Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Decline and Fall of Econometrics?

"Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY."
(Evelyn Waugh, 'Author's Note' in Decline and Fall, 1st ed., 1928)

I'm not sure that there's anything funny about the decline and fall of Econometrics, especially if you're an econometrician - that's if it were true, of course. But is it? Personally I don't think so.

Econometricians seem to be very much in demand. To take one example, if you take a look at the EconJobMarket site right now you'll see that over the past 6 months, and also in total since that site began, more jobs have been posted in the Econometrics category than in any other economics category (except for "Any Field").

BTW, don't be put off by the fact that there don't seem to have been very many jobs posted at all in the past 6 months - that period doesn't cover the annual recruitment season job posts. With that recruitment season  in mind, if you look back at last October's issue of JOE, you'll find that there were over 130 job postings in the "Mathematical & Quantitative Methods" (which is primarily Econometrics)category.

It will be interesting to see how the job numbers for econometricians stack up in JOE after this summer's break.

Imagine my alarm, then, when I obtained this chart while playing around the other day with Google Trends: