Hal Varian tells the kids what to study

Q: Your job sounds extremely interesting. What jobs would you recommend to a young person with an interest, and maybe a bachelors degree, in economics?

A: If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on.

Comments

[Max]

Study plumbing.

[JorgXMcKie]

A fairly sizable number of my students credit getting their first or current job to either budget or stats courses. Even the ones who didn't like the courses have admitted being able to talk seriously about either gave them a leg up.

[cactus]

I've worked with a lot of people who had taken statistics courses in college or even graduate school but who simply have no idea what to do when faced with actual numbers. I used to wonder how that could be, but I recently discovered that there are people who teach statistics and yet have difficulty accepting that growth rates in 1961, 1962 and 1963 were not affected by changes made to the tax law in 1964.

[JorgXMcKie]

That's okay, I took symbolic logic, and I still find it amazing that people who claim to know better still cherry pick data, disregard context, use descriptives to try to drive policy, and misconstrue (deliberately and repeatedly) statements made by others in order to avoid actual defense of their claims. But it happens, boy, does it happen.