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.
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...
Because that will destroy medical care rather than save it. Just look what's happening in Europe (the waiting lists, and the game of attempting to force neighboring countries to carry the costs of training medical personnel)
Limiting what you can be treated for (EU)
Oh and this is horrible too. When the government is forced to implement limits such as this, they always carve out their own care as a special case (yes, Parlementarians and government officials have different, better, health care, especially when it comes to long-term care, coverage outside of your own country and emergencies. The UN has it's own system as well, for example), and they impose limits.
In Belgium there's a joke. There's 2 treatments in Belgium that are not like everything else when it comes to national health insurance: anorexia for teenagers and a certain congenital disease. They are covered despite it being a BIG negative in terms of money for the insurance/state. This is strange, it doesn't match what they "usually" do at all. Now one might go and check if what the daughter of the prime minister is in treatment for (she's a teenager). One might check what the daughter of 2 prime ministers back, French side, is in treatment for (she's much older, which is strange, given that given the particular congenital disease life expectation ... without gene treatment which is normally a no-no for the national insurance. Just look up "Baby Pia" to see how much they fight it normally). I resent identifying the patients involved to this degree, but obviously their family relation to currently in power politicians matters a whole lot in this case.
From everyone else "reasonableness" is required: for example moral limits. E.g. political decisions about organ replacement: no organ replacements allowed if you've been treated for drug addiction at any point in your life. No gene treatments, no matter how life-saving they will be. Strict (and quickly changing) limits to psychological care, as politically convenient at the time. Using changes in coverage to guarantee jobs. Etc.
Limiting how much is covered (US)
Basically you paid in X, you get < X back. Either it covers or it doesn't. Use whatever care you want. The US profit-driven system.
Which do you want?
In practice, of course, to some extent both systems are limited in both ways. You cannot get treatment for absolutely anything in the US, and you cannot really exceed what you pay in for coverage in the EU (you can, however, in both system get insurance to cover you not working for a decade). But the emphasis of the different systems is very different. Mostly the above classification is true.
What was pretty popular when it was available was medical care, limited to cheaper care. Making sure you get expertise when dealing with a broken leg or pregnancy or ... but for example explicitly excluding psychiatric problems (which are really expensive). However, this means the government has to provide a place to live for people who cannot live by themselves and so the government always insists this is included in private insurance. The problem, of course, is that it's both necessary for some people and easy to abuse to get long-term care without a job. Since the government doesn't want to pay for this largely but not entirely abuse of the system, they force it into the insurance.
Also care speed isn't that bad in Europe, I went to a few clinics while I was there with short notice and didn't have any issues. Same as America honestly, the price difference though was way better though.
Although it’s not really a partisan issue. Establishment republicans and establish democrats both support the central banking system.
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.
From where I'm coming from, no amount of mathematical sophistication is going to save an economist from facing reality.
Tangentially, none of them call themselves “alt-right” anymore; this label was imposed upon three disparate movements (techno-commercialists, ethno-nationalists, and theonomists), rather than one that emerged organically. It was never a particularly popular label on /pol/ or Frog Twitter, for example.
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.
Of mainstream politicians they are most aligned with Obama or Clinton.
The Trump movement since 2016 has taken republicans away from mainstream Economics.
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.
Is Javier Milei not influential? Who or what is influential, then?
> Friedman was not an Austrian
Yeah, ok, he was from the Chicago school. Same shit to me. Whatever mental masturbation they dedicated themselves to is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is which policies they championed, influenced and implemented.
And they seem pretty indistinguishable from each other. At the end of the day, they all loved the holy and sanctimonious free market like a harsh but fair deity who would grind all the undeserving and the rabble into dust.
All AI growth today, is actually from Academia from 20 years ago.
I see billionaires as "water-balloon" (wealth) hoarders, and I see taxes on the rich as thorns on bushes. If the politicians ever wanted to make "trickle down" work, then we need thornier bushes and to make it impossible for rich people to not go through thorny bushes.
But the whole deregulation craze has made it so that the billionaires don't even need people to help them protect their "water-balloons"...
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.
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.
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".
After all, it's not like the epistemologies of the other humanities stands on far more shakier grounds...
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.
