Can vouch that as an undergrad at Reed about fifteen years ago, I watched this very drama play out on campus. I came in watching the tail end of a second failed faculty search for an Economics professor where Reed tried to maintain equal faculty pay across all disciplines, and after receiving feedback from the candidates that declined the position who said they were offered more $$ elsewhere, they began a third search with a substantially higher salary offer, much to the immense and vocal displeasure of several of my professors in the Sciences (and I imagine other disciplines as well…).
It doesn’t take an economist to understand that not paying a competitive wage = no workers (or poor quality workers). Economists have more options than sociologists so universities need to pay them more to retain them.
I remember hearing about something similar at Reed a few years ago, when their brand-new Computer Science department had a hard time finding and retaining professors because Reed wanted to keep the CS profs' salaries close to those for other fields.
This also happens with engineering professors - good engineers have lots of well-paying opportunities outside of academia, so if they don't offer higher salaries, universities will have trouble finding enough *competent* people to do the job.
I think it's very weird for sociologists or liberal arts professors to fixate on economics professors' salaries when lots of other fields get higher average & median salaries. The argument (see https://twitter.com/JessicaCalarco/status/1704894737172627659 for example) that it's all about economists' government positions and status seems very odd to me when you look at all the other disciplines that also get paid more. I don't think "accountant" is a super prestigious title--the field is (unfairly) a shorthand for a boring, soulless job--but professors of accounting make substantially more than most economics professors.
Some of the responses and alternative explanations sound more like cope than a serious attempt at explaining wage differentials, which is also slightly odd because I don't think most sociologists secretly wish they were working at Amazon or an investment bank, so "economists have outside options at <insert evil firm here>" seems like it would satisfy a lot of people's egos, but I guess not in the way they wanted?
"you have to take more math classes (which Americans hate)"
Rather than a "compensating differential", why not just view math talent as scarce. That is, it's not that people need to get paid to endure dull classes, it's that there are fewer people making it through the classes and hence a supply shortage and higher prices.
I think you hit the nail on the head, but I want to add another level. That is not to say that all sociologists lack quantitative skills. The truth is probably more that nearly all economists have these skills, while only some sociologists do.
I used to do some hiring for a job class that required the applicants to be data savvy. I actually hired several sociologists, and they were often superior to economists because the job also required linking the data with emerging trends and that needed someone who could also work qualitatively. That said, I was always nervous when hiring a sociologist because their data skills were so hit and miss. The same cannot be said for economists. They were much more uniformly data savvy.
In many jobs the costs of making a bad hire (compared to acceptable hire) are much higher than the benefits of making an excellent hire. For this reason, I suspect that some of the reason economists have a salary premium in the private sector (which bleeds over to the academia) has more to do with quality control in terms of quantitative skills as opposed to absolutely being better. An econ degree is just a better signal that you are competent in terms of data.
This is a quite interesting column. But I think on the sociologist side of the argument there may be something to elite perspective or prejudice. Economists get paid more than sociologists or English professors because those in charge believe they add more value. They may be right or wrong.
I can add a personal story. I began a career as an archivist in the mid 1970's. After about a decade I switched to corporate records management and in the last decade of my career(I retired about 6 years ago) corporate records management mostly functioned as ediscovery support. My salary shot upward way beyond what I ever expected to earn. This mostly related to panic surrounding e-discovery and corporations and often law firms being unprepared to address (see https://cloudnine.com/ediscoverydaily/case-law/ediscovery-history-a-look-back-at-zubulake/)
The panic drove salaries upward. My key skill was not really a command of IT needed to meet ediscovery requirements but to know just enough of the legal and IT world to act as a translator between folks who had great difficulty understanding one another. By the end of my career I was in the same job classification as attorneys. It was quite a ride.
The ability to translate between groups is often more valuable than being an expert in either skill. I just finished a 35 year career as an engineer. Engineering is a well paid field, but it is full of people who can only communicate with other engineers. Those people top out in salary fairly early, and are usually the first to be let go in a downturn. My career success was much more due to my ability to explain complex ideas to the hourly workers who were actually running the chemical plants I worked in, and to interpret the behavior of the production equipment that they were describing, but did not have the vocabulary to explain at a technical level, than any of the technical work I did.
