On Sat, 9 May 1998, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> >
> > Ask yourself, why can't econ Ph.D.s get jobs? Basically, "market" for econ
> > majors/students is "signaling" a profound excess supply. I'd like to believe
> > that this "rationalization" of the workforce is due to its own intellectual
> > bankruptcy - but I doubt it.
>
> Jason, what deficiences in economic departments led to the establishment
> of business departments? At Berekeley, I sat in on an international trade
> course in the business dept taught by a terribly lucid economist Robert
> Feenstra.More inerested in how to use anti-dumping laws or induce the
> govt to negotiate VERs, those students who were returning from the
> business world looked on in amusement at the different arguments about
> producer and consumer surplus which are created and lost through free
> trade or the problems posed by the Leontiev paradox to H-O
> theorems or the factor-price theorem. Then Feenstra, who was a great
> teacher, would pose the problem of greater income inequality (though he
> tended not to dwell on the fact that skill premium is based on steeper
> wage falls for the so-called unskilled--what a premium); Feenstra, a
> rather honest guy, would suggest that economists didn't really know what
> the causes were and that skill-biased technological change, which seemed
> to be synomous with computers but was so ill-defined that I began to feel
> sorry for economists, was really a cop out to explain what the economists
> didn't understand.It seemed to me that such human capital explanations
> take hold only because skilled (ha, ha) professionals understand their
> greater income as a sign of moral superiority (especially vis a vis
> blacks, one suspects), as their reward for having had the foresight to
> have deferred present consumption to enjoy their standing in the worlds.
> Senior adapted to the world of the petty bourgeoisie.
>
> Of all this nitty gritty about income inequality and its causes, the
> business students seemed not to care one whit. But then when Feenstra said
> that businesses must outsource as much as possible to protect whatever
> domestic employment base they had, interest perked up. Now he had their
> attention. There were also nods of assent that unemployment insurance was
> a waste as workers didn't use it to relocate to booming regions. I must
> say that I left with the impression that economics and business schools
> are something of a sick joke. I hadn't been so creeped out since I had
> been a Ph.D. student in Government at Harvard.
> Best,
> Rakesh
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