"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.
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.
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.
He should add “Economists confidently making wishful-thinking based proclamations without a shred of evidence or even a plausible logical path.“ to the list!
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.
The money people are generally unconcerned with what they label themselves as. If anything, you are articulating the chameleon’s nature. That creature will masquerade as necessary.
Sound souls don’t go into certain professions. One doesn’t just go into porn, and one doesn’t just find themselves at the Federal Reserve. Your soul is already blasted before you head down these paths.
We never got soulful outputs from these professions because they are a void, no return.
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!
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The note about economists and data science in the article felt weird, because data science as a title was invented to get non-CS PhDs to do analyst work because they wanted smarter people doing it.
The point of hiring an economics PhD in industry is largely not because they learnt something but because it's a strong and expensive signal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
I think a big part of the problem is people are recognizing that many modern economic theories and models are kind of trash and failing to make accurate predictions today. Challenging popular economic theory will often get someone labelled a crackpot, regardless of how good or bad their models and predictions are. And the field and players that are in play and have some power to influence or change policies are deeply embroiled with political dogma and will fight tooth and nail against anything that might make their previously established beliefs and education obsolete or god forbid show they were just straight up wrong from the start.
Economists are “scientists” as much as parapsychologists.
There are several conflicting market theories and no one knows how it precisely works or they would be insanely rich from the stock market.
When were economists right once before some event? They always claim they have seen it coming after the dust settles. Virtually useless job akin to future tellers
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
By that argument in addition to meteorology that another commenter already mentioned (and more generally atmospheric science), astronomy, most of geology, cosmology, astrophysics, most planetary science, most oceanography, and seismology are not sciences.
And who would do the remaining jobs? I assume scientists are too busy and important to farm, build infrastructure (roads, bridges) or provide healthcare.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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!"
>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.
This turned out longer than I expected. TL:DR; I'm not sure what he is trying to do, but he gets some things right, some things wrong, and some things are not applicable.
Points 1-2 seem to match what I am seeing as an Econ PhD student on the market and what I am hearing from others. Point 3 may be happening, but this assumes that AI is going to be doing this in a way capable of producing research AND that there is a limited amount of research to be done. As someone who has used various AI agents as help in cleaning data, exactly what he suggested it does, I suspect that this will increase the value of the positions that use Econ PhDs because they can now do more.
The thing that bothers me most about this post is his point 4, and it seems so wrong to me to the degree it makes me wonder about the rest of it. I don't know what he got the following perspective.
1. first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation
2. then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,”
3. finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all
In contrast, I've seen something different.
1. I saw debate over how people would save/spend rebate checks and how that would feed through to the economy. Some people speculated that it wouldn't lead to inflation based on the results of the 2008-2009 recession. Additionally, most economists I spoke to thought that the supply shocks due to the pandemic would lead to temporary inflation. If he got the impression that there was a "confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation", I would like to know who he was listening to.
2. The inflation during the pandemic _was_ transitory. Take a look at [0-2], mildly different views of one measure of inflation. The high inflation period due to the pandemic is over. Persistent inflation at the Year over Year levels seen early in the pandemic would mean we're seeing 7% inflation, not the 3%ish we're actually seeing. Federal interest rate targets would probably be in the 7APY-9APY region as a result. Part of the confusion here is due to the difference between inflation and price levels. Inflation is the rate of change of price levels. Yes we underwent inflation, and the higher prices accrued[2], but inflation rates dropped and we still paid the previously inflated prices. That is normal. The 2020 inflation bout did come at the end of a period with absurdly low inflation though; the decade between 2010 and 2020 had deals such as the $5 footlong from subway and the $5 hot and ready from little ceasars last almost the whole decade. Looking at [0] again, that time had historically low inflation. So suddenly being exposed to relatively high inflation was novel and painful.
3. I can see how this might seem like a thing. There was a whole issue where the CPI levels and the costs of living (felt inflation) differed a whole lot. There are reasons for this, such as changing consumption patterns (which change faster than the CPI basket of goods), and is due to the fact that CPI is trying to measure how prices change in a method that is comparable across time. It is not trying to measure how expensive the lives of consumers are. Especially when you use the typically presented measures of CPI which does not include food or energy (these are excluded because they are volatile). Add in income cuts and rising food prices and suddenly the budget situation of most Americans was getting more difficult. So yeah, there was a disconnect between households experience and the measures of inflation. This wasn't lying, this was people not understanding how economic statistics work and then misusing them.