I spent a good part of my working life with attorneys and engineers. They do not talk the same language. Attorney requirements are based on a standard of reasonableness given the totality of circumstances. IT always had questions of how to opetatonalize legal requirements. They found a reasonableness standard ridiculous. What the hell does that mean they would ask me
On the other side I became friends with an engineer who was having issues with his wife. He suggested that their relationship needed a work breakdown analysis so the could see obstacles to the critical path creating communication problems. To put it mildly she did not find this idea useful and he was rather surprised by her reaction.
Wow are people still reading Samuelson? That's what I read in college a half century ago? Of course if value is a function of human actions and humans allow emotions to govern their actions then of course value is subjective.
My impression is that the field is largely unfalsifiable ideological garbage that can be summed up as “everything my pet victims do is the result of something ‘systemic’, no you’re not allowed to consider if they bring their conditions upon themselves”.
If by smarter you mean more capable of disguising policy that self-evidently favors rich people into plausible models that appear neutral, but have no basis in reality or contain impossible simplifying assumptions and leveraging the use of said models to get more money from the oligarchy, than sure, smart.
I'd bet the truth is that you know just enough math to think your smarter than everyone else, when, at best you have a minor comprehension of statistics, and you were deliberately misled into thinking you understand calculus. (Using difference equations when you should be integrating over time) https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/im-not-discreet-and-neither-is-time
And at times the entire field has been completely incapable of using basic algebra, for instance the basic algebra of double entry book keeping could have easily disproved fractional reserve banking / financial intermediation banking, which Obama relied on heavily to justify bailing out Wall Street and intentionally maximizing the numbers of foreclosures on poor people. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477
From the perspective of a non-scientist in either field, I view Economists as those studying the monetary value/implications of society's choices, and sociologists as merely concerning themselves with the personal or group results of those choices. Sociologists to me are the lesser value as their 'product' has no obvious measurable enhancements to society, whereas an economist may produce actual recommendations for greater prosperity - and in our highly materialistic society we want measurable & monetarily beneficial ideas ! IOW I care much less what a sociologist may say than what an economist may say ! Sorry sociologists !
The sort of people who pursue economics, engineering and accounting PhDs have the option to take a lot of high paying non-academic job opportunities instead.
To attract good candidates for the PhD programs they need to pay high salaries, and to keep them they need to pay good salaries. There are lots of economics PhDs working on Wall Street, in supranational institutions, think tanks, government agencies, etc at very high salaries.
For too many universities "good" PhD candidates are the ones who can attract corporate money for special projects. Not candidates who will be good teachers. Some fairly sleezy interests influenced universities to whore out their econ profs to hype dribble-down and other fallacious "theories" without foundation.
You do know you sound pretty materialistic here, right? You're straight-up saying that money is more important than people! I'm not an economist or a sociologist, but I believe both fields of study are valuable. There is much more to human society than the filthy lucre, you know.
That's pretty much the sociology trap. It's too theory laden to have much practical use in commercial or public policy applications. Sociology does teach valuable skills, like analytical and synthetic thinking, and interpreting statistics. Those jobs exist, but they have to be paired with career-relevant courses. Sociologists would make great money as Wall Street investment analysts, in advertising and marketing, but a sociology minor would go a lot farther and make more money than a major.
That is scientific explanation, anything else is (more or less fantastic) literature. Now, some sociologists and other social scientists do the same, so they are “honorary economists”, the rest are outside mainstream science, because the core of science is reduction.
They seem somewhat close, though, but it could still be explained by economics prof candidates having better outside options. Econ prof candidates tend to be experts in a subject matter many people/firms care about (econ) for obvious reasons. Stats profs have the quantitative toolset but may need to learn more about a field people care about. And econ requires both quant skills and a lot of writing/communication. Stats mostly requires the first. And the demand for econ profs in colleges is bigger than the demand for stats profs (though that may change with the emergence of data science).
The demand-side explanation is pretty compelling. Take a look at what medical school and law school professors make. Higher-paying non-academic alternatives are substantially greater for economists than sociologists.
It is really silly to make this so theoretical. The answer is that economists get paid a lot more outside of academia and thus are hard to recruit because of large demand. Same for engineers, business school professors, doctors, etc. Sociologists, historians, and English lit PhDs have very few other options, and most pay less, not more. So the only demand is created by academia itself, and academia produces more graduates in these fields than positions for them to take.
