Jump to content
Urch Forums

Career advice for young economists


Voided

Recommended Posts

Hi,

 

I've been lurking for a few months now, wasn't planning to sign up anytime soon (I'm planning to do a masters followed by PhD but won't start the masters until 2015) but I saw this post with career advice for freshly minted (or soon-to-be) PhDs:

 

Core Economics | Career advice for young economists

 

And thought that some people on this forum would find it interesting. Some of it is Australia specific but I think the more interesting parts are more general.

 

This passage in particular caught my attention:

 

"Within economics, most academics judge someone’s productivity by looking at what they have achieved since their PhD. This means the number of years a PhD took is usually not carefully considered, nor is any career before the PhD. In turn, this also means that it is actually in a young academic’s favour to have the date of the PhD be as late as possible. Students often want to complete their PhD sooner in order to please family, or to have it over with, but in terms of academic career, later is better."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I read the related article, the one in The Economist and found the comments of the readers very interesting, but the last one caught my attention the most, here it goes:

 

'Economics is not science. The world is too complex for the ivory tower models. Until Economists begin to be humble and accept this truism, they are currently "entertainers"'

 

I think that's the problem with current economic knowledge, the lack of precise predictive power. I find that economics can correctly make qualitative predictions most of the time, but somehow fails when making quantitative predictions and/or assigning a probability to certain outcomes.

 

And as for cryses, they can't be predicted with a 100% probability. If you could and everybody believed it, the crysis itself would happen sooner than predicted. The best you could do is to say that if A, B and C remain in this range there is X% (X

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Herbert Gintis has competent thoughts on the prediction v. description debate, and lands on description (gasp -- but we're not mere story tellers!). Most of what economists do on a daily basis has almost nothing to do with prediction, and the philosophical idea (some) economists have about themselves being ardent students of the scientific method - predicting behavior of systems then testing those predictions - isn't borne by practice.

 

Most of the theoretical and empirical work economists do is post-hoc stylized description, from which patterns in social systems emerge by induction from repeated work. There is nothing wrong with that, and it produces often incredibly useful insights your average Economist magazine commenter fails to grasp. It's not "data mining," and it's not an example of the Humean inductive fallacy. The deductive and predictive pretense in economics is just that, and not much more. (Though I think using deductive logic to tell little intuitively appealing stories about social phenomena is really interesting stuff.)

 

Chateau is right, and the point goes beyond social science. The theory of evolution is nearly entirely an ex post descriptive theory -- it doesn't predict anything.

Edited by Humanomics
confused ex post with ex ante like the UG I am
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Saying that economists should predict crises is the same as saying that physicists should predict airplane crashes. Or, better yet, saying that mathematicians (say, probability theorists) should predict the outcome of a coin toss. Prediction has nothing to do with science, and economics in particular. Edited by ivanspartakfan
Link to comment
Share on other sites

To be fair - economists are not without responsibility for giving the public the impression that they can manage the business cycle. The public probably isn't that stupid then for confusing the mountain of (I think wrong-headed) claims about ex post crisis management, with implied ex ante crisis management.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm really surprised by the the comments of y'all. It seems that I wasn't clear enough, so let's make myself clearer first then.

 

When I say predictions I mean an 'empirically verifiable afirmation about the world'. So, the simple statement 'print lots of money and prices will go up' is a prediction. What I'm saying is that these predictions in economics are somewhat vague.

 

I don't know a lot about the scientific method and the philosophy of science, but if we want to call Economics a science (and we all do) then I think that we as economist should be able to make predictions about the world based on our knowledge. The usefulness of those 'predictions' is twofold: first it's useful for our activities to know that if you do X, then Y will happen; second, making predictions and empirically checking them helps to improve the theory (science should be falsifiable at some extent). A science that can't make (reliable) predictions is as good as Greek mythology. You can make ex-post explanations of what happens in the world caused by the actions of the gods, but I find it rather difficult to make a reliable prediction based on that body of knowledge.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I read the related article, the one in The Economist and found the comments of the readers very interesting, but the last one caught my attention the most, here it goes:

 

'Economics is not science. The world is too complex for the ivory tower models. Until Economists begin to be humble and accept this truism, they are currently "entertainers"'

 

 

This is a fashionable but, in my opinion, fundamentally-flawed criticism that is derived from a failure to understand what a model is and what its purpose is. When the claimant above says that the world is too complex for the ivory tower models, he is implying that analyses are imperfect. To that I say: so what? We don't need a completely accurate picture to have a useful one. If a model or picture of the world is far from completely accurate but is more accurate than alternative descriptions, it is useful.