Finally, the author may be ideologically motivated, e.g. [3] where he stated:
"You can participate in this societal trend, dear math world, by kicking this deranged, murderous tranny out of your ranks. Don’t let him infect the next generation of students with the woke mind virus — or, at the very least, don’t hire him in your department, where he will surely be a magnet for lawsuits."
> For clarity, the use of the word "murderous" is due to the discussion about some posts by a math PhD student that are somewhat threatening. The use is on topic.
I bring this up not to attack the author but to raise questions about the author's rhetorical goals. I start by stating that I don't actually know what he is trying to achieve.
If his point is that the Econ Job market is has been rough the last 3 years and is getting worse; that is well known among economists and hopefully is known by those looking at doing a PhD in economics. The point he explains at the introduction and conclusion is that an econ PhD doesn't have the same returns or guarantees it used to (e.g. compared to 10 years ago). That is true and points 1-2 are all that is needed to make that point.
It also seems like he may be trying to call into question the value of some or all of the following: academic economists, economic training, or higher education. If that is his goal, then 1-2 are beside the point, 3 is speculation and only somewhat pertinent, and 4 is applicable but wrong. The phrasing in the title seems to point to this. Is this a complete collapse? I don't know. We'll know in 5 years though.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
lkrubner|4 months ago
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|4 months ago
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...
rayiner|4 months ago
Although it’s not really a partisan issue. Establishment republicans and establish democrats both support the central banking system.
filloooo|4 months ago
umutisik|4 months ago
alephnerd|4 months ago
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
ivape|4 months ago
Sound souls don’t go into certain professions. One doesn’t just go into porn, and one doesn’t just find themselves at the Federal Reserve. Your soul is already blasted before you head down these paths.
We never got soulful outputs from these professions because they are a void, no return.
Citizen_Lame|4 months ago
monkeyelite|4 months ago
Of mainstream politicians they are most aligned with Obama or Clinton.
The Trump movement since 2016 has taken republicans away from mainstream Economics.
notmyjob|4 months ago
erxam|4 months ago
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.
nxm|4 months ago
kenjackson|5 months ago
pempem|5 months ago
giardini|5 months ago
It's not like the USA needs a butt-load of "math PhD's".
supportengineer|5 months ago
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.
DisKarlito|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
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.
nxobject|5 months ago
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.
ls612|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
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.
logicalfails|5 months ago
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
ActorNightly|5 months ago
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.
asciident|5 months ago
Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
narrator|5 months ago
Eridrus|4 months ago
The point of hiring an economics PhD in industry is largely not because they learnt something but because it's a strong and expensive signal.
neom|5 months ago
I came away feeling unsatisfied, is there a bigger cultural thing going on here?
lumost|5 months ago
rawgabbit|5 months ago
danbrooks|5 months ago
abirch|5 months ago
Loughla|5 months ago
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.
dleeftink|5 months ago
---
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.
closetohome|5 months ago
cinntaile|5 months ago
declan_roberts|5 months ago
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=...
codyklimdev|5 months ago
darth_avocado|5 months ago
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.
altairprime|5 months ago
keeganpoppen|5 months ago
lvl155|5 months ago
jrajav|5 months ago
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.
sarchertech|5 months ago
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’.
giardini|4 months ago
kyleee|5 months ago
William_BB|5 months ago
drnick1|5 months ago
AngryData|4 months ago
juleiie|4 months ago
There are several conflicting market theories and no one knows how it precisely works or they would be insanely rich from the stock market.
When were economists right once before some event? They always claim they have seen it coming after the dust settles. Virtually useless job akin to future tellers
awesome_dude|5 months ago
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)
chokominto|4 months ago
estetlinus|4 months ago
zackmorris|5 months ago
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!
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
bArray|5 months ago
fastaguy88|4 months ago
jeffbee|5 months ago
AlexCornila|5 months ago
burnt-resistor|4 months ago
imtringued|4 months ago
thatguymike|5 months ago
tmaly|4 months ago
erxam|4 months ago
I'm glad more and more people see that it's complete bunk.
whycome|5 months ago
SoftTalker|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
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.
tzs|4 months ago
nothrowaways|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
TMWNN|5 months ago
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.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
Jun8|5 months ago
"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."
coolThingsFirst|4 months ago
cjbgkagh|5 months ago
mothballed|5 months ago
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.
postflopclarity|5 months ago
more_corn|4 months ago
The logical house of cards is built upon several tenuous or flat out outrageous assumptions that do not resemble reality.