People choose to pursue certain fields for a variety of factors, some personal. When I was thirteen my mother gave me a book entitled Mathematics from the Time-Life Science Series. I fell in love. I found my calling. I am amazed that I sometimes meet people who believe that I hate math as much as they do and that I became a mathematician only because I thought it would lead to a lucrative career (or to meet men).
I’d say supply for sociology prof jobs might start off near horizontal at a fairly high number and then kink up (supply Dems d curve for liberal arts academia more like a “T” than an “X”.)The fundamental issue is that econ profs can get real jobs and sociology profs can’t. I know people who would gladly take that sociology professor job for $50k just for the prestige and the ability to indoctrinate.
LOL yes, you do. I mean quite literally you have to be an idiot to not see that Amazon is a monopoly that regularly engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior to achieve market dominance and is now leveraging that to make life miserable for almost everyone that has anything to do with them to scrape out a few more dollars. Who do you think facilitated that? https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
Which is easy to do because econ is a mixture of pseudoscience, "common sense," and post-hoc rationalizations. Mainstream econ, as far as I can tell still teaches fractional reserve banking. It was championed by the best and the brightest at least during the Obama admin, where he gave very moving speeches about about it to justify bailing out Wall Street and intentionally maximising the number of foreclosures on poor people. Despite anyone with any experience in double entry bookkeeping or anyone willing to go take a look at banking software (or books earlier) being able to easily disprove this,.
Or take Nordhaus, winner of the faux Nobelin 2018 for his groundbreaking work arguing that 4C temperature rise is economically optimal, based on not one single bit of evidence besides his hilariously stupid assertions and highly curated opinions from people without any relevant knowledge on the subject. He only cites one climate scientists, and then proceeds to pretend that citation says the exact opposite of what does say. For this, he was rewarded a seat on the IPCC where he can discourage any hasty action to decrease fossil fuel use.. 4C is almost certainly human extinction and at the very least civilization collapse.. https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_appallingly_bad_neoclassical_economics_of_clim-1.pdf
Kalecki called it back in 1943 (where he predicted ZIRP and NIRP) we have the means and ability to ensure everyone who wants a job has one, but the rich and the powerful will never accept that situation and use economists to undermine full employment as a legitimate policy objective.
This is an interesting column but on the sociologists side there is something about elite perspectives or prejudices. Perhaps economists are paid more because those at the top think they add more value and deserve more. Here is something from my personal experience. I began a career as an archivist in the mid 1970s and within a decade switched to corporate records management. By the last decade of my career (retired in 2017) I mostly functioned in an ediscovery support function. My salary zoomed upward as management panicked over the inability of internal and external legal teams to comply with legal requirements applicable to information stored on computers -- see (https://cloudnine.com/ediscoverydaily/case-law/ediscovery-history-a-look-back-at-zubulake/
By the time I retired I was in the same job classification as attorneys. This was considerably more money than I ever expected to earn and I see more as a matter of luck than anything else.
My super power really wasnt understanding tools to harvest and preserve information required by courts and regulators as much as to serve as a translator between IT and Legal who had great difficulty communicating with one another.
The opportunity cost is higher for the economists. An economist can go work in the private sector more easily, which pays more, and that’s why universities have to attract them with higher salaries
I've worked for a couple of Fortune 500 and one Furtune 100 corporation and had the "opportunity" to experience C's, VPs, and Directors with that dubious academic background. Always, it was a disappointing and, at best, humorous experience. The Peter Principle is constantly demonstrated by econ grads in corporate life.
Can vouch that as an undergrad at Reed about fifteen years ago, I watched this very drama play out on campus. I came in watching the tail end of a second failed faculty search for an Economics professor where Reed tried to maintain equal faculty pay across all disciplines, and after receiving feedback from the candidates that declined the position who said they were offered more $$ elsewhere, they began a third search with a substantially higher salary offer, much to the immense and vocal displeasure of several of my professors in the Sciences (and I imagine other disciplines as well…).
It doesn’t take an economist to understand that not paying a competitive wage = no workers (or poor quality workers). Economists have more options than sociologists so universities need to pay them more to retain them.
I remember hearing about something similar at Reed a few years ago, when their brand-new Computer Science department had a hard time finding and retaining professors because Reed wanted to keep the CS profs' salaries close to those for other fields.
