Arnold has covered the positive aspect of the question, I think it is worth considering the normative aspect. I absolutely acknowledge that many great minds have devoted themselves to advancing the science of economics over the past 100 years, and have made many important findings. I still wonder if the yield was positive. Would the world really be a worse place if all the Nobel memorial prize winning economists had found work in private sector economics/statistics/business/law/meteorology or whatever? Economics journals would be publishing articles by industry researchers, or lay experts etc. Example: With all due credit to Stiglitz and Rothschild and Akerloff and Yellen and all the other remarkable asymmetric information innovators, is it really that hard to believe that private sector economists working in the insurance or finance sector would have come with similar insights? Obviously investing in bad economic research is the worst of all outcomes, but investing little public money in economic research may be a better idea than sustaining even the old infrastructure that Arnold and Allison fondly remember.
Republicans need to define the categories to be protected against discrimination so as to include Republicans, Christians, and pro-life believers.
Then sue colleges that have been secretly, and illegally (?), discriminating against hiring such folk.
In parallel, no tax-exempt org that practices such discrimination should be tax-exempt, nor should students going to such a place be eligible for Federal loans.
J. Haidt and most "moderate" Democrats probably agree with Schrager - but are mostly wrong. Neither UATX (Bari Weiss plus) nor Ralston (Jordan Peterson), will be in the top 100, much less top 10, before 2030 (90% guess).
Cut off gov't money to orgs that discriminate.
On the other hand, society, production, finance and gov't will be changing so much that "economics as I knew it" will be evolving far away from what was previously "known" no matter what.
If at some point all of the smart economists are working and industry and all academia has is people fixated on various DEI topics, it seems like people will simply stop having any respect for those in academia. That may take a generation (for all the people who grew up idolizing academics to die off). But I don’t see any reason why smart people will respect what academia is becoming. Most people already don’t.
The problem come from mostly from the soft sciences (all the so-called social sciences) and much of the softer sides of economics really not trying to achieve the "truth". When the STEM people speak of science they include trying to determine vantage points where they can "see" what is true and what is nonsense. When there are several potential hypothesis that could be used to "see" the data, they don't use 2 sigma or similar viewpoints on what is true, but may use 5 sigma or higher like what was used by CERN in the finding the Higgs Boson.
The social science think they know something when they get a correlation between two variables in a N variable problem (N is very large and not even known in many cases). The soft sciences also don't seem to play the "blood sport" of proving the other guy wrong and backing it up with real data not just p-hacking nonsense.
From when I was a young man and studied some engineering economics it appears that economics as we see in academia has decayed. I seldom see mention of the effects of delays (as from regulation) on the stability of feedback control system like supply/demand markets, where a demand change drives a supply change with a dynamic response with huge impacts caused by time delays. Short term elasticity is not the same as long term.
I no longer see economist in public noting that inflation can also be "seen" as a decrease in the value of money relative to asset values and a destruction of wealth. From the latter viewpoint inflation is theft of value, such as my retirement savings. Back in the '60s to '70s it was common to discuss "real interest rates" (interest - inflation) as a valid measure, but we are now running -6% on that basis with the gall of the government to charge taxes on imaginary inflation "earnings".
Many of the government workers probably still have the COLA protections.
My reaction to Arnold's comment is compatible with Asher's but a bit different. College graduates who are interested in rigorous neoclassical economics and its macro extensions, and who want to learn economics at an advanced level to solve worldly problems could find that studying within business schools or public policy schools might be more useful than continuing in the arts & sciences. As an aside, I know quite a number of economists, as Arnold and I did, find their way into the financial sector ("Wall Street") because they were dissatisfied with ivory tower for various reasons, and some non-economists who are working on interesting problems in retirement income and other areas, but within the commercial sector.
Re: "people with less of a bent toward progressive ideology may select out of academia."
Economists have excellent employment opportunities beyond academe. So do STEM researchers. By contrast, researchers in the humanities and in the "social sciences" besides ECON -- e.g., sociology, poli sci, anthropology -- have few employment opportunities (in their research fields) beyond academe.
A puzzle arises:
Why are ECON faculty and STEM faculty usually less radical than faculty in the humanities and in the social sciences besides ECON?
If the non-radical subset of talented historians, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. can't self-select into employment in their fields beyond academe, then shouldn't we observe more political variety in those fields within academe, than in ECON Departments and in STEM Departments within academe?
Nonetheless, Arnold's "road to sociology" notwithstanding, we still observe the opposite pattern. ECON faculty and STEM faculty are usually less radical.
Perhaps ECON and STEM still attract conservative and classical liberal personalities? (These fields have "selection effects"?)
Or perhaps Ph.D programs in the humanities and in the social sciences besides ECON inculcate radical politics? ("Treatment effects").
