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41 sats \ 13 replies \ @Undisciplined 9 Nov \ parent \ on: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy denies that 5-day office mandate is a 'backdoor layoff' news
You know that in our profession there's a pretty strong correlation between status obsession and technical competence. My guess is that there would be a permanent reduction in competence.
Who cares, though? It's not like most of that work is valuable.
Good point. At the lower levels, recent grad and early/mid career levels, I would definitely agree. Not as sure about leadership levels though.
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I only know a few older government economists and their competence level is frankly an embarrassment to the profession.
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I'm just catching back up here.
A government economists seems like an oxymoron and I'm sure it is.
I think the best government employees are Park Rangers. And guess where they have to work?
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Most economists work for the government. It's not ideal.
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It's ideal for them because they can't get a job doing anything else. It's welfare.
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That's really not true. They just can't get jobs that are nearly so easy.
Economists actually have lots of job opportunities in the private sector, but we don't generally want them.
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Economists actually have lots of job opportunities in the private sector, but we don't generally want them
I think a lot of that has to do with socialization at grad school which sees academia as the only measure of success.
I had a number of my classmates go into private sector, mostly into data science in the tech industry, and I'm honestly kinda jealous of them.
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There's obviously a lot of crowding out, too. If universities were private and the government didn't have so many statistical agencies, then many of those jobs would be in the private sector.
Like Thomas Sowell is tenured and he's very valuable.
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We need more Thomas sowells and less Paul krugmans