This also happens with engineering professors - good engineers have lots of well-paying opportunities outside of academia, so if they don't offer higher salaries, universities will have trouble finding enough *competent* people to do the job.
I think it's very weird for sociologists or liberal arts professors to fixate on economics professors' salaries when lots of other fields get higher average & median salaries. The argument (see https://twitter.com/JessicaCalarco/status/1704894737172627659 for example) that it's all about economists' government positions and status seems very odd to me when you look at all the other disciplines that also get paid more. I don't think "accountant" is a super prestigious title--the field is (unfairly) a shorthand for a boring, soulless job--but professors of accounting make substantially more than most economics professors.
Some of the responses and alternative explanations sound more like cope than a serious attempt at explaining wage differentials, which is also slightly odd because I don't think most sociologists secretly wish they were working at Amazon or an investment bank, so "economists have outside options at <insert evil firm here>" seems like it would satisfy a lot of people's egos, but I guess not in the way they wanted?
Professors seem directly comparable; and economics and sociology are both, from bird's eye view, social sciences, unlike, say, engineering.
"you have to take more math classes (which Americans hate)"
Rather than a "compensating differential", why not just view math talent as scarce. That is, it's not that people need to get paid to endure dull classes, it's that there are fewer people making it through the classes and hence a supply shortage and higher prices.
I think you hit the nail on the head, but I want to add another level. That is not to say that all sociologists lack quantitative skills. The truth is probably more that nearly all economists have these skills, while only some sociologists do.
I used to do some hiring for a job class that required the applicants to be data savvy. I actually hired several sociologists, and they were often superior to economists because the job also required linking the data with emerging trends and that needed someone who could also work qualitatively. That said, I was always nervous when hiring a sociologist because their data skills were so hit and miss. The same cannot be said for economists. They were much more uniformly data savvy.
In many jobs the costs of making a bad hire (compared to acceptable hire) are much higher than the benefits of making an excellent hire. For this reason, I suspect that some of the reason economists have a salary premium in the private sector (which bleeds over to the academia) has more to do with quality control in terms of quantitative skills as opposed to absolutely being better. An econ degree is just a better signal that you are competent in terms of data.
This is a quite interesting column. But I think on the sociologist side of the argument there may be something to elite perspective or prejudice. Economists get paid more than sociologists or English professors because those in charge believe they add more value. They may be right or wrong.
I can add a personal story. I began a career as an archivist in the mid 1970's. After about a decade I switched to corporate records management and in the last decade of my career(I retired about 6 years ago) corporate records management mostly functioned as ediscovery support. My salary shot upward way beyond what I ever expected to earn. This mostly related to panic surrounding e-discovery and corporations and often law firms being unprepared to address (see https://cloudnine.com/ediscoverydaily/case-law/ediscovery-history-a-look-back-at-zubulake/)
The panic drove salaries upward. My key skill was not really a command of IT needed to meet ediscovery requirements but to know just enough of the legal and IT world to act as a translator between folks who had great difficulty understanding one another. By the end of my career I was in the same job classification as attorneys. It was quite a ride.
The ability to translate between groups is often more valuable than being an expert in either skill. I just finished a 35 year career as an engineer. Engineering is a well paid field, but it is full of people who can only communicate with other engineers. Those people top out in salary fairly early, and are usually the first to be let go in a downturn. My career success was much more due to my ability to explain complex ideas to the hourly workers who were actually running the chemical plants I worked in, and to interpret the behavior of the production equipment that they were describing, but did not have the vocabulary to explain at a technical level, than any of the technical work I did.
I spent a good part of my working life with attorneys and engineers. They do not talk the same language. Attorney requirements are based on a standard of reasonableness given the totality of circumstances. IT always had questions of how to opetatonalize legal requirements. They found a reasonableness standard ridiculous. What the hell does that mean they would ask me
On the other side I became friends with an engineer who was having issues with his wife. He suggested that their relationship needed a work breakdown analysis so the could see obstacles to the critical path creating communication problems. To put it mildly she did not find this idea useful and he was rather surprised by her reaction.
According to Samuelson value is subjective.
Wow are people still reading Samuelson? That's what I read in college a half century ago? Of course if value is a function of human actions and humans allow emotions to govern their actions then of course value is subjective.
