"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.

> 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...

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]

Based on his background, it appears he attempted a pre-doc at UChicago but didn't stand out.

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".

[0] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-brunet-28074a288

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

This. It’s not useful to capture the smartest people if we use them to spend 50% of their time promoting projects for grants.

[citation needed]

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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".

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/...

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

> There it is; the quest for moral purity continues.

I am neither a university nor 'academia'.

I am, however, still unclear about what your point is.

It’s funny that instead of making points or adding data, you just repeat the same slogan and act like a victim. Many of us have tried to listen for a long time but we have never found any intellectual meat on the slogans. It’s boring.

There was a paper published in 2022 on the political leanings of scientists [1]. Here's the abstract:

> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.

An example they give of the changes in the Republican Party are the Republican position on climate change. For a good illustration at just how much Republicans have changed just take a look at the 2008 Republican Party Platform [2].

They wanted to address climate change by reducing emissions and greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency, promoting EVs and natural gas powered vehicles, and create multi-million dollar prizes for technological developments to eliminate the need for gas powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.

They also talk about the need for renewables to become mainstream and supported long-term energy tax credits to promote that.

Compare to today. Now they are opposed to nearly all of that. The current administration's position is the climate change is a hoax or scam.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3

[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...

Members of an ideological group that sees educational institutions as their enemies less likely to find jobs in educational institutions, news at eleven.

Have you considered that it's not filtering for conservatives, but conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all? Isn't liberal arts degree a literal punchline to so many on the right, yet you cant figure out why that might skew left?

> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven

Huh, wonder why this world view doesnt jive with academia.

> Have you considered that … conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all?

When the ingroup is underrepresented the question is “how can we get more ingroup in”.

But when the outgroup is underrepresented it’s met with “maybe outgroup just isn’t as good”.

Eg. women in tech, men in nursing; conservatives vs liberals in academia.

It’s worth thinking about why you’re wrong, because it explains why those comparisons aren’t valid. Modern conservatism is defined by rejecting ideas like objective truth or pluralism which are the core of academia. There’s no way to have conservatives more represented in science when conservatives refuse to allow people who practice science to be part of their movement: you used to be able to find Republicans who wanted to do something about climate change, for example, but anyone who wants to apply scientific principles there now has been purged from the party. Vaccines aren’t quite there yet but it’s trending in that direction and the percentage of doctors who are Republican have been declining since the pandemic.

Contrast that with women in tech or men in nursing and it becomes obvious why the comparison isn’t valid: women want to be good technologists, not to reject the validity of technology or say we should all go back to the Amish lifestyle (that desire is common to senior developers of both genders). Male nurses want to be good nurses, not claiming that their gender means they can commit medical malpractice.

Ugh, there is only ignorance and enlightenment. Keep enjoying ignorance.

This is religious thinking.

> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven

This is not religious thinking? You’re arguing based on faith and claiming the rest of us have to prove there is no tea pot floating in orbit on the other side of the sun

> That's not a great way to survive.

Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.

Academia didn't make it financially impossible to have kids. Just what control do you think academia has over the market? Over the government?

"Raise house prices now or I'll send you to the principal's office!"

The gays didn't send house prices to the moon. Mexicans didn't send the jobs to China. No, it's the people with assets who pursued asset-pumping policy to great effect. You're right to be angry, but you're a fool to believe them when they point at universities as the source of the problem.

> At this point, we might be just fine. The academics won't be, but they were the ones telling everyone to wait on having kids in the first place. Demographic trickle down, biting the hand that feeds academia, is a big part of this story.

> At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.

Hard to tell if this is just parody.

I will say that if feel that providing something equates to mandating it... I don't know how we're going to be able to have logical exchanges

You seem to argue that academia of all places made having children being a chore. Not like, dunno, job security, housing and child care costs?

Whatever beef you got is what 'media' fed you selected smug academics to piss you off.

