Our profession’s lack of understanding of gender and diversity is not innocuous. Presumably, it is one reason the climate in our profession is so poor. But it also affects what gets published (or not) and our influence on policy (or lack thereof). While economics is always concerned about causal identification, the bar is higher for papers about gender because, in the words of one of my recent journal reviewers at the American Economic Review (the flagship publication of the American Economic Association): “Unfortunately, papers like this face the uphill battle of having to rule out all unobservables that could possible [sic] be correlated with gender…” [emphasis added].
Tag: Economics
If you get a PhD, get an economics PhD
This needull is dedicated to a friend who made the smart choice and is now reaping the dividends.
Why do so very few newly minted econ PhDs face the prospect of unemployment? Part of it is due to the econ field’s extremely well-managed (and centrally planned!) job market. Part of it is due to the large demand from the lucrative consulting and finance industries. And part is due to the aforementioned proliferation of b-schools. There may be other reasons I don’t know. But in an America where nearly every career path is looking more and more like a gamble, the econ PhD remains a rock of stability – the closest thing you’ll find to a direct escalator to the upper middle class.
Why mathematics has not been effective in economics
I have always felt that mathematics could have been better used in economics.
Håvelmo argued also that if economics wanted to be taken as seriously as physics, chemistry and biology, it needed to employ probability because that was the way that opinions were expressed in science. He believed that if this was done, economics would make new insights, just as physicists and biologists had. He also observed that the natural sciences had found a perspective on nature that made it appear to follow stable laws. The goal of The Probability Approach in Econometrics was to present how this could be realised. Morgenstern began The Theory of Games, like Håvelmo, with an argument for the use of mathematics in economics and explained that what was required was the careful definition of terms, a pre-requisite of mathematics but lacking in economics. To this end, von Neumann started with the axioms of utility that had been at the core of Carl Menger’s, unmathematical, economics.
Needull in a haystack 