
|
| Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago
| economics department.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| In the end, the need for a certain job sector drives
| demand. Its the same reason a new grad in CS in US could go
| get a six figure salary, because everyone was racing to
| monetize the web.
|
| PhDs werent dealing with stock prices either. Nobody was
| trying to predict the stock market. The goal was to price
| volatility and sell volatility to the end party that would
| actually roll the dice.
| jgamman wrote:
| Orange Guy is the official mascot for NZ elections.
| DisKarlito wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Borrowing a line from Rentec, probably because they'd
| rather prefer pure-math or physics people not "tainted" by
| economic dogma
| ls612 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because it's a very different type of math than that used
| in Quant Finance. Econ PhD programs don't want people with
| broad math skills, they want people who know the very
| narrow slice of math needed to solve these very unusual
| models. Quant Finance mainly uses PDEs and Brownian Motion
| stuff that all Math and Physics majors learn.
| ls612 wrote:
| The theory you are discussing (grad micro 101 equilibrium
| existence) is not actually crazy if you think about what the
| mathematical assumptions actually imply. Really the economic
| assumptions boil down to "small changes in prices lead to
| small changes in demand" and the math is just rigorously
| defining small in terms of a general topology.
| Retric wrote:
| Small price changes don't necessarily lead to small
| results. There's a reason companies advertise 19.99 not 20
| which has been experimentally verified many times.
|
| People simply act irrationally, which is a fundamental
| issue when trying to treat economics as math.
| kergonath wrote:
| Matter is not continuous and yet we don't need atoms to
| predict how a metal sheet will bend. There are a lot of
| sound theories about how to deal with discontinuity, and
| how the problem solves itself when numbers get large
| enough.
|
| Or think of it like weather and climate: we cannot
| predict that there will be a thunderstorm on a given day
| 2 months from now, but we can be fairly confident that in
| x years, the average global temperature will be y+-zdegC.
| Because when you aggregate enough events, statistical
| effects become dominant.
|
| "But reality is not linear" is not really a gotcha.
| Retric wrote:
| > Matter is not continuous and yet we don't need atoms to
| predict how a metal sheet will bend.
|
| At sufficient detail atomic structure has a huge impact
| on how a metal sheet bends. Metallurgy seriously
| investigates at this level.
|
| Hand waving details is fine when discussing with friends,
| it's not a sound foundation for serious academic
| research.
|
| Also, the degree to which the weather is unpredictable 2+
| weeks out is somewhat overblown. It generally snows in DC
| several days a year yet the odds it snows in DC 2 weeks
| from now is essentially zero not ~4/365. Similarly you
| can more accurately predict thunderstorms than a pure
| guess 2 months from now. We may call it climate, but a
| physical model of earths tilt, prevailing winds, CO2, etc
| is better than just historic data.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > Hand waving details is fine when discussing with
| friends, it's not a sound foundation for serious academic
| research.
|
| It's how physics worked for hundreds of years. Make a
| handwavy model, find out it works on some cases but
| breaks down on others, then make a slightly less handwavy
| model the next time.
|
| Metallurgy considering atomic structure is a very new
| concept, and was not needed for the first millenias of
| metalworking.
|
| The issue with economics is not handwaving, is that
| models are hard to test due to systems not being well
| isolated.
| oscaracso wrote:
| The history of physics is the exact opposite of what you
| say. Models were subject to considerable criticism and
| refinement on theoretical, philosophical, and aesthetic
| grounds. Newton did not discover universal gravitation
| because Kepler's laws broke down. Maxwell did not
| discover his correction because Ampere's laws broke down.
| Einstein did not discover relativity because Newtonian
| mechanics broke down. Investigation proceeded along
| different lines altogether and was accompanied by a
| degree of scrutiny not to be characterized as 'handwavy'.
| ls612 wrote:
| Falling back to "people are irrational", in the economic
| sense of rational (ie not having complete, transitive,
| and reflexive preferences) quickly leads to any economic
| claim being unfalsifiable.
| Retric wrote:
| Irrational isn't the same thing as unpredictable.
|
| Biology was forced to deal with the insanity of
| biochemistry because that's what is actually happening.
| Economics can't get away from the innate complexity of
| actual humans if it wants to be actually useful for more
| than just propaganda.
| ls612 wrote:
| You misunderstand the difficulty. We don't have (and
| likely won't ever have) the ability to read people's
| thoughts and say what they were thinking when they made
| their choices. In order to do any analysis of human
| choices you must impose assumptions on the process
| because otherwise you can say that "they were thinking
| xyz" and there is _no way_ to falsify that.
|
| Economics chooses to impose assumptions that peoples
| observed choices are a better way to study their behavior
| than what they say, and so we look at the observable
| state of the world for an individual economic agent. You
| can do analysis of people whose preferences are not
| rational (in the strict mathematical sense that I
| described above) but _you must choose what kind of
| irrationality they have_. And that gives you the ability
| to assume any results. That isn 't any way to do science.
| Rationality is the worst option except for all the rest
| as they say.
| Retric wrote:
| Rationality isn't an option because it's wrong. There's
| literally zero reason to invest any time into models
| using it whatsoever when the opportunity to look for
| something that actually works exists.
|
| You don't need to read people's minds to predict their
| behavior at sufficient granularity to be useful.
| Economics is blessed with plenty of opportunities to
| collect high quality real world data without needing to
| conduct arbitrary experiments.
|
| How much gas will this specific gas station sell on date
| X. Build whatever models you want at whatever scale is
| relevant and they face the brutal truth of a knowable
| answer to judge them. That's how science progresses not
| arbitrary assumptions to make modeling easier.
| ls612 wrote:
| "Newtonian mechanics isn't an option because it is wrong.
| There's literally zero reason to invest any time into
| models using it whatsoever when the opportunity to look
| for something that actually works exists."
|
| Do you see the issue here when I frame it this way? The
| core microeconomic assumption of people having
| preferences which are complete, reflexive and transitive
| (these are formal mathematical definitions! They don't
| require a whole lot to hold!) has been incredibly useful
| in the 20th and 21st centuries much like understanding
| Newtonian mechanics was in the 18th and 19th centuries.
|
| Besides this, you are still not engaging with the
| philosophy of science point that I am making. Because of
| the fact that humans have this pesky thing called free
| will, unless we impose some assumptions on their thinking
| nothing we study about causality in the behavior of
| humans is falsifiable. Maybe you eat because you feel
| hungry. Maybe you eat because you worship bread as a god.
| I fundamentally can't say either way without making
| assumptions that you likely find unobjectionable.
| Retric wrote:
| > Do you see the issue here when I frame it this way?
|
| Honestly no.
|
| Newton mechanics can be accurate to 20 decimal places,
| that's currently indistinguishable from reality in
| relevant and well understood contexts. Making Newtonian
| Mechanics actually useful.
|
| The core microeconomic assumption is never anywhere close
| to that accurate. It works except XYZ which doesn't apply
| is acceptable, it never works isn't.
