They had a good run.
Fairly good pay, especially in the rarefied heights of academia, which also offered job security in the form of tenure and a platform from which to pontificate.
And as pointed out in a 2009 post, Keynes on Economists:
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! ....MORE
From the New York Times, July 28:
Earning a Ph.D. in economics has long been a reliable path to affluence and prestige. Not anymore.
The moment it dawned on Thomas Fullagar that his job search was not going well came in April, about six months into the process, when he applied for a position in Manhattan, Kan.
The job, at a technology company called CivicPlus, involved relatively straightforward data analysis that he wouldn’t strain to do. In fact, he had done much more complicated work while completing his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Further improving his odds, he had grown up in Manhattan, the home of Kansas State University, and his mother knew someone at the company, who helped fast-track his application.
Yet despite his connections and credentials, he did not get the job. He didn’t even get a second interview. “It was in Manhattan, Kansas — who the heck is applying for this?” Dr. Fullagar, 33, wondered. “That one was really baffling.”
For decades, earning a Ph.D. in economics has been a nearly foolproof path to a lucrative career. Even as bearers of advanced degrees in history, English or anthropology struggled to find gainful employment, the popularity of economics as an undergraduate major created plenty of tenure-track teaching positions, while government agencies snatched up Ph.D. economists in bulk. Those looking for even larger paychecks could turn to tech companies, Wall Street and consulting firms, which bid up the price of economists as if they were a bespoke cryptocurrency.
Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer pay were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100 percent, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85 percent.
Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones.
Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.
“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”
Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy....
....MUCH MORE
One thing I do know, economists suffer from physics envy more than practitioners of other soft sciences.
Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists et al seem to have accepted
that they aren't really scientists, at least deep, deep down they do.
Economists? They seem to believe that because they use the tools of
science (maths) that their area of focus is akin to chemistry or
physics. It's not.
At best they are modelers (no disparagement, it's something humans are
pretty good at) and because the economy, like weather, is both a complex
system and a chaotic system, it is probably going to take the advent of
quantum computers to get to the next level of deep understanding.
For more insight into why economics is not a hard science read the work
of author, raconteur, juggler and bongo player Richard Feynman:
Gates Puts Feynman Lectures OnlineAll that being said, I am reminded of a quote that describes similarities between both physics and economics, along with another human activity:
-Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate, physics, 1965
From the Wall Street Journal's FX Horizons at MoneyBeat:
Let’s face it, economists make lousy economists.....
May 26, 2010
"WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!"
I had a similar, albeit intuitive rather than empirical, thought in the June '09 post "Climateer Investing on Carbon Trading and Traders":
...Just as an economist using the tools of science (mathematics) doesn't make economics a science, carbon traders using the tools of markets doesn't make carbon trading market based....From the abstract at Physics arXive:...
June 3, 2015
Economists don't have "physics envy"
I hear all the time that economists have "physics envy". This doesn't seem even remotely true. I'm not sure whether "physics envy" means that economists envy physicists, or that economists want to make physics-style theories, or that economists wish their theories worked as well as those of physicists. But none of these are true.
Reasons why economists don't have physics envy include:
1. Economists make a lot more money than physicists.
2. Economists are treated as experts on practically anything. An economist can talk about why hipsters have moustaches, and get taken seriously. An economist can talk about which restaurants are the best, and get taken seriously (Update: NO, I'm not saying Tyler's book is bad, I haven't even read it, so HUSH). An economist can talk about politics, marriage, popular music, sex, race, or sports and get taken as seriously as any expert in those fields. An economist can talk about how much progress physicists are likely to make, and get taken seriously. Physicists get taken seriously when they invent quantitative rules for things, but otherwise are treated as just one more tribe of crazy nerds with their heads in the aether....
We have many more posts on the shortcomings of economists, it's sort of a hobby.
Here, with an opposing view, is Oxford's Simon Wren Lewis:
Climateer you ignorant slut- Academic knowledge about economic policy is not just another opinion
