Some Links, 10/3/2025
Tim Carney on the need for religion; Yuval Levin on the Trump-Biden budget; Chris Brunet on the collapse of the market for econ Ph.D's; Oliver Kim on same
The liberal project, for decades, was to push us towards a more secular, more rational society that leaned less on dogma, tradition, and faith. This was supposed to be emancipatory. Enlightenment would free us from the dark fire and brimstone messages of Protestant preachers and Catholic or Jewish guilt.
That didn’t work.
…
Our culture is broken, and it needs a fix. And in the moment, it seems possible that this fix may come not from technology, not from our government, not from the market, but from millions of Americans spending reverent time in the pews and in prayer.
In the late 1960s, I recall a gospel tune—which was satirical—that said “We need a whole lot more religion and a lot less rock’n’roll.”
My sense is that over the latter half of the twentieth century there were occasional magazine covers touting the emergence of one sort of religious revival or another. None of them lasted.
In March, Congress passed and the president signed a continuing resolution that extended Biden-era appropriations levels through the end of this fiscal year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the reconciliation measure passed in July — raised spending levels for defense and immigration enforcement but otherwise kept appropriations where they were.
…Amazingly, Trump and his team seem content to keep in place the spending levels approved by Joe Biden and the last Congress through perhaps as much as half of Trump’s second term. No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this.
So all the sound and fury coming out of Washington signifies nothing. The Biden bump in spending is going to persist.
You now have 1,385 brand-new PhDs chasing just 400 tenure-track jobs.
…Furthermore, the new graduates aren’t competing just with their own cohort. They’re thrown into the same bucket as the leftovers from every prior cycle: post-docs clinging to hope, visiting professors chasing stability, lecturers desperate to upgrade, assistant professors stranded at second-tier schools. The “new supply” is just the visible tip; the true applicant pool is a rolling backlog several times larger.
The result? According to EJM, 5,341 candidates participated in the 2024–25 market, the largest applicant pool ever recorded
He points to Oliver Kim, who writes
And of course, all of this decline occurred before the litany of disasters that have recently hit the Econ job market. In May, Jerome Powell announced that the Federal Reserve—perhaps the largest employer of economists in America—would cut its workforce by 10%. The federal government has frozen hiring, as has the World Bank.
Government and industry used to be a reliable source of employment for Ph.D economists. But that may be changing. In any case, I enjoyed Kim’s entire essay.
substacks referenced above:
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As someone who grew up and attended early 1960's rural SW MO hillbilly churches, I can assure you that the song was not originally "satirical" . . . Skeeter Davis had a hit with it, for God's sake: "In the late 1960s, I recall a gospel tune—which was satirical—that said 'We need a whole lot more religion and a lot less rock’n’roll.'”
Of course, when I let my hair grow later in the 60's and started attending Peace Rallies, I then sneered at the old people concerned about the deleterious effects of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
However, now that I am an old person shaking my sparsely grey-haired head at the lunacy of our current society, I wonder if we might have been better off without quite so much "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
This exact complaint applied to my 1979 Ph.D. from the English department of a solid state university: an economics "degree is a trap: six or more years of grinding work that too often ends with being overeducated, underpaid, and locked out of the profession you trained to join."
The very best of our class got a non-tenure track position at an Ivy--and thence in a few years to a peripheral branch of a state university. The rest went to community colleges, even high schools . . . or as in my case out into the cold of the non-academic workforce.
And yet the English department continued to recruit starry-eyed Ph.D. students, knowing, knowing full well, there would be no prestigious or even numbingly-boring academic positions to fill.
Of course, it did not help that English departments across the land went full lunatic on cultural issues, which has only gotten worse.