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm a pure math major, and I took several economics classes.
| The whole field was very baffling for me.
|
| The most reliable model was the dead simple IS-LM, which is
| based on observations. But you don't really need a lot of
| math for it, so it's boring.
|
| As a result, researchers keep trying to generalize the
| microeconomic behavior of people to derive macroeconomic
| laws. Like we do with the ideal gas laws. And this produces
| reams of beautiful math that you can investigate and tweak
| endlessly. But it doesn't seem to have a lot of predictive
| power.
| raffael_de wrote:
| Economists are stuck at a ceteris paribus level of
| comprehending what's going on. Forget about differential
| equations.
| Findeton wrote:
| Thing is, the part about using math for economics is highly
| debatable and that's why Austrian School of economics
| doesn't use it. From that perspective, we use ranking
| systems for our preferences, at the individual level, so
| using math for aggregate behaviour is just not well
| substantiated. This point of view comes from Carl Menger,
| which started the whole marginalist revolution.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Austrian School of economics doesn't use it
|
| Well, yeah. They're basically a cult with three rules:
|
| 1. The market is perfect.
|
| 2. If the market is not perfect, then it's the fault of
| the government.
|
| 3. If you have any questions, see 1.
| Findeton wrote:
| No, they don't say that the market is perfect. And if you
| want a cult, that's the current keynesian economics.
|
| Anyway, I don't see any way around not using math.
| Because value is subjective and that means it's a ranking
| system of preferences, not based in nominal values.
| Zigurd wrote:
| No true Austrian Schools economist...
| cyberax wrote:
| You can mathematically analyze subjective rankings.
| That's not at all a problem for model building.
|
| What makes the Austrian economics "school" a cult is not
| the complexity of models. It's their rejection of models
| altogether and a refusal to make testable predictions.
| jostylr wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Austrians believe that analyzing
| based on individual preferences and actions is the key. I
| haven't made it very far into Mises Human Action, but I
| gather that was the starting point and Mises developed
| many theorems based on that. So if you say that allowing
| individuals to maximize their preferred choices given the
| constraints around them is "the market" and artificially
| restricting those choices, using acts or threats of
| violence, is "the government", then yes, I suppose that
| is their framework. One of the main things they would
| probably push back against is the notion to think of the
| market or government as independently existing entities.
| The government is just a collection of individuals who
| use violence to impose their will on others in a way that
| most of the society is agreeable to, at least to some
| extent, and, because they are individuals, they have
| their own preferences and actions which can also be
| analyzed in this framework. If you think people in the
| market do things that are nasty when all the actions are
| voluntary (and that certainly can happen), shouldn't you
| be even more skeptical of those who are willing to engage
| in violence to force the things they want to come to be
| to happen?
|
| Austrians would also object to the notion of something
| being perfect. But they do analyze situations in which an
| external force interferes with the normal voluntary flow
| of actions and generally find that the stated outcomes
| (probably not the actual desired outcomes) of those
| external forces is generally not met. For example, rent
| control is often argued for as about helping more people
| to be housed and, empirically, that usually is not what
| happens when rent control is enforced. One could argue
| that the real intent of rent control is about making life
| better for the well-connected at the expense of the less
| well-connected and that probably does happen regularly.
| avdelazeri wrote:
| Cargo cult mathematics
| k2enemy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is true for the first foundational courses in micro and
| macro. The profession has moved beyond this and the last
| forty plus years of research have been looking at various
| relaxations of these assumptions.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Even the undergrad is like this. I was shocked to learn it
| wasn't a historical study of economic theory and instead a
| technical course in stats and modeling.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I just went through the DSGE wiki page [1]. It says the
| following about the model, which if true, then I can see why
| it is an completely unserious model.
|
| > Below is an example of the set of assumptions a DSGE is
| built upon: > Perfect competition in all
| markets > All prices adjust instantaneously >
| Rational expectations > No asymmetric information
| > The competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal >
| Firms are identical and price takers > Infinitely
| lived identical price-taking households
|
| > to which the following frictions are added:
| > Distortionary taxes (Labour taxes) - to account for not
| lump-sum taxation > Habit persistence (the period
| utility function depends on a quasi-difference of
| consumption) > Adjustment costs on investments - to
| make investments less volatile > Labour adjustment
| costs - to account for costs firms face when changing the
| level of employment
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_stochastic_general_
| equ...
| Matthyze wrote:
| Are these not the 'friction can be ignored' assumptions of
| economics? They are, of course, blatantly false. But that
| doesn't stop such models from effectively modelling real-
| world behavior.
|
| Granted, I know a slight bit about general equilibrium
| theory, but nothing about DSGE.