Deciding who benefits or not from legislation is not a Economist's domain, their work is descriptive, not normative. You're critiquing politicians here for prioritizing GDP, but that is divorced from your critique of economics. The economist will only tell you what they think will happen with regard to the economy if you pass a bill or not given the goals you've outlined to them.
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/big-beautiful-bill-impact-def...
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387
Well you look at analysis here, do you then disagree with the predictions of the bill and the methodology used, and if so, what is your better analysis here with supposedly more refined epistemic assumptions?
Among the most dramatic cutbacks was the dismantling of the National Cancer Institute, which halted early detection programs for breast and cervical cancer. Funding was also frozen for immunization campaigns, severely disrupting vaccine access during Argentina's first measles outbreak in decades. The National Directorate for HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis lost 40 percent of its staff and 76 percent of its budget, delaying diagnosis and treatment across the country. Emergency contraception and abortion pill distribution have also stopped.
Prescription drug prices and private health insurance premiums have surged by 250 percent and 118 percent, respectively, according to official data.
https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278391265/mileis-austeri...
Obviously, this is an article from the political side of things (I tried to cut out value judgements), but these are decisions made by actual economists like José Luis Espert, Agustín Etchebarne, Federico Sturzenegger, Alberto Benegas Lynch and probably a million others I'm not aware of.
Debt crisis is a real problem. We have borrowed more than we can ever repay, all nations, for the last 30 years. Both sides. Just drove right off the cliff.
All models start with givens…
You need a model to design an experiment.
This is how all science is done. You hypothesize. Then experiment.
Economics both describe and prescribe, so those models should be evaluated on their predictive power and on whether they have actually done any good.
Sure. Nobody claimed that. I’m just pointing out that being upset that a model makes assumptions is nonsense.
(I don't feel like anyone is upset?)
Nobody does this.
If you start talking about competition or consumer choice, surprise! You have made an extremely bold assumption: that healthcare is currently operating as a free market.
That assumption is actually, like, 1000 assumptions. Do people prove even one of those? No. They just move on and hope nobody notices.
And, well, we don't. We're so used to these economy falacies that they're practically invisible.
I am interested in what people have to say about them though.
1. DEI and identity politics prioritization 2. cost
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.
I am neither a university nor 'academia'.
I am, however, still unclear about what your point is.
There is data that some ridiculous percentage of academics are on the left, and drastically so for liberal arts departments.
“Everyone knows” that they filter against conservatives (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).
Liberals deny this, so what’s the point of discussing it. Let the dismantling continue until corrections happen I guess.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
Also the whole idea that they are self selecting out is absurd. There are many flavors of conservative, not just the ones you see on Ali G show or whatever.
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
Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.
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.
"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.
Whatever beef you got is what 'media' fed you selected smug academics to piss you off.
> 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
...and they turn around and complain about liberals' "moral purity."
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.
Seriously, 90%? None of what you said is happening at anywhere near that scale. Touch grass.
1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants. 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people. 3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
You can trust professionals to do their jobs as they see fit and write them a check, or you can make them "waste" time proving to you they're doing the job you want them to do. You can't have low-trust and low-effort grant administration.
>1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants.
There are all kinds of scientists, some do the research, some do the writing, some do the grantsmanship. Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part. It takes understanding an communication skills to convince a panel of peer-experts that your ideas are good enough to give millions of dollars to.
> 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people.
There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step, including opportunity for public commentary.
Just because you personally don't know it exists, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
>3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented. If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did and how they spent that money.
Please. PLEASE. I am begging you. Learn about a subject before forming an opinion about it.
I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
> Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part.
Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work!
And you’re right - promotors aren’t lesser. They are greater - more valued in academic job placement and promotion.
> There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step,
Did you miss the prior comment? The existing oversight is ineffective. Researchers see it as a hoop to jump through.
> If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did
Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career. Unless I attend a specialized conference I won’t hear about the latter, except in a form crafted for public reception. That’s the one that gets grants.
> Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented.
There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
> yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism.
Name calling.
Grants are hard, not because of admin/paperwork, but because coming up with a novel idea is hard and convincing others to fund it is harder.
The people leading the grants are the ones creating and guiding the ideas. They set the agenda.
A tech CEO doesn't spend their days coding minor bug fixes, in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work. They are leaders, who are occupied getting funding and setting the direction.