Because we economists are smarter than sociologists! sorry, a brief undergraduate flirtation with sociology has left me jaundiced about sociology.
My impression is that the field is largely unfalsifiable ideological garbage that can be summed up as “everything my pet victims do is the result of something ‘systemic’, no you’re not allowed to consider if they bring their conditions upon themselves”.
I think mostly that proves that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous.
If by smarter you mean more capable of disguising policy that self-evidently favors rich people into plausible models that appear neutral, but have no basis in reality or contain impossible simplifying assumptions and leveraging the use of said models to get more money from the oligarchy, than sure, smart.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/what-is-the-point-of-economics
https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/economics-and-the-way-the-world-works/
I'd bet the truth is that you know just enough math to think your smarter than everyone else, when, at best you have a minor comprehension of statistics, and you were deliberately misled into thinking you understand calculus. (Using difference equations when you should be integrating over time) https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/im-not-discreet-and-neither-is-time
And at times the entire field has been completely incapable of using basic algebra, for instance the basic algebra of double entry book keeping could have easily disproved fractional reserve banking / financial intermediation banking, which Obama relied on heavily to justify bailing out Wall Street and intentionally maximizing the numbers of foreclosures on poor people. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477
From the perspective of a non-scientist in either field, I view Economists as those studying the monetary value/implications of society's choices, and sociologists as merely concerning themselves with the personal or group results of those choices. Sociologists to me are the lesser value as their 'product' has no obvious measurable enhancements to society, whereas an economist may produce actual recommendations for greater prosperity - and in our highly materialistic society we want measurable & monetarily beneficial ideas ! IOW I care much less what a sociologist may say than what an economist may say ! Sorry sociologists !
The sort of people who pursue economics, engineering and accounting PhDs have the option to take a lot of high paying non-academic job opportunities instead.
To attract good candidates for the PhD programs they need to pay high salaries, and to keep them they need to pay good salaries. There are lots of economics PhDs working on Wall Street, in supranational institutions, think tanks, government agencies, etc at very high salaries.
For too many universities "good" PhD candidates are the ones who can attract corporate money for special projects. Not candidates who will be good teachers. Some fairly sleezy interests influenced universities to whore out their econ profs to hype dribble-down and other fallacious "theories" without foundation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/?sh=798df85d870e
I think you mean almost all universities. In all fields.
Liberal arts colleges still value teaching to some degree
You do know you sound pretty materialistic here, right? You're straight-up saying that money is more important than people! I'm not an economist or a sociologist, but I believe both fields of study are valuable. There is much more to human society than the filthy lucre, you know.
????
I’m saying that if you wish to hire good people you need to pay them a salary that is competitive with their other alternatives.
That is not controversial and has zero to do with materialism.
Plenty of good people are paid shit. Plenty of not-so-good people are overpaid. It's always a good idea to try not to do this.
TL/DR: Economics is seen as useful by the private sector, sociology isn't, thus, economists make more.
If sociologists want to make more money, produce something companies will pay for.
Same reason for any wage differential
That's pretty much the sociology trap. It's too theory laden to have much practical use in commercial or public policy applications. Sociology does teach valuable skills, like analytical and synthetic thinking, and interpreting statistics. Those jobs exist, but they have to be paired with career-relevant courses. Sociologists would make great money as Wall Street investment analysts, in advertising and marketing, but a sociology minor would go a lot farther and make more money than a major.
Too long. We, economists are reductionists. We try to generate social phenomena from individual level behaviour.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400842872/generative-social-science
That is scientific explanation, anything else is (more or less fantastic) literature. Now, some sociologists and other social scientists do the same, so they are “honorary economists”, the rest are outside mainstream science, because the core of science is reduction.
Now do the one where you explain why economics professors earn more than statistics professors.
They seem somewhat close, though, but it could still be explained by economics prof candidates having better outside options. Econ prof candidates tend to be experts in a subject matter many people/firms care about (econ) for obvious reasons. Stats profs have the quantitative toolset but may need to learn more about a field people care about. And econ requires both quant skills and a lot of writing/communication. Stats mostly requires the first. And the demand for econ profs in colleges is bigger than the demand for stats profs (though that may change with the emergence of data science).