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| It's fine to want to solve interesting math problems for the
| sake of it I suppose but they shouldn't be so certain about
| things when telling politicians what policies will work
| nxobject wrote:
| The opportunities are in applications that lead to job
| opportunities in other departments, especially with the rise of
| secondary data analysis in other fields... I would sell myself
| as as a methodologist in a field of application, rather than an
| economist first.
|
| For example, I do health systems research in an academic
| medical center. I work with a health economics research unit
| that doesn't mint PhDs, but does hire at all stages of the
| academic career, and there's been a lot of mobility for their
| "alums" - just not in traditional Econ departments.
| William_BB wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| you probably want a qualified economist running the AI to
| leverage productivity and assess/assert that output is high
| quality
| llmslave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Doubtful the AI democratizes this. If anything it centralizes
| power and capital even more.
| GLdRH wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can I ask you why you think that will happen?
| GLdRH wrote:
| Because the job can be done by AI.
|
| Yes, I was unprecise to the point of being wrong.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wrong. The bad journalism just now uses AI.
| GLdRH wrote:
| You're right
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| People in power (including the people running these Ai
| companies) love bad journalism and bad science.
| coliveira wrote:
| You lost me when you mentioned management consulting and high
| finance as important functions in society.
| ls612 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Welcome to the world. A PhD guarantees nothing, tenured position
| barely exist anymore. Weird that economists did not realize this
| yet...
| paulpauper wrote:
| agree. All job markets are 'bad'. The number of openings is
| greatly exceeded by people applying. this is true for pretty
| much everything.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's more aggressive than that. It's an intentional
| dismantling of higher education overall.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > That's not a great way to survive.
|
| Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > pissed off half of customers in their quest for moral
| purity
|
| I'm not sure what 'half' means here. It's neither true
| that men make up half of applicants (which are really
| what we should be focusing on), nor that so-called
| 'conservatives' make up half of this population.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Academia didn't choose trickle-down policy. Quite the
| opposite -- that was you guys, _after_ you purged all the
| leftist economists in the McCarthy era. In fact, the
| think-tank driven economics departments of recent years
| are so notoriously to the right of most academic faculty
| that this is a point of frequent conflict.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| This wasn't a response to any of his arguments.
|
| I am interested in what people have to say about them
| though.
|
| 1. DEI and identity politics prioritization 2. cost
| corimaith wrote:
| This is just partisan conspirational nonsense. Modern
| Economics took the useful things from Marx and left the
| rest in the dustbin of history like it should. Nor do
| Economists advocate for "trickle-down" theory, the answer
| has more to do with where one is on the laffer curve.
|
| Economists clash frequently with other fields like social
| sciences because such fields continue to use
| unfalsifiable and highly flawed epistemic tools like
| dialectics to advocate for debunked theories like World
| Systems Theory.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Economic theory in western nations is so hilariously
| skewed towards free market capitalist think that obvious
| models are just straight up missed, or sometimes
| obviously wrong conclusions are drawn. Most economics
| start with the understanding that the answer or cause is
| _something_ about free market forces, and then work
| backwards.
|
| For example, when talking about the economics of
| healthcare (or anything else, but lets start with
| healthcare), the conversation is approached from the get-
| go under the assumption that:
|
| 1. Healthcare is already a free market.
|
| 2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free market.
|
| 1. is just not true. Healthcare, in the US and and all
| developed nations, is not a free market. But, economists
| will just assume it is, because they assume everything is
| a free market, and then apply free market dynamics.
| Basically, they skip step 1, and go to step 1000.
|
| And, for number 2, it's very debatable. IMO no,
| healthcare cannot be a free market, just by virtue of
| what healthcare is as a service. But that's debatable, I
| won't get into it.
|
| Point is, we immediately start our economic understanding
| based off assumptions on top of assumptions that come
| from free market thinking, thinking around IP, thinking
| about consumer knowledge, thinking about access, etc.
|
| We make absolutely wild and unsubstantiated claims _for
| free_ , and nobody checks them.
| corimaith wrote:
| >But, economists will just assume it is, because they
| assume everything is a free market, and then apply free
| market dynamics. Basically, they skip step 1, and go to
| step 1000.
|
| Which economist are you referring to here? It's hard to
| even see what specific policy conclusions you're
| critiquing here, beyond a vague strawman against "free
| market assumptions".
| quantumgarbage wrote:
| That isn't a vague strawman, that's a great point.
| Economists work from assumptions, which can be flawed in
| two ways: they can be blatantly wrong (see the work
| Kahneman and Tversky did on the rational individual
| hypothesis) and they can be unfalsifiable (you can't
| always gather data about the assumption itself). There is
| a good essay on this from Tirole (yet a very mainstream
| economist) here: https://www.tse-
| fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...
| corimaith wrote:
| You're pointing to a critique of an assumption, what I'm
| saying can you name a specific economic policy or
| position given by an economist that is used in real
| public policy and then we can measure the merits of those
| policies and their assumptions as opposed to the
| counterfactuals. I'd bet 9/10 times the chosen policy
| likely would have been the most logical option.
|
| After all, it's not like the epistemologies of the other
| humanities stands on far more shakier grounds...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > the most logical option
|
| Well for whom? Another aspect of this problem is an
| economic solution can have winners and losers. An
| economic policy that invokes slavery as solution to labor
| issues may actually be 'logical' but clearly puts the
| interests of one group over another. Economics is just
| the science resource allocation after all. People have
| some serious biases when it comes to deciding policy on
| who gets what and how.
| corimaith wrote:
| I've asking multiple posters to give a specific policy
| example to critique and so far all of you have been
| unable to do so, instead dancing around and critiquing
| vague notions of a possibility of bias without giving
| concrete examples. Very postmodern, but this is why
| actual policymakers don't listen to critique like this.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Ok, cutting taxes to the very rich while raising them on
| middle and lower classes and cutting services. This was
| part of the big beautiful bill. This is 'logical' from
| the point of view of the billionaire class, but in terms
| of the economy that everyone else lives in, things will
| be worse for them.
| corimaith wrote:
| >Ok, cutting taxes to the very rich while raising them on
| middle and lower classes and cutting services. This was
| part of the big beautiful bill. This is 'logical' from
| the point of view of the billionaire class
|
| Deciding who benefits or not from legislation is not a
| Economist's domain, their work is descriptive, not
| normative. You're critiquing politicians here for
| prioritizing GDP, but that is divorced from your critique
| of economics. The economist will only tell you what they
| think will happen with regard to the economy if you pass
| a bill or not given the goals you've outlined to them.
|
| https://taxfoundation.org/blog/big-beautiful-bill-impact-
| def...
|
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387
|
| Well you look at analysis here, do you then disagree with
| the predictions of the bill and the methodology used, and
| if so, what is your better analysis here with supposedly
| more refined epistemic assumptions?
| erxam wrote:
| _Milei 's government slashed the national health care
| budget by 48 percent in real terms and fired over 2,000
| Health Ministry workers -- 1,400 in just a few days in
| January. These drastic moves were part of Milei's broader
| plan to shrink the state and remake Argentina's debt-
| ridden economy._
|
| _Among the most dramatic cutbacks was the dismantling of
| the National Cancer Institute, which halted early
| detection programs for breast and cervical cancer.
