A View of the Economics Job Market

|Peter Boettke|

Noah Smith provides a perspective on the job market for economists.

I'd like to invite any the economists within the Austrian tradition to share their perspective.  As a slightly out of sync economist, how did you survive the market, and what advice would you give to the aspiring economist among our readers?

Comments

[Xerographica]

For the life of me I haven't been able to get Noah's thoughts on the Austrian tradition...

http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2011/11/ostrich-response-to-pragmatarianism.html

His justification for not responding was, "I guess it's just that I have trouble understanding what you write..."

Maybe he has a point. So let's blame Wikipedia...because that's where all the cool kids go for information. Is there any possibility that you, or any other Austrian economist, might be interested in improving the Wikipedia article on partial knowledge?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersed_knowledge

I'd do it myself but...well...there's a good chance Noah's not the only one that has trouble understanding what I write. To judge for yourself check out the Wikipedia article I created for tax choice...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_choice

[Xerographica]

In case anybody wasn't aware of this, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, listed Hayek's essay..."The Use of Knowledge in Society"...as the theoretical basis of Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Political_and_economic_views

[Oklahoma venture capital]

Job market is cut down due to the retardation in the business investment in United States and it also effects the recuperation of the universal economy.

[Xerographica]

Speaking of people that do not understand Austrian economics...Matt Zwolinski banned me from bleedingheartlibertarians.com because of this discussion we had...

http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2012/02/fallibilism-vs-fairness.html

Oh well...you win some and you lose some. That being said, it does lend credence to this comment that I posted on your entry on the relationship between Economics and Philosophy...

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/02/on-the-relationship-between-economics-and-philosophy/#comment-437336276

Somehow we do need to make these concepts a lot more accessible to people in other fields. So perhaps you can write an entry over there that would help even Matt Zwolinski understand the basic concepts that form the foundation of Austrian economics. Hopefully you can succeed where I failed!

[Roger Koppl]

I think there are 12 simple lessons for aspiring Austrian economists who want to survive and thrive in the academic job market. My "lessons" are pretty basic stuff, I suppose, but grad students should totally pay attention and take them seriously.

The most important lesson is to be sure to engage the mainstream literature. Don't rework or refine the "Austrian theory of X," whatever X might be. Find, instead, a problem that mainstream economists write about and work on it. If you really have something to say about the "Austrian theory of X," then you can probably find an X-related mainstream literature to plug into. If not, then your insights on the Austrian theory of X may not be interesting or useful.

The advice is to *engage* the mainstream literature. That means that you respect the intelligence, integrity, and scholarship of your interlocutors. You don't tell them that they are math bigots, or whores to the state, or too stupid to understand praxeology. Such claims are rarely true and, in any event, it's always better to pluck the beam from thine own eye than the mote from thy neighbor's eye. Even when some such charge is true, how does it persuade anyone to say "The other guy's a jerk"?

To engage the mainstream literature on a topic, you must also understand it. Be sure you get the technical details, the context, the intuition, how it fits with other issues, and so on. If you flub the technical bits, you're dead. JMCB will not publish an article that says rational expectations assumes away error. Besides getting the basic argument right, you also need to pay attention to the context. Why would somebody think ratex (or whatever) is the right way to go? If you can't understand why "they" would think such crazy things, you probably don't understand them yet. "They" are not stupid or mad; they are perfectly serious scholars trying to advance knowledge.

I guess you could sum up this first lesson with the injunction to write so that the mainstream will take you seriously.

Okay, so the first of our 12 lessons is "Engage the mainstream." None of the other 11 lessons matter.

[Jezreel]

It is good arrangement of events specially this economist job market. In doing this we encourage young economist to turn up and expose their talents in a challenging task. In this event you can give an opportunity to all those graduates but find difficult to find a correct path of their economic careers.

[Elle]

The impact of this event to others is great, the only problem is even so that we have this kind of event but if the opportunity is less then not all young economist will benefit on it. I think in that event we must discuss also how to accommodate the needs of all.