It can always get worse
Dearest lessons you've learnt so far (inside and outside academia)?
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People want sympathy, not advice.
Your ability to change others is extremely limited. Your best bet is just to listen to them -- ask questions from time to time, but don't say much.So, you are completely useless.
My department was filled with profs like you when I was a student. Thank God for the younger hires who came in that would actually give you feedback.
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I agree with this sentiment. But the business world has similar problems. No industry is free from these problems because they all involve human nature and incentives.
Academia follows a caste system. Merit matters, but surprisingly little. Coming from HRM matters a lot more unfortunately.
This.
I'm sure all (most?) of us were wide-eyed and bushy-tailed when we contemplated a PhD and ultimately a career in academia. However, I've become more and more jaded these days with the whole business of economics academia.
If I could summarize one issue I see with economics academia, is precisely that merit and scholastic talents have fairly little correlation with publication success. This is the exact antithesis of how I viewed the whole business of studying and publishing when I was an undergrad. For instance:
- Theoretical work these days is basically nonexistent. Hardcore theoretical economics is nothing more than a circle jerk. Applied theoretical models serve as an appendix to empirical papers. The proof arguments of these models (especially the applied ones) are really no more than just reams of undergrad Calculus I and high school algebra. Worse, often times economists just don't even care about whether the math proofs are correct or not (existence? uniqueness? well-posedness? who cares!?)
- Empirical work these days is largely a function of networking. Effectively, once you have a unique data set (of course through networking with the correct friends at high places), you can reg y x, robust on all sorts of funny things until you find the "right" economic question and story to tell. Does anyone care whether your data matches the assumption behind the 'robust' variance-covariance estimator? Nope. Does anybody care about using econometric models other than OLS and its friends? Nope. Beyond technical issues, how fundamental are the economic questions being answered? Do we really need to rigorously quantify that giving mosquito nets to people are useful? Or that CEO dicksize has something to do with corporate innovation? It seems like the 5-6 years of PhD training is just one long session on reading the Stata manual, and lessons on writing fairy tales.
Overall, I just feel so jaded and even scammed into this profession. I'd wished that my econ professors back in the days were harsh to me in telling me the "realities" of academia, instead of just preaching the higher calling of learning (which, I don't think exists in econ).