Should You Get a Ph.D in Economics? Not If You're Smart.
August 17, 2008
I could not disagree more profoundly with Professor Walter Block's recent Lewrockwell.com article that aims to persuade Austrian students to go ahead and pursue the Ph.D degree:
My disagreement stems from the picturesque view of the academy that he presents. Becoming a professor, one might conclude from reading the article, is as easy and enjoyable as joining the local tennis club. "So, young students: Should you get your Ph.D. and become a professor of economics?" Professor Block inquires, and to which he answers: "You betcha."
While I have no doubt whatsoever that it would be infinitely encouraging to study under wise and humorous professors such as Professor Block himself, this is not exactly the academic setting most of us young Austrians find ourselves in. On the contrary, most of us find ourselves in an academic atmosphere that is demeaning, hostile, and downright miserable. It is also an atmosphere in which cases like mine are all too common:
In other words, I think it is terribly important for young Austrians to enter graduate school with a clear sense of what they are getting themselves into, because I know I had no idea about the morass into which I was diving. If you survive the likely humiliation, marginalization, and mockery to earn the Ph.D as an Austrian, then you might get a chance to fight and schmooze for the following few years for the handful of jobs that are available. You might even win one of those positions, and have the opportunity to fight for several more years for tenure. By then you will have spent years choking down the worthless reading material fed in graduate school, to the point where you will be virtual expert in what can only be described as empiricist drivel.
I find it hard to believe that young Austrians can be served in any way by studying the standard fare of graduate school. The best Austrian minds would be wasting their precious gifts and time studying the most fashionable intellectual garbage of the day. Lesser minds would find themselves in an intellectual climate that sets them up for selling-out, or falling victim to the siren song of the most fashionable theories of the day. Either way, this would appear to be a lose-lose situation.
Austrians don't aim to install people in high-ranking political office, or to waste our precious resources groveling at the feet of those who are in office, because democratic politics and electioneering leads to selling-out and unconscionable compromise. Why is this not also true of the attempt to place Austrians in the current socialized educational system?
And, what can we say about the prospects of young Ph.D students in the current global economic environment? Suffice it to say, that with the rapid drying up of student loans, coupled with the mind-boggling price of a graduate education today, that it would be imprudent at best to blow massive amounts of money right now in the hope that you will be able to find a professorship. This will be all the more true as the global recession worsens and state tax revenues consequently decline (and state university funding declines concommitantly), which will result in a scaling back of the number of positions available in the future for newly minted Ph.D's.
My answer to Professor Block's question "So, young students: Should you get your Ph.D. and become a professor of economics?" would be:
"Sure, if you're masochistic, don't care about money, and don't care about finding a job, once the recession worsens."