>Did you miss the comment we are replying to? The existing oversight is ineffective. It’s just a hoop for the professor to jump through.
It's not ineffective though, and an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
>Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
>There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
>Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career.
Wrong. Every PI I know does the stuff they like, and they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
>I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
>yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism. >Name calling.
Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Yes, we are in agreement. That's why promoters are so valuable.
> in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work.
This large workforce of Phd's protecting the time of the PI also represents a massive allocation of young intelligent talent, and that's part of my concern.
> an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
It's difficult to talk about demand for required credentials. A large percentage is foreigners securing visas to work in the US.
> You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
> Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
I think researchers put a great deal of care into public reporting. And I think they use their intellect to construct a story conducive to their careers. Who doesn't?
I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. TTheir sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
> Every PI I know does the stuff they like
I don't doubt they are passionate and driven. I'm saying something different. When you are in the thick of establishing yourself you have to care more about what system cares about (this is maybe your situation?), and modern competition makes this all encompassing. But the book they write in sabbatical tends to look different than their official title.
> they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
How would we falsify this statement?
> You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
PhD to software engineer is a common career path.
> Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
EDIT: to focus on my personal beliefs and not yours.
Yes, I would say that represents a gap between a public who want to see a science factory in which not one single blueberry muffin is ever wasted on an unworthy grad-student's wasteful seminar, and the actual reality of how science works. The problem is that going, "aha, gotcha, you were HIDING these ILLICIT SEMINARS on SPECULATIVE WORK!" doesn't educate the public on how science really works and also doesn't make the seminars unnecessary. If you eliminate all the scientific processes that don't conform to an uninformed popular image of white-collar "efficiency" (eg: Office Space), you won't have any good scientists left, because they'll fuck off to private-sector jobs where you don't have to justify a blueberry muffin to a hostile Senate subcommittee.
(For anyone wondering if I'm hungry or something, in January 2025 my lab's parent university forbade us from providing lunch during lab meetings because they were informed that the incoming Administration was going to start looking for efficiencies in scientific grant funding.)
>I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. Their sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
Their grant is public record. Their oversight during that grant is public record. Their regulatory approvals are public record. Their publications are public record.
"Basically finished" is not finished. It is not finished unless it has been published. Your statement is like saying "its wrong for a baker to buy an oven if he already has the flour and sugar. The cake is basically finished. He is just putting future costs into this current cake".
Most grant applications include prior work, current work, and future work. A program officer will make site visits and assess current work and upcoming work. Funding of a grant is not "do X thing and publish, end of project and money:. It is the pursuit of an idea. If task 1 is "basically finished" the PO will push for publication of that and moving on to the next aim.
In many cases having an aim "basically finished" is a good thing. It shows that prior work is successful and future work can produce similar success. Most grants have multiple aims and several sub-aims. If one aim is finished, they move on to the next. If all the aims are complete, the grant usually indicates next steps. The PI and PO will have discussed the next steps long before they are carried out.
If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for. Not all research can be speculative. Not at research can be mainstream. It is a mix, based on opportunity and expertise.
This is grants 101. Please, again, I'm not lecturing you on software development, because it is not my expertise. Please understand scientific funding before lecturing me about it.
>Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
Its not name calling to call out your anti-intellectualism. You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.
That’s actually not what I said.
> If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for.
My claim is not about good or bad. My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.
> This is grants 101
You seem to agree such a gap exists, you just think it’s a good thing or a matter of business.
> because it is not my expertise
So notice when I bring up correct information, I’m told I don’t have the experience/expertise to do so despite my academic union card.
Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.
> You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.
you seem to identify intellectualism as a group of people or an organization.
I think that’s a mockery of truth and ideas.
Yes American science as a family of organizations deserves scrutiny and critiques. Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
They deserve scrutiny and critique from an informed point of view on what science can accomplish for the public, that is, what science can do for the absolute public good. "This doesn't work like I thought it did!" is not necessarily, in and of itself, an absolute public bad. It is, unfortunately, a cost of doing business in employing specialized labor to do specialized work.
Driving a truck doesn't work how the broad public thinks it does, either.
There is a gap between how software is written and how it is used by the public.
Clearly computers are flawed and need a complete rework.
>Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.
Software is a illuminati scam perpetrated by bitter typesetters forced to get funding in a system they don't believe in. Anyone who says otherwise is in on it.
>Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
Are they flawless, no. Have they done more public good than any organization in history (or at least top 3)? yes.
And your response is to poo-poo the whole system because you had a bad time in your PhD. Sad.
All oversight is a hoop to jump through in a low-trust principal-agent system. Adding oversight bureaucracy partially helps in aligning the scientists to the public interests (after all, if they're working on something totally disconnected from funding goals, they won't get funded) but can never really increase public trust in the scientists or the grant-agency bureaucrats.
Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high. See e.g.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
"Yet the average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27% and 28% over time."
and a lot of that is simply because nobody wants to do the detailed accounting for things like: lab electricity usage, janitorial services, misc supplies.
> The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud.
This is dramatic nonsense; a simple made up number.
The 70% "indirect cost" number had latched into my brain. I was willing to concede this point, but it looks like 50, 60, 70% are accurate as of 2025 [0].
While there exist institutions with only 30% indirect cost, every single not-especially-prestigious university in my region are retaining 60% or more.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48540
> As of May 2025, indirect cost reimbursements for [institutions of higher education (IHE)] are typically determined by an indirect cost rate that is pre-negotiated with the federal government and varies by IHE—ranging from 30% to 70%.
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'
That is not true. Those happened in 2024.
The extortionate demands are happening in 2025.
The campus protests are clearly a pretext.
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.
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.
https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-b...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
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.
> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”
> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
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.
This is why i want hard facts.
1. It's not my head in the sand. 2. Do you have any actual hard, credible, facts?
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.
The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you, because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that you could get away with BS, but you got called out instead.
If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable, you can post them at any time.
You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
An academic CS department has to attract PhD level talent in hot areas like ML while only paying $30k a year.
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.
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).
Also a PHD is not 10 years long? You start your career 4-5 years after a typical BS in CS
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.
Compared to almost any activity a university could take, it is incredibly cheap to bring in mathematics PhD students.
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.
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.
The alternative would be hiring dedicated employees to help with grading and lab sessions, and they won't tolerate the $30k/yr a PhD student does. This would have immediate impacts too, as there's no way a lone professor can keep up with grading for the class sizes in early undergrad.
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"
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.
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.
People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a breakdown on how you pull this off.
There are extreme downsides - for many colleges athletics is a money-maker. So is administering IP. There's is also lots of real estate, which appreciates value, but needs maintenance.
The big reason for all the extras is that it makes the school known, in a very big and important way. They host conferences, have archives that receive donations, give out awards.
Donors give all sorts of weird tasks - and funding to achieve them.
Modern colleges are so many different things.
There is a subset of colleges that adopt the "keep it simple" approach, but they often run into lots of trouble. The big problem is without doing tons of stuff, people forget they exist.
It's a bit like drug companies advertising at the super bowl. They hate doing it, but don't have a choice.
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.
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.
It's not like the USA needs a butt-load of "math PhD's".
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.
https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
Scroll down to the graph under "Not So Very Serious Stuff".
Innovation is hard, most ideas do not pan out, and most people aren't made for it. It really is a number's game: to stay competitive and innovative as a country you need enough people pushing against the frontier, including taking bets that are too risky for the private sector.
It's unsustainable. I got my PhD 20 years ago, but I would certainly advise my children to avoid it.
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 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.
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.
I don't think it's actually the luxuries that cause the high price though, I think it's the increased relative expense of human labor, as above. Is my hypothesis anyway.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Austrians would also object to the notion of something being perfect. But they do analyze situations in which an external force interferes with the normal voluntary flow of actions and generally find that the stated outcomes (probably not the actual desired outcomes) of those external forces is generally not met. For example, rent control is often argued for as about helping more people to be housed and, empirically, that usually is not what happens when rent control is enforced. One could argue that the real intent of rent control is about making life better for the well-connected at the expense of the less well-connected and that probably does happen regularly.
1. Keynesianism: "Your spending is my income, so when there's not enough spending, the government needs to step in".
2. Monetarism: "The monetary supply directly controls the economy and is the primary reason for economic phenomena".
3. Austrian economy: the market god, the market is king, all hail the market.
The first two approaches provide actionable models and make predictions. As with all models, they have limits of applicability, and they are often wrong to some degree.
