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The Ph.D. has become a rather mediocre commodity in almost every field. Seldom do professors get master’s degrees anymore. They memorize a bunch of stuff as undergrads, get admission into a doctoral program, sprint in five years to a Ph.D. with a dissertation that some Principal Investor wanted to farm out to a novice, and then get treated as an expert.

Economics is probably the worst, since they can always find some crappy dataset and throw a barrage of “sexy” statistical tests at it and then it get published in a dubious R1-type journal that hardly anybody will ever read. Ask them about how the dataset was constructed, i.e., what unstated assumptions were made in its construction, and they start melting down into Spam in a suit (or dress). Most new economics Ph.D.s have no idea how to construct a logically consistent model of anything, much less test it.

And they are much, much, too specialized. I stopped going to conferences years ago, because even seasoned professors just “don’t know enough to know (about) what they don’t know.”

It gets worse every year.