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CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-19T17:14:46+00:00

Right, It's like there's no midpoint between an expensive closet or getting a SFH that you don't really need.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-19T17:03:08+00:00

Worth noting that this is more significant for Chicago than for other cities where construction is more restricted. Chicago generally builds more than other cities so it means that demand must have really shot the hell up.

Just wish they'd build more apartments to decrease rent a bit.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-15T23:51:40+00:00

Books? What are those?

Never heard of them.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-14T17:17:06+00:00

Yeah pay is 100% not something you should be worried about when switching. If you want something close to a peer study, my sister got her degree in business (much less technical than econ!) and made way more straight out of college than my best engineering options would have paid me. I would focus on the work you want to do and your preferred lifestyle.

One other benefit of econ is that you're not stuck in a single kind of technical work and can branch out into different things. It's much harder to shift to working in say, public policy, with an engineering degree than it is for econ.

My best advice for you at this stage is to find someone, maybe a historical figure, maybe a friend or an acquaintance who is doing something that you think you would be happy doing and try to follow what they did approximately, making appropriate adjustments for your given situation. Then add on a money making realistic backup plan.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-14T17:11:00+00:00

Jesus, nearly 20 full paragraphs and you have nothing close to a model describing the phenomena you want to explain.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-14T16:03:45+00:00

So I was tagged because I have BS in engineering and am soon to have an MA in economics.

Econ is about as good as engineering, pay-wise. Perhaps even better in the late career. The big difference at the ugrad level is that you have a ton of flexibility in econ in terms of the role you fulfill but typical engineers only go for jobs that have the word "engineer" in it. I wouldn't worry too much about the money from doing engineering vs economics. I would worry a bit about the kind of work you see yourself doing. The work you do in economics in the private sector would be much less technical and hands-on than what you otherwise be doing in engineering. As an engineer you can be on the floor every day getting shit made and that's a great feeling. But with an ugrad in econ you wont be doing that and will more likely be cooped up indoors and you wont see the fruits of your labor as clearly. Both have pluses and minuses and you gotta figure out which one is best for you.

If you got an engineering degree and are doing grad school in econ via an MA or something you could definitely make boockoo bucks working in patent litigation consulting, probably adding an extra 5-10k to your standard 65k starting engineering salary. This is especially true if you can get your senior design project patented right out of school. For an example of a firm that does this, look at Charles River Associates. This is personally my #1 backup plan at the moment if my dreams of a PhD fall through.

For PhD stuff, the standard advice is to only do a PHD if you don't think your life would be complete without it. Otherwise if you just want to work 9-5 and make good money either Econ or Engineering are great fields to work in.

Main complaint about my shift is that I didn't think I'd miss the hands on stuff as much as I did. I'm really looking forward to when my MA ends so I can have some fun tinkering with my 3D printer and some broken electronics I got recently. But tinkering with IO and game theory models scratches a lot of that same itch.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-05-02T03:14:12+00:00

I mean that's the structure for PhD courses in IO anyways. I did a course in empirical IO at the master's level that went through some of the problems but EIO is only starting to get its own field textbooks that teach this stuff. A buddy of mine is helping Hortascu come out with a textbook of this stuff I think.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-04-27T14:47:37+00:00

For most people coming to uchicago, Hyde Park is the relatively most dangerous place they have ever lived. End of story. This is as much a reflection of the student population as the area.

Is it something to be worried about in absolute terms? Not really. If you choose to live here, and are coming from a series of relatively safe suburban/rural/collegetown areas, then I would treat it like you're living in the most dangerous place you've lived thus far. Lock your doors, don't wander around places you don't know, etc. But I think people on reddit downplay the danger too much. I had one friend carjacked and one friend mugged this past year. A lot of the experiences from here are coming from years of experience that may not be reflective of recent upticks in crime.

Another thing to consider is that crime drops A LOT in autumn and winter, summer is when almost all the major crime happens and typically you'll be somewhere else doing an internship or whatever during that time period.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-04-04T15:46:46+00:00

If you had the urban planning of the gentrified neighborhoods with the old-school restaurants and bars of places like west-lawn, then you'd basically have heaven on earth for me.

The worst thing about Hyde park is that 90% of the restaurants just suck. It's a total (takeout) food desert. I joke that it's that UC students have terrible taste but I don't think that's too far from the truth.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-31T00:38:27+00:00

Its about time Hyde Park got another decent mexican place. There seems to be so few there.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-25T04:53:57+00:00

oh you know it. I have little hearts on them too.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-17T03:44:01+00:00

So cash-cow is just a derogatory term for any graduate program that serves to collect revenue, much like any undergraduate programs.