I feel bad for the toxic world building you are committing yourself to. You should try not monolithizing groups of people.

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."

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.

Which side are you talking about?

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.

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

> 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'

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.

I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed

> 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.

I hope they're cutting their bloated administration departments before cutting classes and lecturers, but I'm not holding my breath.

They are cutting both from what I hear from lecturers in top schools

> 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.

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/admini...

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

An anecdote describing feels is political.

This is why i want hard facts.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

Is there a long term financial payoff, or does it mostly attract people who are choosing academia over commercial for some other reason?

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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"

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.

…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…

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Math PhDs are usually paid stipend and pay no tuition, so each additional student is a cost to the school.

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.

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.

You forgot about administrators, who are climbing in number relative to the number of students for no good reason.

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

> 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

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.

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".

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Economists are stuck at a ceteris paribus level of comprehending what's going on. Forget about differential equations.

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.

> 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.

No true Austrian Schools economist...

Cargo cult mathematics

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.

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.

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±z°C. Because when you aggregate enough events, statistical effects become dominant.

"But reality is not linear" is not really a gotcha.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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).

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.

Borrowing a line from Rentec, probably because they'd rather prefer pure-math or physics people not "tainted" by economic dogma

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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

Its the old axiom best expressed by the philosopher Sir Michael Tyson - "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".

Look up the concept of computational irreduceability

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.

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).

> Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago.

It was called statistics

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.

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.

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.

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

Actuarial science perhaps

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...

> 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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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

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.

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.

Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating ED..."<

That would be a hard act to follow.

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_MandateForLeade...

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.

That will depend on if it fits the narrative or not.

The "people think they're guaranteed a job" narrative is because the author is a right-wing journalist who "exposes" academics.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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!

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.

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’.

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.

Not to mention the sexual misconduct and coercion

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?

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.

Did they do extrapolation using paint? Omg

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.

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.

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=...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Plus most PhD have spent their whole life in education and haven't got any real work experience.

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

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 :)

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Weather reports are really accurate. Economic forecasts less so.

Weather reports have the luxury of only needing to forecast out a week, and only very accurate for coming 1-3 days.

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)

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.

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

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.

agree. All job markets are 'bad'. The number of openings is greatly exceeded by people applying. this is true for pretty much everything.

>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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

Doubtful the AI democratizes this. If anything it centralizes power and capital even more.

You lost me when you mentioned management consulting and high finance as important functions in society.

One of the more salutary effects of AI will be the removal of bad journalism and bad science (bad in the sense of slop).

Can I ask you why you think that will happen?

Because the job can be done by AI.

Yes, I was unprecise to the point of being wrong.

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?

Wrong. The bad journalism just now uses AI.

You're right

People in power (including the people running these Ai companies) love bad journalism and bad science.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.

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

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.

It’s not surprising that aspiring economists prefer the theory which loads them with power.

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.

It's amazing Hayek won a Nobel after being the student of such a washout.

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...

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...

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/...

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.

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.

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/2002/20021...

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.

Milton Friedman also rejected one of the central Austrian tenets, the business cycle.

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.

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).

the people with economics PhDs are not the people in control of economic policy.

They're frequently the "oh ffs don't do that" folks, even.

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.

And who would do the remaining jobs? I assume scientists are too busy and important to farm, build infrastructure (roads, bridges) or provide healthcare.

It did not say scientist-only. HN is deteriorating smh.

It was greenspans favorite book after all

Do you even understand what first class citizen means?

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.

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.

> 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.

How is the length of the postdoc a factor? Next year there's going to be another graduating class and again the year after.

What! Tradeskills are clearly in demand and pay great. A good plumber where I live is over $800/hr.

Dont forget the worlds oldest profession.

Thank god TikTok and Insta are grooming us already. We will be ready!

AI girlfriends are coming for that too

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.

you probably want a qualified economist running the AI to leverage productivity and assess/assert that output is high quality