Humanomics

This is exhausting. I don't have a lot of interest in comparing people's CVs and syllabi here, in order to draw inferences about pipeline likelihoods in social science. If folks are interested in pursuing these questions formally, there is a lot of cool stuff coming out of the sociology of science. If anyone wants to learn more about the MACSS program at Chicago specifically, feel free to message me. Marshall333: You can also consider the fellowships like Data Science for Social Good, at the Computation Institute, for your gap year after EME. Google the Toyota Institute at Chicago for other opportunities if you want to get closer to computer scientists. If you're interested in this kind of work longer run, you might want to politely decline the offer in personal emails to the faculty you were interested in working with at MACSS. That can be an opportunity to explain that you have elected to ensure a strong theoretical base for your training before you go applied or try to innovate, and to express an interest in collaborating in the future. Many of these people have large pools of money across UChicago, connections to independent institutes like, eg, Sante Fe, and they have very strong reputations in their respective disciplines (Padgett, Raudenbush, and Evans specifically). It's worth keeping a channel open.

Some of the economics faculty might take your position in the MACSS program as a signal that you're interesting and creative. The trouble is with the smart signal. I'm afraid Chateauheart may be right. Faculty may be skeptical of how selective MACSS is, and/or how strong its treatment effect is. Although Professors Raudenbush and Hong are very well respected by our economists. Generally the MAPPS, CIR, and other MA programs in the Social Science Division are consolation prizes for kids who aren't good enough to get into the SSD's doctoral programs. MACSS is not taking indirect admittances in that same way, but MACSS may (unfortunately/unfairly) suffer the same stigma early on. Students who do well in MAPPS and CIR are genuine false negatives who bust their butts and compensate for the noise they suffered in initial admissions decisions. But a large portion of them do not do well and move into industry with a lot of debt and a relatively weak signal of technical competence. For the folks in the viewing audience, these are important considerations when you're thinking about paying for a stepping stone masters anywhere. In the first three years here, between 2016-2019, I would not recommend MACSS unless you: (1) know you want to use it for industry, for which you will have access to top research jobs, and very interesting and fun ones at that, or (2) if you have an incredibly good idea of the kind of computational work you want to do in an interdisciplinary social science doctoral program afterward I have a friend in George Mason's Computational Social Science program who is extremely dynamic, is giving talks at major institutions in government and the academy, publishes relatively often in major news magazines . . . and still does not expect to place well into a traditional social science department on the market.

EME has a strong record of placing economics students. Email James Evans about your plans beyond the program. He keeps relationships with top economists, statisticians, and folks from other disciplines. He'll have some idea of how the signal will read and what kind of opportunities you might have. You're likely at the top of their pile if you got into EME, so he'll want you to come. But he's very fair and will not mislead you about your chances of placing beyond the program. If you're interested in frontier quantitative methods and want to work with network scientists, statisticians, AI / machine learning / topic modelers / et al. long run, the Duncan Watts RAship and Gentzkow/Shapiro RAships are very good options after EME. Another option is to go to EME and self train in whatever ancillary methods/questions you're interested in, in order to have something to pitch to an RAship application.

Sup guys, long time no see. Hope everyone is handling the wait ok -- decisions will start rolling in soon! Stigler Center is building out and hiring an RA. Disclaimer: I can't tell how old the job posting is. https://jobopportunities.uchicago.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=647148

Does Economics4Life's IP address trace to Italy?

Pretty sure it means that committees are optimizing over some convex map of credentials, and that a lot of one variable can compensate for a little of another.

Is the person who gave this advice an older faculty at a lower ranked school? Ph.D. admissions and the job market used to work like this, but does not anymore given the size of the applicant markets. If you want to start a research discussion with faculty you're interested in, that's fine. It is not a requirement and only in the minority of cases will result in such a positive impression that the professor lobbies for your admission to the program.

120-130 should do it.

Bjorn Lomborg makes the kinds of arguments OP is looking for, I believe, and has caught major flack for suggesting that there are much more important human health and development goals to invest in than environmental protections, because it's say quite cheap and very important to deal with malaria which we know kills people with high probability than it is to do very expensive things to quash CO2 emissions when the probability estimates of various outcomes are all over the place (this is not a statement about the probability of whether anthropogenic climate change exists, which even most academic critics agree is 1). As far as the positive/normative distinction, I think it is a dichotomy that is a useful thing to think about, but denotes the ends of a continuous interval. The same is true of form/content, degree/kind, and a number of other famous "elemental [false] dichotomies" that scholars have always argued over. Generally I agree with chateauheart that it's not necessarily meaningful or productive to force people/groups/disciplines to one side of that interval or try to pin them down to a location within it. Economics has the advantage of having reduced the dimensions of its discussion to those chateauheart pointed out. There are costs and benefits to such institutional/organizational parsimony.

It's interesting that at the same time as the price of elite college educations has exploded, the merit of the credential it imparts (as a measure of the noisiness of the signal) has diminished.

Lol. I was referring to fashions in the sociological sense -- you know -- where you get to stretch the definition of a word to claim it is a foundational mechanism driving social behavior across a bunch of contexts. So I meant orange skinny jeans and stainless steel coffee growlers. ;)

I think that's largely true, but only within a certain range of methods and propositions. That goes for any "knowledge community" I suppose, and a lot of this thread is me just crying because there is no heat and serve discipline out there that is already tuned in to the frequency I'm broadcasting on. So I don't want to trash economists or sociologists when I'm discussing interdisciplinarity here. It's just that it is in fact increasingly difficult in the number of disparate methods and postulates you want to bring together, because you will be asking people to pay considerable prices to digest and evaluate your research. Hell, it sometimes feels like I'm asking people to pay an unusually high price to sit in a theory course with me. ;)

Honestly I think any top 10 or top 20 school is really going to give you the freedom to do what you want to do. There is considerable room for creativity in economics to be sure. Are you going to go to Harvard, pass comps, and then do an ethnographic study of the introduction of a price system for traditional goods in rural Guatemala, then ship off to a tenure track job in economics at MIT? No. But once you've cleared comps and such, there is an assumption I think that you're purebred stock and there exists greater trust for you to venture off and do what you want if you're higher status. In my (relatively small) experience talking to people, risk taking and game changing is generally not encouraged and welcomed at lower ranked departments unless they have a speciality in such things like GMU. There is a result from organizational ethnography called "middle status conformity" that proposes and inverted-U function of conformity against status. Low status people often deviate because they are new to groups and do not understand norms and routines, because they have potentially lower investment in the group relative to others and draw fewer resources from the common pool, etc. High status people often deviate because they have a stock of clout that they can spend, and frankly, they make the rules to some degree. But middle status people conform to and police norms most vehemently. That's some of where I'm deriving these conjectures about strategies in economics programs from.

You should bring that note over to Phil Mirowski during his office hours and see what he thinks about it. ;)

Well that's cool, cuz I was just making all of that up on conjecture. Lol. I've never done a matching or random study in my life, and have read probably 15 experimental papers and 2-4 matching papers in my life. Yep, agree. Does the Handbook of Experimental Economics have a good exposition of these tests of the level of randomization achieved? Have you read Delia Baldassarri's paper here? They got an enormous field sample out in Africa and were really thorough about collecting network data while running various games. https://michael-falco-p2nl.squarespace.com/2011-centralized-sanctioning-and-legitimate-authority-promote-cooperation-in-humans