| Funding was also frozen for immunization campaigns,
| severely disrupting vaccine access during Argentina 's
| first measles outbreak in decades. The National
| Directorate for HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis lost 40
| percent of its staff and 76 percent of its budget,
| delaying diagnosis and treatment across the country.
| Emergency contraception and abortion pill distribution
| have also stopped._
|
| _Prescription drug prices and private health insurance
| premiums have surged by 250 percent and 118 percent,
| respectively, according to official data._
|
| https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278391265/mileis-
| austeri...
|
| Obviously, this is an article from the political side of
| things (I tried to cut out value judgements), but these
| are decisions made by _actual_ economists like Jose Luis
| Espert, Agustin Etchebarne, Federico Sturzenegger,
| Alberto Benegas Lynch and probably a million others I 'm
| not aware of.
| reactordev wrote:
| There is no economics that involves enslaving other
| humans. Not slavery. Not ever. However, in debt in
| perpetuity is a thing. So you have to work to pay, so you
| can live, so you can work, so you can pay...
|
| Debt crisis is a real problem. We have borrowed more than
| we can ever repay, all nations, for the last 30 years.
| Both sides. Just drove right off the cliff.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Economists work from assumptions_
|
| All models start with givens...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the conversation is approached from the get-go under
| the assumption that: 1. Healthcare is already a free
| market. 2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free
| market_
|
| Nobody does this.
| yongjik wrote:
| America's greatest conservative government pressured a
| private business to fire a comedian for a remark on the
| death of someone who was basically a celebrity troll.
|
| ...and they turn around and complain about liberals'
| "moral purity."
| reactordev wrote:
| To them, he was a master of manipulation, exactly what
| they're looking for. Someone who can spout racism and
| bigotry and drive listenership based on what crazy thing
| he'll say next. Where does this sound familiar? It's
| playbook man. That's their business. I don't condone any
| of what happened but he's not someone we should be
| building statues of.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yeah, where do people think Technology Growth comes from.
| GOP is all Growth, Growth, Growth, will save us, but hey
| lets poison the well from which it flows.
|
| All AI growth today, is actually from Academia from 20
| years ago.
| nradov wrote:
| Growth comes from many sources. The supply-side economics
| wing of the GOP would claim that lower taxes and smaller,
| less intrusive government will allow for a higher private
| sector growth rate. There may be some truth to that,
| although the effects are probably limited compared to the
| development of disruptive new technologies.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier
| institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession
| mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and
| lecturers.
|
| This all started when the govt began withholding federal
| funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > This all started when the govt began withholding federal
| funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests
|
| This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding
| federal funding'
| yongjik wrote:
| Yeah it's more like "clamp down on higher education."
|
| I've said it multiple times, Trump and his folks see
| higher education as the enemy, the anti-Christ that
| corrupts their vision of America. Protests and admin
| bureaucracy (give me a fucking break) are just convenient
| excuses.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But
| the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But
| the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed
|
| That is not true. Those happened in 2024.
|
| The extortionate demands are happening in 2025.
|
| The campus protests are clearly a pretext.
| kadushka wrote:
| I hope they're cutting their bloated administration
| departments before cutting classes and lecturers, but I'm
| not holding my breath.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > bloated administration departments
|
| Can you demonstrate how those administration departments
| were bloated (in any way)
|
| edit: re-added "administration" which I had, for some
| reason, neglected to add, thinking that it was obvious
| that that was what I was talking about.
| kadushka wrote:
| Yes, this fact is well-known and has been widely
| discussed. The first two google search results provide
| the stats:
|
| https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-
| review/features/death-b...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/adm
| ini...
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Both of those links (thanks for providing them) only talk
| about raw numbers, no real in depth analysis of whether
| the administrators are needed at those levels, or not,
| nor even how they classify someone as being an
| administrator.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more
| details would be really helpful. For example MIT and
| CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x
| more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy,
| but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the
| distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.
|
| I feel like this is an example where we can get almost
| everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing
| better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is
| almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see
| a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also
| be the case that people see the admin responsibilities
| and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is --
| with this data, I have no idea.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I have a suspicion that as an entity such as a University
| (or government, or business, etc) gets larger, its
| bureaucracy/administrations needs grow (at a much faster
| rate)
| araes wrote:
| There's some examples in the first link, with the
| implication they're representative (unknown whether they
| are, yet, "detail about the distribution")
|
| > Purdue administrator: a "$172,000 per year associate
| vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of
| committees charged with considering a change in the
| academic calendar" who defended their role to a Bloomberg
| reporter by stating "'[my] job is to make sure these
| seven or eight committees are aware of what's going on in
| the other committees.'"
|
| > serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms.
| "Health Promotion Specialist", "Student Success Manager,"
| and "Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability" are all
| positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A
| Harvard Crimson article considered the university's
| recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) "Task Force on
| Visual Culture and Signage", a 24 member-strong committee
| including 9 administrators.
| layman51 wrote:
| I don't have any serious evidence, but the idea of
| "bloated administration" has been a meme for many years
| and I remember this humorous article describing it as a
| new chemical element floating around since around a
| decade ago:
| https://meyerweb.com/other/humor/administratium.html
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk
| about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've
| never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers"
|
| That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the
| other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it
| - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything
| about who is being described as "administration" nor do
| we know why they're there in the first place.
| kelipso wrote:
| I know a current professor who has been in the same
| department for 15 years and the admin bloat thing is
| definitely real. Just tons of new people employed for who
| knows what. Maybe the numbers are out there maybe not
| (who is looking at them?) but it's definitely not an
| imaginary thing or made up for political purposes.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| An anecdote describing feels is political.
|
| This is why i want hard facts.
| kelipso wrote:
| It's not feels when admin has grown massively in staff
| while other staff, faculty and students remain the same
| lol. It's really not interesting talking to someone who
| actively and proudly places their head in the sand.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| You literally presented an anecdote on the feelings of
| "someone you know"
|
| 1. It's not my head in the sand. 2. Do you have any
| actual hard, credible, facts?
| kelipso wrote:
| You don't seem to be able to distinguish between an
| anecdote on feelings as opposed to anecdote on facts.