Arnold has covered the positive aspect of the question, I think it is worth considering the normative aspect. I absolutely acknowledge that many great minds have devoted themselves to advancing the science of economics over the past 100 years, and have made many important findings. I still wonder if the yield was positive. Would the world really be a worse place if all the Nobel memorial prize winning economists had found work in private sector economics/statistics/business/law/meteorology or whatever? Economics journals would be publishing articles by industry researchers, or lay experts etc. Example: With all due credit to Stiglitz and Rothschild and Akerloff and Yellen and all the other remarkable asymmetric information innovators, is it really that hard to believe that private sector economists working in the insurance or finance sector would have come with similar insights? Obviously investing in bad economic research is the worst of all outcomes, but investing little public money in economic research may be a better idea than sustaining even the old infrastructure that Arnold and Allison fondly remember.
Sadly, all too true.
Republicans need to define the categories to be protected against discrimination so as to include Republicans, Christians, and pro-life believers.
Then sue colleges that have been secretly, and illegally (?), discriminating against hiring such folk.
In parallel, no tax-exempt org that practices such discrimination should be tax-exempt, nor should students going to such a place be eligible for Federal loans.
J. Haidt and most "moderate" Democrats probably agree with Schrager - but are mostly wrong. Neither UATX (Bari Weiss plus) nor Ralston (Jordan Peterson), will be in the top 100, much less top 10, before 2030 (90% guess).
Cut off gov't money to orgs that discriminate.
On the other hand, society, production, finance and gov't will be changing so much that "economics as I knew it" will be evolving far away from what was previously "known" no matter what.
If at some point all of the smart economists are working and industry and all academia has is people fixated on various DEI topics, it seems like people will simply stop having any respect for those in academia. That may take a generation (for all the people who grew up idolizing academics to die off). But I don’t see any reason why smart people will respect what academia is becoming. Most people already don’t.
The problem come from mostly from the soft sciences (all the so-called social sciences) and much of the softer sides of economics really not trying to achieve the "truth". When the STEM people speak of science they include trying to determine vantage points where they can "see" what is true and what is nonsense. When there are several potential hypothesis that could be used to "see" the data, they don't use 2 sigma or similar viewpoints on what is true, but may use 5 sigma or higher like what was used by CERN in the finding the Higgs Boson.
The social science think they know something when they get a correlation between two variables in a N variable problem (N is very large and not even known in many cases). The soft sciences also don't seem to play the "blood sport" of proving the other guy wrong and backing it up with real data not just p-hacking nonsense.
From when I was a young man and studied some engineering economics it appears that economics as we see in academia has decayed. I seldom see mention of the effects of delays (as from regulation) on the stability of feedback control system like supply/demand markets, where a demand change drives a supply change with a dynamic response with huge impacts caused by time delays. Short term elasticity is not the same as long term.
I no longer see economist in public noting that inflation can also be "seen" as a decrease in the value of money relative to asset values and a destruction of wealth. From the latter viewpoint inflation is theft of value, such as my retirement savings. Back in the '60s to '70s it was common to discuss "real interest rates" (interest - inflation) as a valid measure, but we are now running -6% on that basis with the gall of the government to charge taxes on imaginary inflation "earnings".
Many of the government workers probably still have the COLA protections.
My reaction to Arnold's comment is compatible with Asher's but a bit different. College graduates who are interested in rigorous neoclassical economics and its macro extensions, and who want to learn economics at an advanced level to solve worldly problems could find that studying within business schools or public policy schools might be more useful than continuing in the arts & sciences. As an aside, I know quite a number of economists, as Arnold and I did, find their way into the financial sector ("Wall Street") because they were dissatisfied with ivory tower for various reasons, and some non-economists who are working on interesting problems in retirement income and other areas, but within the commercial sector.
Re: "people with less of a bent toward progressive ideology may select out of academia."
Economists have excellent employment opportunities beyond academe. So do STEM researchers. By contrast, researchers in the humanities and in the "social sciences" besides ECON -- e.g., sociology, poli sci, anthropology -- have few employment opportunities (in their research fields) beyond academe.
A puzzle arises:
Why are ECON faculty and STEM faculty usually less radical than faculty in the humanities and in the social sciences besides ECON?
If the non-radical subset of talented historians, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. can't self-select into employment in their fields beyond academe, then shouldn't we observe more political variety in those fields within academe, than in ECON Departments and in STEM Departments within academe?
Nonetheless, Arnold's "road to sociology" notwithstanding, we still observe the opposite pattern. ECON faculty and STEM faculty are usually less radical.
Perhaps ECON and STEM still attract conservative and classical liberal personalities? (These fields have "selection effects"?)
Or perhaps Ph.D programs in the humanities and in the social sciences besides ECON inculcate radical politics? ("Treatment effects").