Getting a PhD in Economics

9: Conclusion: The Ph.D. Economist-at-Large

C h a p t e r 9 Conclusion:The Ph.D. Economist-at-Large According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are fewer than sixteen thousand economists working in the United States.1 It’s a small club. If someone gathered all of us in a football stadium in a medium-sized American city, we wouldn’t even fill three-fourths of the stadium. And yet economists wield enormous influence in American society . We are in charge of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and, through various advisory councils, we have the ear of the President and Congress. Wall Street also pays attention to us, as do universities and think tanks. And we influence the public and the general discourse through newspaper columns, op-ed pieces, blogs, and talking head appearances. At least part of the reason for this broad scope of influence is that economics is a powerful tool for analyzing many important phenomena in the world. More relevant for you, getting a Ph.D. in economics is excellent training in using this valuable tool. As you have seen by now, obtaining a Ph.D. in economics is not painless but it is far from impossible. A reasonable if aggressively simplified take-away from this book is that successfully getting a Ph.D. in economics —being trained in the profession of economic research, as I argued in Chapter 1—means that you simply need to: 138 Chapter 9 • prepare yourself with the appropriate analytical, mathematical , and research tools before you enter graduate school; • take your graduate school application seriously; • apply yourself diligently to your courses and exams; • put in the hours and effort to develop multiple ideas for your dissertation; • develop the intellectual and social-psychological discipline required to be a professional in this field; • put it all together in a polished package to take to the job market. This is all quite doable but requires a commitment on the scale of years. The intellectual and professional rewards, however, are immense . If you work as an academic economist, you get great intellectual freedom: you can read, learn about, analyze, and work on whatever topic interests you. You work with and get challenged by smart people with interesting ideas. You get paid well compared to many others in academia and sufficiently well to have a comfortable life. You have useful analytical and quantitative skills that are valuable outside of academia, so you can work as a consultant in the nonprofit or private sector on real-world projects. You have an opportunity to influence the economic understanding of young students who will then go on to contribute thoughtfully to society. And you have a level of flexibility in your time that is rarely found in other occupations. If you become a professional economist outside of the academy, you have many of these attractive benefits as well. Although you may have somewhat less flexibility on your projects, you will be able to work on intellectually challenging real-world projects. In this applied world, you will have the opportunity to make a measurable difference in the lives of others. Although you may have less flexibility in your work hours, the time demands tend to be more limited and better defined than in academia, and your time outside of the office is your own. And you will certainly be remunerated very well. There is much to like about being a Ph.D. economist, regardless of which track you choose. Conclusion 139 The Afterlife and the Economist-at-Large A fear that many graduates have is that they will be trapped into working on their dissertation topic for the rest of their lives. This thought fills them with dread, because by the time they’ve worked several years on their dissertation and presented their job market paper half a bijillion times, they will be utterly sick of it and never want to see it or speak of it again. And this is even before the paper goes through the publication mill, being submitted, reviewed, rejected , revised, and resubmitted. So any nausea associated with your dissertation is understandable. Bear in mind that there is nothing in your contract that stipulates that you must work on your dissertation topic in subsequent work although it is always sensible to build on your previous knowledge . But perhaps your previous research efforts showed you how foolhardy or difficult your dissertation topic was. In that case, you would be wise to move on. And if you carefully read the...