| That's unfortunate but it's not something I can help you
| with. So I will just leave you with your head in the
| sand.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Please, stop posting false claims and anecdotes.
|
| An anecdote is not data, not ever.
|
| No matter how you try to spin things, your claim was
| worth less than the recycled electrons it rode in on.
| kelipso wrote:
| Now you're backing up to false claims lol. Seems to me
| you are clinging on to a hot take that you will do
| anything to defend. No point in a discussion with you.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Your false claim is that somehow I have my head in the
| sand for daring to point out that you are providing
| anecdotes which are feelings based (there are _zero_ hard
| facts in your claim, no numbers, no examples, just
| "looks like more people")
|
| The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you,
| because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that
| you could get away with BS, but you got called out
| instead.
|
| If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable,
| you can post them at any time.
|
| You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| They are cutting both from what I hear from lecturers in
| top schools
| gbacon wrote:
| This seems like a broad overgeneralization unless you believe
| zero fat in grad schools is available for trimming.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The fat (insofar as it exists) is almost entirely not in
| mathematics PhD student funding.
|
| Compared to almost any activity a university could take, it
| is incredibly cheap to bring in mathematics PhD students.
| michaelt wrote:
| Most phd programmes are very, very low fat when it comes to
| salaries.
|
| An academic CS department has to attract PhD level talent
| in hot areas like ML while only paying $30k a year.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Is there a long term financial payoff, or does it mostly
| attract people who are choosing academia over commercial
| for some other reason?
| LPisGood wrote:
| A little of column A and a little of column B. There is
| prestige in getting a PhD. There is also access and
| unique networking opportunities.
|
| On the purely financial side, many top students work
| internships during the summers and make 40 or 50 thousand
| dollars during that time in addition to their academic
| stipend.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| In CS there's a long term payoff bc tech has the money to
| invest in R&D even in an economy like this one
| array_key_first wrote:
| The payout is very, very long term and honestly you
| probably don't come out ahead.
|
| Starting your career 10 years earlier (effectively) and
| immediately progressing in your career probably gets you
| further. Especially if you look towards management, which
| is where the money is (usually, million dollar AI
| research salaries is a new thing).
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I don't think this is always true. AI research big
| payouts aren't even a new thing. It was common 10 years
| ago for big name professors to get hired by Google etc.
| and bring the whole lab with them.
|
| Also a PHD is not 10 years long? You start your career
| 4-5 years after a typical BS in CS
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, the big money is in becoming a leader in a field
| _before_ it 's hot - making the _big_ payoffs very
| speculative.
|
| In the mid 2000s, natural language modelling was a joke
| and the best performing ML systems for sentiment analysis
| would lose in benchmarks to emoji counters. Today, people
| with a PhD in ML language modelling and years of
| experience delivering projects in industry are finding
| the PhD in ML really pays off.
|
| But what about someone who spent the mid 2000s working on
| formal methods for static analysis? Or a compiler
| responding to the challenges created by Intel's Itanium
| architecture? Or trying to fit FPGA accelerator boards
| into the niche CUDA fills today?
|
| Well, honestly their career's probably still going fine,
| they're a smart person and there's been many years of
| high demand for competent programmers. But industry isn't
| beating their door down; the beneficial effects of the
| PhD will be a lot less obvious.
|
| Honestly a lot of PhDs go to people from cultures that
| prize education; and to people from upper-middle-class
| backgrounds who've been brought up to do well in school,
| follow their passions, no need to worry too much about
| money.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The sources of university funding and spending on
| administration has been broken for a long time.
|
| What does a graduate math program need? A building with
| some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a
| couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and
| salaries for students and researchers/instructors.
|
| What need does a math program have for any but the most
| basic administration? That's where all the money is going,
| where the biggest growth in spending is going.
|
| You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose
| nothing. Start with the top 25 university presidents who
| all earn a slightly rounded up 2 million a year and more.
| nxobject wrote:
| ...and money to go to conferences and summer schools, and
| money for software licenses (especially in applied
| programs), and department funds to bring visiting
| academics, and the following things that get lumped under
| administration: money for grad student food pantries and
| childcare because funding streams for PhDs don't provide
| for good salaries outright, and job advising centers
| because the math job market is a crapshoot, and free
| student health clinics for psychological and physical
| health because doing a PhD in any condition is rough...
| LPisGood wrote:
| A lot of software licenses are free for academic use for
| what it's worth.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Who pays for all that? Usually it's not the students or
| even private funders / donors. Most of the money comes
| from one level of the government or another, and it comes
| with all kinds of regulations and requirements. Complying
| with that requires a lot of specialized administrative
| staff.
|
| Most of the time, when you hear a politician saying that
| universities should / should not do X, they are
| effectively saying that universities should spend more on
| administration.
|
| Universities with a residential campus have a lot of
| staff in functions unrelated to the academic mission,
| such as student housing, food services, healthcare, or
| sports facilities. If they have to compete for students
| instead of most people just automatically choosing the
| nearest university, focusing on these tends to make them
| more competitive. And while student amenities are not
| particularly important to PhD students, they are
| important to the university if it also educates
| undergraduates.
|
| Then there is the organization chart. In a traditional
| university, the faculty senate (or another similar body)
| is in charge and all administrators are subordinate to
| it. But the modern world prefers centralized
| organizations, with administrators at the top. And
| whoever is in charge also determines the priorities of
| the organization.
| kenjackson wrote:
| "You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose
| nothing."
|
| People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a
| breakdown on how you pull this off.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Cut the top 20 salaries in half and fire 10% of the staff
| who are not directly involved in academics (must teach,
| learn, or research) for starters. Sever any major
| athletics organization (i.e. football, basketball, etc)
| into a separate legal entity with something like a
| license fee to the university based on team revenue as a
| percentage so funds flow exclusively in one direction.
|
| University admin work expands to the available workforce
| and I've heard first person accounts from long time
| senior university staff about admin employees who
| literally didn't do anything of any conceivable
| consequence.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I mean actually breakdown exactly where the spending is
| going and then show the cuts.
|
| You can say "cut salaries in half" about any industry.
| You could say it about software engineers. But just
| because you say that doesn't mean it'll work out well for
| the industry. Non-minimum wage salaries should be market
| driven. I doubt you could just cut salaries in half and
| keep a reasonable work force.
