My Advice to Tyler on the Econ Ph.D.: Lighten Up

July 13, 2006

My Advice to Tyler on the Econ Ph.D.: Lighten Up

Tyler is once again handing out career advice to potential Ph.D. students in economics. I stand by my previous claim (here and here) that he makes some good points, but is far too negative.

Where does Tyler go wrong? His standard of "success" is far too high. He barely considers himself successful. But I say there's no shame in doing 10% as well as he's done. Compared to your next best option, that could easily be a very sweet life. If you want to live the life of the mind, econ's the place to do it. As I said a little while back:

Overall, the econ Ph.D. is such a good deal that I would seriously advise people who want to do research in political science, psychology, or even history to just get an econ Ph.D. and become a professor of economics. Even if you have to research topics you don't care about until you get tenure (and you probably won't have to), you could easily earn tenure in econ before you would have defended your dissertation in another field.