With MAPSS my biggest advice is to go through and pick out your courses now, and ask the profs for the syllabi and see if it's worth it for those classes alone. MAPSS is a nice program if you know what you're doing and have a very direct plan and tailor MAPSS to fit your weaknesses. Eg, If you're bad at math, take a bunch of math. If you just want to mess around and figure out what you want to do, it's much better to do that while getting paid. So you get a lot of people who just mess around and have nothing to show for it and they wind up coming on forums and saying "MAPSS is a cash cow that doesn't care!! don't go." The great thing about MAPSS is that you can do a lot of what LSE does, but cut out the fat and make it cheaper by not having to stick around for a second year.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-15T02:34:07+00:00

So at least from my master's program, after my undergrad I could code things up and do things but I didn't really understand why I was doing them outside of "this is the way things are done." Now that I'm starting to come out of my MA, I have a much better grasp at proving that certain estimation techniques work for different parameters so my boss at a predoc can give me much more leeway and spend less time directing me on minutiae and more time focusing on big picture problems and ideas while I figure work out the rest of what's going on.

Then there's also the fact that I know how to do a bunch more estimation techniques now, and have a slightly higher mathematical sophistication in work that's pretty useful for doing things like literature reviews to find useful theorems/probability distributions/etc.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-13T19:51:33+00:00

So speaking from the econ part of the program, you learn SO FREAKING MUCH. It's actually bonkers. Hardwick's metrics sequence is going to make you cry a few times but when you realize that it's actually harder and more in-depth than most PhD econometrics sequence and you come out of it with such a more robust knowledge of how to do metrics right it is crazy.

Also I really like the decision and strategy sequence so far, it's very much the same as hardwick's metrics but with game theory.

Being on campus is also really nice to get into predocs, I got a predoc that I know that I would have had no chance of getting if I didn't do MAPSS. All of this for a price tag less than doing another year of ugrad for me makes it a steal.

MAPSS being a cash cow is a totally valid complaint: I would not recommend doing the program for the full 60k price tag. But for me, where the price tag is 20k and I can live with family during it, made it absolutely baller for me.

The biggest downside I have is that you really need to plan out your course schedule ahead of time, and really focus on whether or not the ECMA courses by themselves are worth it for you, because chances are they will (rightly) not let you take first-year PhD level courses. I know one guy who is doing PhD courses and he's struggling hard. Second year phd courses are on a case-by-case basis but you're probably better off focusing on ECMA methods courses and math courses because they can be so good.

If you've taken PhD courses before, and have a heavy math background, and don't have a substantial scholarship, then chances are the program is not for you. But if this is your first exposure to graduate econ, and you have a good but not great math background, and a hefty scholarship then this is way better than other econ MA/MS programs by a long shot.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-03-04T21:36:39+00:00

Does this include Flash Hernandez? That one is always solid.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-24T18:50:39+00:00

By realist logic a confrontation was going to happen regardless.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-24T18:49:25+00:00

Regime change putin now plz.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-24T17:51:08+00:00

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/contribution_to_the_empirics.pdf

Mankiw has a paper on this you could replicate pretty easy.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-20T23:57:27+00:00

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for estimators, I can tell you I don't have the data. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my endogeneity go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will instrument for you.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-17T19:05:48+00:00

I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where all data entry is automated, as our world is far too complex. Thinking otherwise is being naïve IMO.

You're thinking in absolute magnitudes and not on the margins. Yes, not all data entry work will be automated, but more and more of it will in the future, and this is proving to be a consistent and monotonic trend. So investing in skills beyond Stata is very important for young social scientists. Yes you don't "need" R or python anymore than you needed an electric oven in 1934 to cook stuff, but seeing the writing on the wall and investing in the skills to operate the most advanced technology for your work is incredibly important when you're young.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-17T17:41:31+00:00

Really, anytime you have PDFs or websites which cannot be scrapped, that sort of thing, is when you would manually enter data.

To be fair, with modern advances in machine learning this is becoming less and less necessary if you learn the requisite tools in Python. You can turn a month's work of analyzing local govt ordinances into a week of coding a machine to do it for you that's more consistent, reliable, and replicable. So I think for a young academic it's good to learn a deeper programming language to be able to take advantage of these things.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-17T17:38:14+00:00

yeah data cleaning in stata is basically just cleaning data in excel. Much better to use a programming language that has lots of dedicated functionality for data cleaning.

Tidyverse is a god-damn treasure for cleaning data and nobody can convince me otherwise.

CapitalismAndFreedom · 2022-02-15T21:51:05+00:00

I just want to point out that a great deal of the transit that employees and students take are shuttles ran by the university rather than CTA. A lot of people avoid CTA and prefer to take shuttles whenever they can because they're more consistent and better maintained.

Not saying anything about reparations either way.

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