 

Second, the claim that the world is too complex for models is itself an unsupported claim. The data age is very, very young. It may very well be the case that down the road, complexity methodologies or some other set of methodologies develop to the extent that they actually are able to meaningfully describe incredibly complex systems. No one is in a position at this moment to claim that there are systems that are "unmodelable". They may not be amenable to modeling with current techniques, certainly, but to imply that there is something fundamental about human activities in aggregate that serves as some sort of black box that we are incapable of understanding to a useful extent is pure conjecture.

 

Essentially, these sorts of criticisms are derived from the idea that a discipline or methodology must produce a perfect description or analysis of something. There is no such imperative, in my eyes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see a lot of interest from young guys and gals in methodology and philosophy of science in economics. I don't understand why more of you don't seek this literature out yourselves and get deeper with it. I'm further surprised that economists don't recognize this demand from their students and supply the market for it. It's only natural that younger students will be interested as they "discover themselves." I mean - we teach sex education to pubescent teenagers right? The same principle would seem to apply here if we want to avoid unplanned pregnancy and the spread of methodological disease.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see a lot of interest from young guys and gals in methodology and philosophy of science in economics. I don't understand why more of you don't seek this literature out yourselves and get deeper with it. I'm further surprised that economists don't recognize this demand from their students and supply the market for it. It's only natural that younger students will be interested as they "discover themselves." I mean - we teach sex education to pubescent teenagers right? The same principle would seem to apply here if we want to avoid unplanned pregnancy and the spread of methodological disease.

 

Woah woah woah, I'm all for teaching kids about proper usage of birth control and what not; but anything to do with the scientific method? At that age? What if they start......experimenting on their own?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Then you should look into the matter before making such strong assertions.

 

I have, but I wanted to point out in my post that I'm aware of my deficiencies. I'm always willing to learn. I just wanted to discuss about it, and since I think nobody here is an expert, I thought that it was a good way to learn more about the topic and hear what other people think.

 

The role, or the extent, of falsification in science today is debatable as far as I know. For instance in Physics, such debate is taking place regarding String Theory. Some people complain that as up to date there are no testable predictions, it's not good science. Others argue that the absence of such predictions does not invalidate the theory. I find that discussion really fascinating.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

More later, but even as you point out the "prediction" about printing money and inflation is something economists learned heuristically, by trial and error, over the course of decades, with no precise theory of the matter nor experimental design to test it. This is how social science works, and the emergence of our descriptively-accurate theory of inflation is a testament to the usefulness of the inductive method.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Young people, who are considered nascent, may need sexual education to help them adjust their libidos and act in the socially responsible manner. Why would young economists need to abstain from philosophical probing of the science and experimenting with the methodologies? I guess, such a qualification could be dictated by neo-Keynesian theory planted mind subconsciously acting on the pre-set combination of alternatives.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interview with Thomas Sargent - The Region - Publications & Papers | The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

 

^To read this interview in its entirety would consume a large amount of time, but I wanted to throw in a small quote from Tom Sargent. Just has to do with using models. There is more good stuff in there, but in my opinion if anything models should continue to get more mathematically complex because that will permit them to be more accurate.

 

Rolnick: OK, here goes. Examples of such criticisms are that modern macroeconomics makes too much use of sophisticated mathematics to model people and markets; that it incorrectly relies on the assumption that asset markets are efficient in the sense that asset prices aggregate information of all individuals; that the faith in good outcomes always emerging from competitive markets is misplaced; that the assumption of “rational expectations” is wrongheaded because it attributes too much knowledge and forecasting ability to people; that the modern macro mainstay “real business cycle model” is deficient because it ignores so many frictions and imperfections and is useless as a guide to policy for dealing with financial crises; that modern macroeconomics has either assumed away or shortchanged the analysis of unemployment; that the recent financial crisis took modern macro by surprise; and that macroeconomics should be based less on formal decision theory and more on the findings of “behavioral economics.” Shouldn’t these be taken seriously?

Sargent: Sorry, Art, but aside from the foolish and intellectually lazy remark about mathematics, all of the criticisms that you have listed reflect either woeful ignorance or intentional disregard for what much of modern macroeconomics is about and what it has accomplished. That said, it is true that modern macroeconomics uses mathematics and statistics to understand behavior in situations where there is uncertainty about how the future will unfold from the past. But a rule of thumb is that the more dynamic, uncertain and ambiguous is the economic environment that you seek to model, the more you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, and learn and use some math. That’s life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...