I can’t take the author seriously.
complex_pi|5 months ago
hyperbovine|5 months ago
It's just that economics, as a field, is better at making charts and loudly complaining about things.
paulpauper|5 months ago
pessimizer|5 months ago
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!"
lenerdenator|5 months ago
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.
youainti|5 months ago
Points 1-2 seem to match what I am seeing as an Econ PhD student on the market and what I am hearing from others. Point 3 may be happening, but this assumes that AI is going to be doing this in a way capable of producing research AND that there is a limited amount of research to be done. As someone who has used various AI agents as help in cleaning data, exactly what he suggested it does, I suspect that this will increase the value of the positions that use Econ PhDs because they can now do more.
The thing that bothers me most about this post is his point 4, and it seems so wrong to me to the degree it makes me wonder about the rest of it. I don't know what he got the following perspective.
1. first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation 2. then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” 3. finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all
In contrast, I've seen something different.
1. I saw debate over how people would save/spend rebate checks and how that would feed through to the economy. Some people speculated that it wouldn't lead to inflation based on the results of the 2008-2009 recession. Additionally, most economists I spoke to thought that the supply shocks due to the pandemic would lead to temporary inflation. If he got the impression that there was a "confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation", I would like to know who he was listening to.
2. The inflation during the pandemic _was_ transitory. Take a look at [0-2], mildly different views of one measure of inflation. The high inflation period due to the pandemic is over. Persistent inflation at the Year over Year levels seen early in the pandemic would mean we're seeing 7% inflation, not the 3%ish we're actually seeing. Federal interest rate targets would probably be in the 7APY-9APY region as a result. Part of the confusion here is due to the difference between inflation and price levels. Inflation is the rate of change of price levels. Yes we underwent inflation, and the higher prices accrued[2], but inflation rates dropped and we still paid the previously inflated prices. That is normal. The 2020 inflation bout did come at the end of a period with absurdly low inflation though; the decade between 2010 and 2020 had deals such as the $5 footlong from subway and the $5 hot and ready from little ceasars last almost the whole decade. Looking at [0] again, that time had historically low inflation. So suddenly being exposed to relatively high inflation was novel and painful.
3. I can see how this might seem like a thing. There was a whole issue where the CPI levels and the costs of living (felt inflation) differed a whole lot. There are reasons for this, such as changing consumption patterns (which change faster than the CPI basket of goods), and is due to the fact that CPI is trying to measure how prices change in a method that is comparable across time. It is not trying to measure how expensive the lives of consumers are. Especially when you use the typically presented measures of CPI which does not include food or energy (these are excluded because they are volatile). Add in income cuts and rising food prices and suddenly the budget situation of most Americans was getting more difficult. So yeah, there was a disconnect between households experience and the measures of inflation. This wasn't lying, this was people not understanding how economic statistics work and then misusing them.
Finally, the author may be ideologically motivated, e.g. [3] where he stated:
"You can participate in this societal trend, dear math world, by kicking this deranged, murderous tranny out of your ranks. Don’t let him infect the next generation of students with the woke mind virus — or, at the very least, don’t hire him in your department, where he will surely be a magnet for lawsuits." > For clarity, the use of the word "murderous" is due to the discussion about some posts by a math PhD student that are somewhat threatening. The use is on topic.
I bring this up not to attack the author but to raise questions about the author's rhetorical goals. I start by stating that I don't actually know what he is trying to achieve.
If his point is that the Econ Job market is has been rough the last 3 years and is getting worse; that is well known among economists and hopefully is known by those looking at doing a PhD in economics. The point he explains at the introduction and conclusion is that an econ PhD doesn't have the same returns or guarantees it used to (e.g. compared to 10 years ago). That is true and points 1-2 are all that is needed to make that point.
It also seems like he may be trying to call into question the value of some or all of the following: academic economists, economic training, or higher education. If that is his goal, then 1-2 are beside the point, 3 is speculation and only somewhat pertinent, and 4 is applicable but wrong. The phrasing in the title seems to point to this. Is this a complete collapse? I don't know. We'll know in 5 years though.
[0]: ANNUAL CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA [1]: MONTHLY CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N [2]: CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (Price levels) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL [3]: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...
chmorgan_|5 months ago
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black_13|5 months ago
[deleted]
tomhowsalterego|5 months ago
thro484krjok|5 months ago
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jmyeet|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
Academia is dominated by Keynesianism.
ceejayoz|5 months ago
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.
llmslave|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
coliveira|5 months ago
_9ptr|5 months ago
bawana|5 months ago
lumost|5 months ago
schainks|5 months ago
higginsniggins|5 months ago
mannyv|5 months ago
jgalt212|5 months ago
fsckboy|5 months ago