| thisisit wrote:
| This seems to be the default defense - Is there no
| fraud/fat/waste etc in this thing which is being harmed?
|
| It sounds like people don't understand bureaucracy is
| always imperfect. If it was perfect then you don't need to
| create another agency called DOGE while having
| Congressional Budget Office and do exactly the same things.
|
| The question should be is there fraud/fat/waste which has a
| meaningful impact? If not then it changing it wouldn't
| really matter. The unfortunate thing is that anecdotal
| evidence rules supreme and there are enemies every where.
|
| "Data doesn't support a meaningful impact? I saw it with my
| own eyes so it should be true and the person reporting the
| data must have Democrat agenda"
| dotnet00 wrote:
| PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school
| to support.
|
| They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate
| independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't
| take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA
| classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through
| grants.
|
| The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the
| necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented
| faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed
| to ensure compliance with grant terms.
| oscaracso wrote:
| >PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research
| school to support.
|
| In America the students at the undergraduate and masters
| levels pay to pursue their degrees, while the PhDs are
| paid by the school. As these students do not directly
| generate revenue, the PhD programs will be first on the
| chopping block and the admin who make the 'tough
| decisions' to keep the ship afloat will be off at their
| next jobs by the time the chickens come home to roost.
| elevation wrote:
| Oddly, the actual threat to knowledge generation?
| Institutions that absorb societal-scale science budgets while
| perpetuating systemic fraud.
|
| Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every
| research grant.
|
| Institutions demand published work even when results do not
| warrant it, and demote professors honest enough to document a
| null result.
|
| The peer review system then rubber stamps papers with no
| actual review or reproduction. Journals blacklist professors
| who withhold endorsement.
|
| The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud. But which 90%?
| We need to drastically reform this system.
| searine wrote:
| This is anti-intellectual propaganda.
|
| Seriously, 90%? None of what you said is happening at
| anywhere near that scale. Touch grass.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Professors have told me it doesn't matter which
| administration is in - they just need to rebrand their
| project to meet funding requirements. Isn't that a scary
| thought? We have no visibility and they are skilled
| enough to transform into any form.
| gammarator wrote:
| [citation needed]
| monkeyelite wrote:
| This. It's not useful to capture the smartest people if we
| deploy them to spend 50% of their time promoting projects
| for grants.
| knappa wrote:
| > Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of
| every research grant.
|
| Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect
| costs that high. See e.g.
|
| https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-
| OD-25-0...
|
| "Yet the average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has
| averaged between 27% and 28% over time."
|
| and a lot of that is simply because nobody wants to do the
| detailed accounting for things like: lab electricity usage,
| janitorial services, misc supplies.
|
| > The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud.
|
| This is dramatic nonsense; a simple made up number.
| boplicity wrote:
| Fascism is not an ideology, or a philosophical idea, it's a
| system of government. And dismantling and/or gaining control
| over academia is a core part of the system.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Their acceptance rate is in the 25% range. Clearly the demand
| is there, so why is there a "fiscal situation"?
|
| In the mid 90's I went to a university that had cafeteria-style
| food, and dorms with no air conditioning. You don't need Waygu
| beef and massages in order to teach students. There shouldn't
| be any "fiscal situation" in higher education.
|
| What is a university anyway? It's some buildings and classrooms
| with professors and students. It should be SUPER CHEAP to run a
| university.
| barumrho wrote:
| Math PhDs are usually paid stipend and pay no tuition, so
| each additional student is a cost to the school.
| kelipso wrote:
| And they are primarily funded by outside, usually
| government, money that professors bring in through grants
| etc. If government doesn't fund the professors, they can't
| pay grad students. If they can't pay grad students, then
| the university has to pay them directly from its own money,
| but the university can only pay so many grad students.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Through this whole thread, this is really the answer.
| Students don't just pay their own way. And the model
| isn't that universities give scholarships to PhD
| students. PhD students either get TAships (that are paid
| by the department) or RAships (paid by the professor
| through their research grants). If the school is losing
| (or at risk of losing) research grants then the first and
| easiest thing to go is grad students.
|
| This isn't about administrative bloat or any of that
| other stuff. It's purely the model to fund grad students
| is being choked and this is one of the few levers
| programs have to adjust to it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I agree with you about the excesses of university luxury, but
| the fact that it's just teachers and students is what makes
| it expensive in fact.
|
| As technology and labor-saving devices make everything more
| productive, human labor gets relatively more expensive over
| time. It's more expensive than it was 30 years ago, much more
| than 60 years ago.
|
| Any business that relies on specifically human labor that
| can't be automated has more and more trouble being
| profitable, at least at prices that any but the rich can
| afford.
| Konnstann wrote:
| You forgot about administrators, who are climbing in number
| relative to the number of students for no good reason.
| judahmeek wrote:
| Prove it.
|
| For your convenience, here's a link to a conversation
| started by someone else saying the same thing & then
| actually providing sources (that don't necessarily support
| their claim): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45466504
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > Their acceptance rate is in the 25% range. Clearly the
| demand is there, so why is there a "fiscal situation"?
|
| They are projecting multiple years of declining federal
| investment in education and research which made up an
| important portion of their budgets.
|
| They also would rather cut or shrink classes / labs, etc.
| than loosen academic or admissions standards because their
| institutional reputation is very important and decided by
| such things.
|
| > You don't need Waygu beef and massages in order to teach
| students.
|
| I went to one of the top (and most expensive) schools in the
| US. I never once saw Wagyu beef or massages offered to
| students.
|
| The fiscal situation, again, is because of increasing
| government clampdown on academia. The Trump admin just a few
| days ago circulated a "compact" it wants universities to sign
| which would mandate all science degrees be tuition free and
| int'l student admissions be capped at 15% of the whole
| student body. Such dramatic lurches and demands can be hurled
| any time by this admin so schools cannot afford to be caught
| off guard anymore
| giardini wrote:
| We've been producing far more PhD graduates than we need for
| decades. Each year a relative few get jobs (e.g., university
| professor) appropriate to the training, while the rest are
| unceremoniously dumped by the railroad track to fend for
| themselves. Same for MS, BS, BA et al. Overall we have far more
| highly-trained people than we need for most all degree
| programs.
|
| It's not like the USA needs a butt-load of "math PhD's".
| searine wrote:
| Having an excess PhD level citizens is every free countries
| wet dream. Its bonkers that people think it is somehow a
| negative.
|
| It is a recipe for innovation. Most of those people want to
| do things with their knowledge, not teach classes. Most go to
| business who use that knowledge to innovate and increase
| profit.
|
| Businesses literally get an excess of highly educated workers
| for (almost) free, and for some reason the MBA/Tech-right
| class thinks its a good thing to blow up that system.
| Absolutely bonkers.
| giardini wrote:
| We've _always_ had an excess of PhD 's. They're made to
| purpose for university instruction or research. But there
| are far more PhDs than appropriate jobs:
|
| https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
|
| Scroll down to the graph under "Not So Very Serious Stuff".
| blackbear_ wrote:
| The purpose of a PhD is not to train people for
| "appropriate jobs". PhD students perform a large part of
| academic research, and while most of it is grunt work and
| produces incremental results, some brilliant people end
| up discovering a gold nugget and carrying their field
| forward many times over.
|
| Innovation is hard, most ideas do not pan out, and most
| people aren't made for it. It really is a number's game:
| to stay competitive and innovative as a country you need
| enough people pushing against the frontier, including
| taking bets that are too risky for the private sector.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| The situation certainly sucks for the actual PhD holders.
| Go through 5-8 years of intense work and minimal pay, and
| the outcome is maybe a 10% chance of getting the job you
| want?
|
| It's unsustainable. I got my PhD 20 years ago, but I would
| certainly advise my children to avoid it.
| bawana wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Dont forget the worlds oldest profession.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| AI girlfriends are coming for that too
| whatever1 wrote:
| Thank god TikTok and Insta are grooming us already. We will
| be ready!
| lumost wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| How is the length of the postdoc a factor? Next year
| there's going to be another graduating class and again the
| year after.
| schainks wrote:
| What! Tradeskills are clearly in demand and pay great. A good
| plumber where I live is over $800/hr.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
| jcbrand wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Citation needed on all claims.
|
| What does it even mean to be "the best of the world"?
| People are not numbers, you cannot just rank them by
| score!
| oscaracso wrote:
| Do you think it is charity? The PI hires a student and the
| student works for them, typically 3-5 years on a salary of
| around $35,000, often very extensive hours. If the student
| is talented and dedicated you can conduct more and better
| research than if they are not. A large proportion of the
| most talented and dedicated candidates will not be
| American. It is not a 'huge favor' it is a mutually
| beneficial arrangement.
| 141205 wrote:
| I'd like to know about your experience in modern academe.
| I've gone to top-ranked schools in America (UT Austin,
| Stanford). My experience with the average foreign graduate
| student is not "top research talent." Most of the time you
| have a mid-level grifter that wants a green card, a work
| visa, or something else that simply lets them immigrate here.
| The work that they produce in exchange for that is low
| quality. The decline in the quality of graduate degrees may
| in many ways mirror the issues that tech workers have had
| with H-1Bs: they were intended to attract high quality
| talent, but became a corrupt racket.
| kyleee wrote:
| Not to mention the sexual misconduct and coercion
| sarchertech wrote:
| The PhD student segregation was blatant even going back a few
| decades, but it was based on country of origin not race.
|
| You'd have a Chinese professor and all his students were
| Chinese, an Indian professor and all hers were Indian etc...
| The American born professors tended to have mostly American
| born students, but it was a bit more mixed.
|
| It's hard to know whether this was based on the professor's
| preference or the students'.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Of course the intent is not malicious. As a student you want
| someone who speaks your language and someone who understands
| you. And similarly for professors.
|
| The absurdity is Americans assuming people won't express in-
| group preference.
| sarchertech wrote:
| The intent doesn't have to be malicious for the outcome to
| be harmful or outright illegal in this case.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| I agree, we should use policy to prevent bad outcomes.
| giardini wrote:
| This has probably been true forever. I considered applying for
| an internship at a medical center back in the 80's. My adviser
| laughed and told me it was a slot created by an Indian
| professor and was intended to be filled by an Indian student.
| verteu wrote:
| "true forever" to what extent?
|
| In 1979, 14% of PhDs went to non-citizens. In 2024, it's 38%.
|
| (Table 1-6 in https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-
| doctorates/2024#data )
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Weather reports are really accurate. Economic forecasts less
| so.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Weather reports have the luxury of only needing to forecast
| out a week, and only very accurate for coming 1-3 days.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| 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?
| ModernMech wrote:
| US economy doesn't need economists to explain the mood of the
| economy anymore -- since it's bent to the will of one man,
| psychologist should instead be called in to evaluate the mood of
| the President.
|
| "WSJ headline: The Governor of California has called the
| President a "baby" on social media, so psychologists are
| predicting retaliatory sanctions and job losses by Q2"
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Excellent book review by Noah Smith that is relevant:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It did not say scientist-only. HN is deteriorating smh.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| It was greenspans favorite book after all
| TMWNN wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Do you even understand what first class citizen means?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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=...
| codyklimdev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Plus most PhD have spent their whole life in education and
| haven't got any real work experience.
| altairprime wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Intelligence doesn't imply wisdom, nor correctness, nor
| even common sense. You have to be able to do a certain
| amount of mental gymnastics to certify as an economics PhD,
| is all. That doesn't affect the odds of whether economics
| is ultimately found to be a waste of time and money, though
| it's useful enough at delaying a possible reckoning.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| i don't expect the fed to fix everyone's problems... let them
| hire the best of the best, and let us internalize the
| benefits... i'm sure i don't fully understand the significance
| of this, but from where i sit, in my fancy office chair in
| front of a very fancy home office setup (not to brag ;P), i see
| absolutely no compelling reason as to why hiring the best is a
| bad thing. is the accusation that the FED is trying to lowball
| american economists? somehow i am dubious, but am beyond open
| to being wrong.
| hluska wrote:
| I could prove you wrong, but you don't seem very open to it
| and I can't under why you had to brag about how fancy your
| office is, so I'm not going to get started. But I don't think
| you know what you're talking about.
