by youainti | 2025-10-03 19:29:32+00:00
This turned out longer than I expected. TL:DR; I'm not sure what he is trying to do, but he gets some things right, some things wrong, and some things are not applicable.

Points 1-2 seem to match what I am seeing as an Econ PhD student on the market and what I am hearing from others. Point 3 may be happening, but this assumes that AI is going to be doing this in a way capable of producing research AND that there is a limited amount of research to be done. As someone who has used various AI agents as help in cleaning data, exactly what he suggested it does, I suspect that this will increase the value of the positions that use Econ PhDs because they can now do more.

The thing that bothers me most about this post is his point 4, and it seems so wrong to me to the degree it makes me wonder about the rest of it. I don't know what he got the following perspective.

1. first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation 2. then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” 3. finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all

In contrast, I've seen something different.

1. I saw debate over how people would save/spend rebate checks and how that would feed through to the economy. Some people speculated that it wouldn't lead to inflation based on the results of the 2008-2009 recession. Additionally, most economists I spoke to thought that the supply shocks due to the pandemic would lead to temporary inflation. If he got the impression that there was a "confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation", I would like to know who he was listening to.

2. The inflation during the pandemic _was_ transitory. Take a look at [0-2], mildly different views of one measure of inflation. The high inflation period due to the pandemic is over. Persistent inflation at the Year over Year levels seen early in the pandemic would mean we're seeing 7% inflation, not the 3%ish we're actually seeing. Federal interest rate targets would probably be in the 7APY-9APY region as a result. Part of the confusion here is due to the difference between inflation and price levels. Inflation is the rate of change of price levels. Yes we underwent inflation, and the higher prices accrued[2], but inflation rates dropped and we still paid the previously inflated prices. That is normal. The 2020 inflation bout did come at the end of a period with absurdly low inflation though; the decade between 2010 and 2020 had deals such as the $5 footlong from subway and the $5 hot and ready from little ceasars last almost the whole decade. Looking at [0] again, that time had historically low inflation. So suddenly being exposed to relatively high inflation was novel and painful.

3. I can see how this might seem like a thing. There was a whole issue where the CPI levels and the costs of living (felt inflation) differed a whole lot. There are reasons for this, such as changing consumption patterns (which change faster than the CPI basket of goods), and is due to the fact that CPI is trying to measure how prices change in a method that is comparable across time. It is not trying to measure how expensive the lives of consumers are. Especially when you use the typically presented measures of CPI which does not include food or energy (these are excluded because they are volatile). Add in income cuts and rising food prices and suddenly the budget situation of most Americans was getting more difficult. So yeah, there was a disconnect between households experience and the measures of inflation. This wasn't lying, this was people not understanding how economic statistics work and then misusing them.

Finally, the author may be ideologically motivated, e.g. [3] where he stated:

"You can participate in this societal trend, dear math world, by kicking this deranged, murderous tranny out of your ranks. Don’t let him infect the next generation of students with the woke mind virus — or, at the very least, don’t hire him in your department, where he will surely be a magnet for lawsuits." > For clarity, the use of the word "murderous" is due to the discussion about some posts by a math PhD student that are somewhat threatening. The use is on topic.

I bring this up not to attack the author but to raise questions about the author's rhetorical goals. I start by stating that I don't actually know what he is trying to achieve.

If his point is that the Econ Job market is has been rough the last 3 years and is getting worse; that is well known among economists and hopefully is known by those looking at doing a PhD in economics. The point he explains at the introduction and conclusion is that an econ PhD doesn't have the same returns or guarantees it used to (e.g. compared to 10 years ago). That is true and points 1-2 are all that is needed to make that point.

It also seems like he may be trying to call into question the value of some or all of the following: academic economists, economic training, or higher education. If that is his goal, then 1-2 are beside the point, 3 is speculation and only somewhat pertinent, and 4 is applicable but wrong. The phrasing in the title seems to point to this. Is this a complete collapse? I don't know. We'll know in 5 years though.

[0]: ANNUAL CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA [1]: MONTHLY CPI INFLATION https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPALTT01USM657N [2]: CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (Price levels) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL [3]: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...