Meanwhile, Austrian economics is always right. And when it's wrong, it's because you haven't done it hard enough.
> If you think people in the market do things that are nasty when all the actions are voluntary (and that certainly can happen), shouldn't you be even more skeptical of those who are willing to engage in violence to force the things they want to come to be to happen?
Well, let's look at a particular example: pollution regulation. Laws limit the almighty Market by forcing compaines to clean up their waste.
Another example is monopolism. In the view of the Austrian economy "school" it is _always_ the result of government actions. And monopolies wouldn't exist otherwise, even for things like water supply and sewer.
The Capitalist Market is the One True God of America. All the math and waxing philosophic are just set dressing to make that idea less obviously absurd.
As for pollution, have you looked at the history of state run industries and their pollution record? How well does the US military manage its pollution, particularly prior to the EPA when the public consciousness shifted? How many of the worst private polluters were in the service of the government (such as for the military)? There are also tales of the communist countries and their abuse of the environment. And in the context of a democracy, one would assume that if it is faithful to what people want, then to have pollution controls requires at least 50%+ of the population to want them. That sounds like a strong market incentive to provide that not to mention actual destructive pollution can be subject to claims by those injured by the polluters. While it was before the largest amount of industrial pollution, there was a time in the US before the government got involved where pollution was restricted by such considerations. Companies did not like that so the government started to regulate in order to protect the polluters. Time and time again, actual government legislation is used to either protect the guilty or it comes in when 90% of a problem has already been resolved.
Also, the first two economic schools of thought you list do not make any basic sense. If it is just spending, then why would there be boom bust signals? Why doesn't everyone just keep spending? Something else must cause a reduction in spending which ought to be pretty important. If monetary supply is the only control for the economy, then set it and forget it on the trajectory you want. Since there doesn't seem to be a stable path, then some other factor is important to consider.
For either of them, why not just print up a million dollars for every person? Do you suddenly have a supply of million dollars worth of goods for everyone? No. There is real wealth that has to be produced and that is why futzing around with money is not good enough.
The information coordinating function is that of prices which requires a relatively stable money supply for accurate signals. If the money supply is artificially tampered with, then the entrepreneurs make bad bets, thinking that either there are more resources then there are (inflationary monetary supply, boom period) or there are less (deflationary monetary supply, spending contraction). The first case leads to half-completed projects when actual resources run out across the economy (bust). This leads to recession/depression which is a time to realign the resource allocation to what is actually desired if government stays out of the way. Compare the 1920 economic downturn (hands-off government, rebounds quickly) to the 1929-1940s economic depression (heavy government intervention under both Hoover and even more Roosevelt). In the second with deflationary, it is idle resources that are the result, they get cheaper, and eventually leading to a boom. There aren't too many examples I am aware of of this though there is a train of thought that the late 1920s had inflation (to help the British with their war debt?) and then the Fed reversed course and starting deflating the money supply cause quite the shock. In any event, both are examples of problematic time periods during the price readjustment to the new value of money.
The main reason the government inflates money is so that they can spend without explicit taxing (inflation is an implicit tax for those that do not get the first rounds of the money printed) and allows for the wealth to borrow to acquire assets, where asset prices inflate with the money supply while the debt burden deflates with inflation. This is specifically to help rich people get much, much richer.
Example: Google. It happened all by itself in an essentially unregulated area, without any real government action.
> Compare the 1920 economic downturn (hands-off government, rebounds quickly) to the 1929-1940s economic depression
The 1920 downturn was _stopped_ by the government intervention. You're confusing the cause and the effect.
Want another example? Look at 2008. The US went with a tepid Keynesian approach of fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing. So the economy recovered to pre-recession levels in 2 years. Europe went with the Austrian approach of austerity and tight monetary supply (they RAISED the interest rates!), and it took 11 years for them to claw back to the pre-recession levels.
And what is the conclusion of Austrians? That there was not enough austerity!
