Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 15, 2023: interesting tweets

Jan 17, 2023

Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.

Massive negative TFP shock for newsletter writing this week, thanks to the shutdown that Joshua Gans describes here:

Joshua Gans @joshgans

Twitter shutting off its API to other apps without warning is unconscionable. Having never used the main Twitter app, it is impossible to replicate my use-flow that I had in Tweetbots. I now get why some people didn’t think moving to Mastodon was a problem.

As always, submissions welcome, if things are missing from the newsletter. Still a lot of juicy content below, though!

First-year macro

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

I just heard that 1st year PhD students in Econ at MIT no longer need to take a full year of macro. This should be a wakeup call for macro, lest this turn into a new trend. Some (perhaps controversial) thoughts. 1/

^prompted lots of discussion. Specifically: “you can skip 2 of the 14 ‘core’ courses. Doesn’t have to be macro” (more)

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

I think this is actually an amazing feature of economics, and should continue. There are huge returns to the cohesive disciplinary identity that this fosters.

Peter Hull @instrumenthull

I don't have anything smart to say about what macro stuff people should learn but man it's strange that there's usually only a single curriculum for all econ PhD students in the first year, regardless of research interests

^correlationally, it’s interesting that more unified fields seem more successful (e.g. econ vs. psychology). Of course causality also goes the other direction, but

Pontus Rendahl @pontus_rendahl

One thing that I notice amongst my non-macro colleagues (and sometime even the macro ones 😱) is how ingrained partial equilibrium reasoning is. Just things like Ricardian equivalence etc is not well understood, or doesn’t come naturally https://t.co/SOd1fVccC3

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

Ryan Decker @UpdatedPriors

People are talking about dropping macro classes. But this week's big policy discussion involved simple extrapolation of micro empirical estimates to aggregate quantities.

Joachim Voth @joachim_voth

@JonSteinsson Tbh Jon, almost all of those arguments could be made for having compulsory echist in the first year, too…

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

@joachim_voth At Berkeley we do. :)

^also, in particular, how about IO methods?

Pierfrancesco Mei @PierfrancescMei

@JonSteinsson Great thread, thank you! A few thoughts. I think the structure of 1st year syllabi in many schools still reflect a time when students started grad school with less tools than now. The focus was on techniques. 1/n

Rudi Bachmann @BachmannRudi

. @tylercowen is in the pro macro in first year camp but advises: “That all said, I would make macro sequences “more practical,” more about economic growth, more about economic history, and less about dynamic programming than is often currently the case.”

Marginal Revolution @MargRev

Why I think graduate programs should keep macro in the first-year sequence https://t.co/hh5YwTM9V9

Emily Nix @EmilyNix100

Very thoughtful thread. My controversial opinion: a) I eventually came to appreciate macro-labor after 1st-year core. So room for improvement to be more relevant across fields, but... b) Macro/micro shouldn't be required over labor/other equally important fields. [1/3]

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

This discussion also all comes in the aftermath of a discussion (also prompted by Steinsson) on gender diversity in macro:

Kevin Bryan @Afinetheorem

The ratio here is crazy, but the cause is less evident. I pointed out this pattern in a paper in Econ Inquiry (kevinbryanecon.com/YoungStars.pdf) a few years ago, but there is a *huge* difference in field choice and in prep between US/Can/UK/Australia candidates and the rest.

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

Macro is really awful on gender diversity. In top 10 econ departments there are 68 men in macro and only 7 women. Ratio is lower for juniors than seniors: 18 junior men, versus 1 junior woman.

Kevin Bryan @Afinetheorem

This year, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Chicago, Pton, Stanford, Cal, NW, Columbia, LSE, Penn have 54 candidates self-identified w/ macro as primary or secondary field. 14 are women. ONE is a US/Can/UK citizen, and even her main field and job market paper is structural labor.

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Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

Tfw you didn't take a core macroeconomics course