| jocaal wrote:
| > let them hire the best of the best
|
| The sooner people realize that there is no such thing, the
| better. People are extremely incompetent in judging
| competence. With that said, the solution isn't to then just
| hire the person willing to do the work for the least amount
| of money. You americans should realize you live in a society
| together and have obligations to give each other chances.
| Plenty of bright people around. This new top down command and
| control culture that has taken root in the American corporate
| world will be the downfall of the nation. Everyone is just
| trying to screw over the next guy for a quick buck.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| If it's an entry level position, there shouldn't be a need for
| H1B. But some of these positions (including at the federal
| reserve) are probably experienced people with 10+ years of
| experience just renewing their visa while they wait for the
| green card backlog to clear for their country or an extremely
| tenured person from places like the Oxford University (the
| article mentions it). Pretending a fresh PhD with most likely
| no job experience can immediately take over that H1B position
| is intellectually dishonest.
|
| This obviously doesn't mean I don't advocate for creating more
| entry level positions which most of the economy these days
| isn't interested in creating.
| bArray wrote:
| Can confirm that UK computer science PhD positions decrease too.
| This is largely due to departments and grants tightening their
| belts.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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!
| AlexCornila wrote:
| Well the economic framework they have been trained for is
| collapsing so there's that
| whycome wrote:
| There's that one guy who used it to become prime Minister of
| Canada. Not even a politician.
| tomhowsalterego wrote:
| Econ PhDs sound fucking useless. They would have served the
| economy better being plumbers, welders and machinists.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| chokominto wrote:
| Did they do extrapolation using paint? Omg
| estetlinus wrote:
| Thank you for noticing. What on EARTH was that abomination?
| lkrubner wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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-affiliat...
|
| https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat...
|
| https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-fall/political-affiliat...
| monkeyelite wrote:
| > the majority of all economists are Republican
|
| Of mainstream politicians they are most aligned with Obama or
| Clinton.
|
| The Trump movement since 2016 has taken republicans away from
| mainstream Economics.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Chris Brunet is part of the Canadian turned American Alt-Right
| movement having been a worked at the Daily Caller and "The
| American Conservative" [0]. Sort of like a Canadian and less
| sharp Oren Cass, and basically the same ideological pipeline
| that created "Rebel News".
|
| He attempted a pre-doc at UChicago but didn't stand out, and
| had similar issues at his other conservative employers along
| with his personality.
|
| One of my buddies was his peer in the program at the time, and
| from down the grapevine, he was dismissed for some, let's say
| "academic issues". The reason he failed in his Econ career was
| for similar reasons a large number of Econ majors can't hack it
| - they lacked the mathematical and computational sophistication
| needed in modern Econ.
|
| He was right to call out Christine Gay for academic fraud, but
| it's a bit of a "pot meet kettle" kind of situation given his
| academic background.
|
| The stereotype of what Econ is in common parlance is what has
| become "Political Science" in 2025. To succeed in a modern top
| tier Econ or PoliSci program, you will need data science and
| mathematical chops comparable to a bachelors in Applied Math or
| CS (excluding the systems programming portion). Heck,
| Government students gunning for grad school back at Harvard
| tend to take mathematical Game Theory classes with proofs
| comparable to those taken by CS and Applied Math majors.
|
| This wouldn't have been bad in the policy world (plenty of non-
| technical "economists" on both sides) but his personality has
| made the actual Alt-Right and the traditional conservative
| right both detest him based on my friend and alumni group. One
| of the other comments on this thread about applied versus think
| tank and journalist background does resonate to my personal
| experience to a certain extent.
|
| > the majority of all economists are Republican
|
| I'd disagree with that. The majority of economists ik who ended
| up in academia or industry are largely split evenly
| ideologically, but in action don't really care one way or the
| other. They tend to have a "show me the data" mentality.
|
| On top of that, while UChicago is nowhere near as conservative
| as it was when Friedman roamed the earth, it's Econ and PoliSci
| departments are very open to heterodox thought and various
| conservative leaning Econ and PoliSci grads have come out of
| the program.
|
| [0] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-brunet-28074a288
| erxam wrote:
| Economists always do this shit. They talk about the unimpeded
| free market being some sort of saintly state of being, convince
| governments to implode themselves, everything goes to shit
| and... guess what? Apparently the economists had nothing to do
| with any of it?
|
| Also, just calling the majority of economists 'Republican'
| doesn't explain it completely. The truth is that the Austrian
| School of Economics (Mises, Friedman, Hoppe) IS economics, and
| every single successful economist believes 100% in their
| gospel.
| notmyjob wrote:
| Friedman was not an Austrian. You are ignorant of basic
| facts. Austrians are fringe and have almost no influence
| within mainstream econ, and beyond that Austrians are closer
| to Chomsky than Burke.
| umutisik wrote:
| He should add "Economists confidently making wishful-thinking
| based proclamations without a shred of evidence or even a
| plausible logical path." to the list!
| filloooo wrote:
| The problem is not with economists, running modern economy is
| kind of like managing a state-owned corporation that can't just
| drop the none-performative ones, there are going to be
| unsolvable ills, cycling between imperfect plausible solutions,
| and a necessary change of path or thinking is going to make a
| lot of people uncomfortable, everytime.
| notmyjob wrote:
| Hilariously wrong to anyone who has spent any portion of their
| career working with actual economists. Every working economist
| is at the very least classic liberal/neo-liberal. It is the
| basis of the profession. Political economists don't really
| exist now, even if they did they'd be liberal or
| anarcho/liberal. They worship in the church of free trade and
| unrestrained immigration. The most famous and influential media
| economists for those who are not familiar with economics or
| haven't interacted with economists are people like Krugman and
| Robert Reich, or Larry Summers for the better educated. All
| deep blue democrats. Some economists may lean right and many
| tend to side against democrats but that's because they all
| rightly fear government debt and socialism. They fear it less
| than tarrifs or tightened border security if you poll them. The
| most famous economist of all time is Marx!
| nxm wrote:
| Stimulus was required at beginning to avoid a recession. Biden
| came in when economy was well recovering and overheated the
| economy, especially with his 2nd stimulus bill resulting in
| very high inflation
| ttonelli wrote:
| Right, so much stimulus that it caused inflation all over the
| world!
| tmaly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| When I think of things being in free-fall, I think of them going
| down. Not going up more slowly.
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