I am unaware of what government intervention you are talking about in 1920. I have heard explicitly that the government did nothing by historians and I asked ChatGPT and it had nothing [1]. In that same conversation I also asked it compare Europe versus US in 2008 from an Austrian perspective. The main thesis Austrians have for busts is that of misallocated resources based on false price information whose remedy is reallocation, often through bankruptcy and repurposing of capital goods. It seems that the US was able to have a better reallocation of resources. I am not sure entirely of the mechanism, but at least some of it was allowing some things to fail and some of it might have been the government going in and manually realigning these things (taking over in the short term). It sounded like Europe did not allow for that, either direct intervention or simply allowing things to fail -- the bad businesses limped along as zombies. Europe kind of did the worst of both worlds.
As for the US, it also suggests that the Austrians, and I have heard this, cite our extreme debt, and it keeps growing, as a sign of a reckoning to come. Kind of like one can keep pumping sugar in to deal with sugar lows after a high, but eventually the bill comes due. Keynesians and others seem to view the economy as a short-term adjustable kind of thing, a chemical reaction with just the right reagents producing something wonderful. Austrians view it as a lumbering ecology, with things adapting and to the extent adaptation based on truth is present, it gets better. To the extent that distortions and violence happen, not so good. We shall, unfortunately, probably see soon enough unless AI can make a productivity miracle happen.
1: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e3ce42-6e78-8012-8a9c-1d7cff2d6f...
Anyway, I don't see any way around not using math. Because value is subjective and that means it's a ranking system of preferences, not based in nominal values.
What makes the Austrian economics "school" a cult is not the complexity of models. It's their rejection of models altogether and a refusal to make testable predictions.
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.
People simply act irrationally, which is a fundamental issue when trying to treat economics as math.
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.
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.
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.
I know, it’s my job. But as much as we like to obsess about the mechanisms for dislocations climbing and solute interactions, nobody cares when they are designing an aircraft. They have macroscopic laws they put in their finite elements code. These are perfectly adequate to describe most known modes of failures of industrial alloys. Nobody is going to model all the atoms in a macroscopic widget, ever. It’s beyond pointless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rational choice isn’t an assumption for most microeconomic models once they’ve been developed.
This is dumb. There are plenty of cases where predicting the rational outcome and measuring an empirical gap from it reveals opportunity.
Like, the standard Arrow Debreu market assumes that you don't carry over money balances from one day to the next, yet economists will vehemently argue in favor of being able to violate Arrow Debreu markets, but the market is in equilibrium anyway.
> 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
> 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
Granted, I know a slight bit about general equilibrium theory, but nothing about DSGE.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
It was called statistics
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.
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.
essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it
"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 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
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 came away feeling unsatisfied, is there a bigger cultural thing going on here?
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.
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.
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.
That would be a hard act to follow.
[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...
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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.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=economist&city=&year=...
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.
How can you tell? Hell, with a few notable exceptions, maybe the entire field is largely a waste of time and money.
"Show me a successful economist and I'll show you a man who has not made an accurate forecast" - attributed to former United States Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
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.
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.
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?
What does it even mean to be "the best of the world"? People are not numbers, you cannot just rank them by score!
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’.
The absurdity is Americans assuming people won’t express in-group preference.
In 1979, 14% of PhDs went to non-citizens. In 2024, it's 38%.
(Table 1-6 in https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2024#data )
Academic salaries are higher in the US than in most other countries. But they are also unusually low relative to the cost of living and industry salaries. In many meaningful ways (such as home ownership), American academics enjoy a lower standard of living than their colleagues in Europe.
Moving to another country is a huge sacrifice and involves significant risks. Most people, including most academics, are not particularly motivated by high incomes. What they seek instead is stability. And that used to be the main reason why American universities were able to lure PhDs from other wealthy countries.
Because academic salaries are unusually low in the US relative to the alternatives, there is less competition for academic jobs and grants. If you take the subset of academics who are willing to move to another country, they are more likely to find a permanent position in the US than elsewhere. Less competition means that any particular candidate is more likely to be the top one for any particular position.
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
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)
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!
I'm glad more and more people see that it's complete bunk.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I don’t doubt that the economics profession has been shaped by politics but it appears they are and have been rather willing participants.
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.
"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...
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...
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.
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”
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.
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.
"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...
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 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.
It's just that economics, as a field, is better at making charts and loudly complaining about things.
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!"
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.
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...
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
Academia is dominated by Keynesianism.
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.
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
Yes, I was unprecise to the point of being wrong.
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.