The demand-side explanation is pretty compelling. Take a look at what medical school and law school professors make. Higher-paying non-academic alternatives are substantially greater for economists than sociologists.
It is really silly to make this so theoretical. The answer is that economists get paid a lot more outside of academia and thus are hard to recruit because of large demand. Same for engineers, business school professors, doctors, etc. Sociologists, historians, and English lit PhDs have very few other options, and most pay less, not more. So the only demand is created by academia itself, and academia produces more graduates in these fields than positions for them to take.
People choose to pursue certain fields for a variety of factors, some personal. When I was thirteen my mother gave me a book entitled Mathematics from the Time-Life Science Series. I fell in love. I found my calling. I am amazed that I sometimes meet people who believe that I hate math as much as they do and that I became a mathematician only because I thought it would lead to a lucrative career (or to meet men).
I’d say supply for sociology prof jobs might start off near horizontal at a fairly high number and then kink up (supply Dems d curve for liberal arts academia more like a “T” than an “X”.)The fundamental issue is that econ profs can get real jobs and sociology profs can’t. I know people who would gladly take that sociology professor job for $50k just for the prestige and the ability to indoctrinate.
Or just possibly there is a large market for telling rich people what they want to hear.
You don't get hired by amazon to tell them what they want to hear.
Don't be so dismissive without backing it up. It's not helpful.
LOL yes, you do. I mean quite literally you have to be an idiot to not see that Amazon is a monopoly that regularly engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior to achieve market dominance and is now leveraging that to make life miserable for almost everyone that has anything to do with them to scrape out a few more dollars. Who do you think facilitated that? https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
Which is easy to do because econ is a mixture of pseudoscience, "common sense," and post-hoc rationalizations. Mainstream econ, as far as I can tell still teaches fractional reserve banking. It was championed by the best and the brightest at least during the Obama admin, where he gave very moving speeches about about it to justify bailing out Wall Street and intentionally maximising the number of foreclosures on poor people. Despite anyone with any experience in double entry bookkeeping or anyone willing to go take a look at banking software (or books earlier) being able to easily disprove this,.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477
Or take Nordhaus, winner of the faux Nobelin 2018 for his groundbreaking work arguing that 4C temperature rise is economically optimal, based on not one single bit of evidence besides his hilariously stupid assertions and highly curated opinions from people without any relevant knowledge on the subject. He only cites one climate scientists, and then proceeds to pretend that citation says the exact opposite of what does say. For this, he was rewarded a seat on the IPCC where he can discourage any hasty action to decrease fossil fuel use.. 4C is almost certainly human extinction and at the very least civilization collapse.. https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_appallingly_bad_neoclassical_economics_of_clim-1.pdf
Even people at the top of the profession have been calling out econ as fundamentally unserious. https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf
Kalecki called it back in 1943 (where he predicted ZIRP and NIRP) we have the means and ability to ensure everyone who wants a job has one, but the rich and the powerful will never accept that situation and use economists to undermine full employment as a legitimate policy objective.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/kalecki-on-the-political-obstacles-to-achieving-full-employment.html
This is an interesting column but on the sociologists side there is something about elite perspectives or prejudices. Perhaps economists are paid more because those at the top think they add more value and deserve more. Here is something from my personal experience. I began a career as an archivist in the mid 1970s and within a decade switched to corporate records management. By the last decade of my career (retired in 2017) I mostly functioned in an ediscovery support function. My salary zoomed upward as management panicked over the inability of internal and external legal teams to comply with legal requirements applicable to information stored on computers -- see (https://cloudnine.com/ediscoverydaily/case-law/ediscovery-history-a-look-back-at-zubulake/
By the time I retired I was in the same job classification as attorneys. This was considerably more money than I ever expected to earn and I see more as a matter of luck than anything else.
My super power really wasnt understanding tools to harvest and preserve information required by courts and regulators as much as to serve as a translator between IT and Legal who had great difficulty communicating with one another.
The opportunity cost is higher for the economists. An economist can go work in the private sector more easily, which pays more, and that’s why universities have to attract them with higher salaries
I've worked for a couple of Fortune 500 and one Furtune 100 corporation and had the "opportunity" to experience C's, VPs, and Directors with that dubious academic background. Always, it was a disappointing and, at best, humorous experience. The Peter Principle is constantly demonstrated by econ grads in corporate life.