I was reminded by my PI about the deaths of two prominent economists at the top of their careers, Alan Krueger and Martin Weitzman, and she made me reflect on why I want to be an economist in the first place.
Obviously I am not saying economics or academia caused their deaths. We don’t know that. But both had essentially reached the summit of what people here spend so much time worrying about: Princeton, Harvard, famous papers, influence, etc. And still, none of that makes someone immune from being human.
It made me think about how much we micro-benchmark ourselves in economics. US T10, T20, predoc prestige, adviser prestige, placements, journals, who is “ahead” at 25. I do it too. However, at some point useful career information seems to turn into a very strange way of measuring your own worth.
Foucault talks in The Birth of Biopolitics about the neoliberal subject becoming an “entrepreneur of himself”. (ECON)Academia sometimes feels like a perfect example. A BSc/MSc becomes an investment, predoc a signal, you choose supervisors based on potential reputational capital, papers become assets, and colleagues become benchmarks. Eventually you are constantly marking yourself to market.
And nobody even has to force us to do it. We do it to ourselves.
I just want to remind people that there is not one ladder. I think academic Reddit forgets this constantly. You can do a PhD and become a professor, but you can also go to a central bank, government, OECD, World Bank, consulting, industry, finance, tech, think tanks, research institutes, etc. You can leave academia. You can come back. You can choose a “worse” department because you love the supervisor, city or life there.
None of this means don’t be ambitious. I want good programmes and good research opportunities too. However, ambition should serve the life you want, not become the life itself.
I doubt most of us became interested in economics because we wanted to be a “T20 economist”. Something actually interested us: inequality, development, labour, climate, macro, political economy, whatever. Maybe it is worth remembering that person before every interesting question becomes “can this publish well?” and every colleague becomes someone to rank yourself against.
There will always be someone younger, somewhere better ranked, with another publication or a more famous adviser. Hence if your satisfaction depends entirely on relative position, you have designed a game with no finish line.
And if someone takes a less prestigious job because they like the city, want children, want to be near their partner, want time for friends and books, or simply want to enjoy their life, maybe they did not misunderstand the optimisation problem.
TL;DR: stop micro-benchmarking yourself. There is no single economics ladder, prestige is not intellectual worth, and a PhD opens plenty of doors outside academia. Remember why you wanted to do economics before everything became a ranking.
