A Modest Proposal for Wannabe Humanities Profs

How do you know there is a disequilibrium in econ Ph.Ds?

This may sound snobbish, but are you *trying* to make refereeing journals more painful?? Why would you encourage more researchers of dubious skill to send more research of dubious quality through the refereeing process??

I think there's a simple answer: discipline police. Sure, maybe a a few people can get away with "the economics of whatever." But honestly, how many such people can there be? Wouldn't hiring committees balk at taking too many "economics of whatever" folks? Wouldn't journal editors limit the number of "whatever" papers and this make mobility and raises impossible? The discipline police would crack down.

If it comes to similar social sciences, you may have a point. I've read many econ papers that are more or less soc or poli sci papers with a few "du/dx=0" in them and an identification. And you do see these people in econ and other programs.

But would this work for a philosopher? Or someone who cares about poetry? Seems unlikely. Also, even if you could write about the "economoics of poetry," it would have to not be about the aesthetics and more about prices.

Yes, let us have more economics PhDs please. I don't see anything delusional about that. Then you can use your new educational credential to make broad philosophical arguments about how broad philosophical arguments are useless and we should just let the market decide.

Ouch aptly put Jesse.

"learn some math"

There's the rub. That's like a real subject that you can't BS your way through!

Perhaps if people learned something broadly useful for life in each of these disciplines it would help. It would also help if that knowledge could not be obtained elsewhere. I think that we school funders (reluctant as we may be) should always ask what is it that people do not know that if they knew it would have the most positive impact on their lives per effort learning it.

"You're too smart to go into business, my child."

Is this really the attitude of academia toward business?

The situation is worse for someone like me, with a Ph.D. in the humanities, who believes literally the opposite of everything everyone else in the humanities believes. Probably would have been a good idea to do the Ph.D. in economics thing. Except that when I actually looked into it, I was discouraged from it at every turn. In the meantime, I am attending conferences on spontaneous orders, colloquia on Hayek, and am being invited to summarize my work for a spontaneous orders in cognition journal. All good stuff, but one can't live on the pay.

So if anyone here knows of someone looking for a Ph.D. in the humanities who is an expert on spontaneous orders and other self-organizing, complex adaptive systems, let me know.

The Dismal Profession could certainly use the clear writing that could result.

However, the offsetting belief in fairy tales would reinforce the existing tendency.