I saw an interesting statistic in the latest issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives. If you rank North American economics Ph.D. programs in terms of the publishing success of their median student in the first six years after graduating, UCSD comes in second.
Number one? Seems to be Princeton.
Professor Hamilton,
Congratulations to you, fellow professors and students. As a UC graduate and California taxpayer, glad to see my tax dollars doing good work!
I read in the original book of “The Making of an Economist” only 800 Ph.Ds and 2,000 MAs in economics are awarded each year in the U.S..
It’s not surprising, since it’s one of the hardest fields to understand.
Sample Chapter:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8438.html
Congratulations. Hopefully UCSD has a deep bench because, sadly, you’ve lost a lot of world class econometrics talent over the last couple of years. I’m thinking of Clive Granger and more recently Hal White.
2slugbaits: No question that students of Clive and Hal were a very important factor in that success.
Therefore, here is a follow-up research question.
If you take away Clive Granger and Hal White’s students, in what position of the ranking would UCSD be?
Manfred: Remember we are talking about the median here.
manfred, interesting question but may not be a fair question. you assume the school exists without those two research groups-and no replacement group existed. by eliminating those 2 groups you are penalizing ucsd twice-eliminating great talent and reducing the size of the program without providing a replacement. what i mean is if those two groups had not existed, would a couple of other great groups had evolved instead?
PeakTrader wrote:
“It’s not surprising, since it’s one of the hardest fields to understand.”
Economics is simple. Moms and dads understand it and exercise it every day. It only becomes hard to understand when academics try to teach illogical theories.
Ricardo: Moms and dads do not have the power to tax nor ability to create money. Since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the money economy has over time gotten exceedingly detached from the natural physical economy. Detached from reality you might say. Credit and debt are integral to this. This makes economics a vastly complex subject. Were this a natural economy, the wisdom of management experts like Peter Drucker and productivity experts like Robert Gordon would be our guides to optimal growth. As today’s economy is instead a very unnatural one – the essence of that unnaturalness being the aforementioned disconnect – economists are looked to for advice. The disconnect is most evident at Panic and Bubble peaks – Panic of 1907, the far worse 1920s bubble, the lesser postwar bubbles of Fed-caused inflation then tamped down by that self-same Fed through yield curve inversions, credit crunches, and monetary tightening, and the Credit Bubble of the 2000s. Deficit-enabled government accompanies, interacts with, and feeds back perniciously on the money disconnect. The mistakes are revealed in the wakes – the Great Depression years and wake of the Great Recession we are in now. Unraveling the skein of this story and pointing the way back to a natural economy with sound money is what’s called for. Moms and dads are clueless to this complexity. Meaning ordinary voters are. And they are not the only ones.
This is not to naysay your observation about economics teaching illogic. But let’s take a moment and parse that. Most logical arguments of economics are pretty much right on. Yet we find ourselves at the endpoint of all their well-meaning advice – the present moment – with a manifestly poor economy that arguably is only going to get worse in coming decades. Where then is the problem? For that we must look to the center of the web. That is, to the initial premise of the mainstream paradigm. If it is upside down and wrong, so will be much of what follows. I leave it for you as a valuable exercise to identify and succinctly define that premise.
I’ve never heard of an econ academic teach an illogical theory.
Why do you want “moms and dads” to live and work in suboptimal economic conditions to a much larger extent?
There has been tremendous progress in economics, including in macro, micro, international trade, central banking, etc..
You can praise economists later.
Ricardo, the popular voice.
Is the Ricardo handle used to suggest Ricardian Equivalence? Anyway, I don’t think Ricardo understands the Treasury market very well, nor the flexibility (and immense power) of a monetary sovereign. Might I suggest a very clear headed explanation written by banker and former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Frank N. Newman “Freedom from National Debt.” Mom and Pop could understand this, and it’s only 89 pages long! Newman has been Chairman and CEO of Bankers Trust; Chief Financial Officer of both BankAmerica Corp. and Wells Fargo; CEO of Shenzhen Development Bank (China); and was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Aware, Treasury’s highest honor. His is a practical, in the trenches, perspective.
Jim,
Congratulations, well done.
Missed you on the last white water trips.
Clint