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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economist | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:09:41.732649+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== By country ==== Economics graduates are employable in varying degrees depending on the regional economic scenario and labour market conditions at the time for a given country. Apart from the specific understanding of the subject, employers value the skills of numeracy and analysis, the ability to communicate and the capacity to grasp broad issues which the graduates acquire at the university or college. Whilst only a few economics graduates may be expected to become professional economists, many find it a base for entry into a career in finance – including accounting, insurance, tax and banking, or management. A number of economics graduates from around the world have been successful in obtaining employment in a variety of major national and international firms in the financial and commercial sectors, and in manufacturing, retailing and IT, as well as in the public sector – for example, in the health and education sectors, or in government and politics. Some graduates go on to undertake postgraduate studies, either in economics, research, teacher training or further qualifications in specialist areas.
===== Brazil ===== Unlike most nations, the economist profession in Brazil is regulated by law; specifically, Law No. 1,411, of August 13, 1951. The professional designation of an economist, according to said law, is exclusive to those who graduated with a Bachelor of Economics degree in Brazil.
===== United States ===== According to the United States Department of Labor, there were about 15,000 non-academic economists in the United States in 2008, with a median salary of roughly $83,000, and the top ten percent earning more than $147,040 annually. Nearly 135 colleges and universities grant around 900 new Ph.D.s every year. Incomes are highest for those in the private sector, followed by the federal government, with academia paying the lowest incomes. As of January 2013, PayScale.com showed Ph.D. economists' salary ranges as follows: all Ph.D. economists, $61,000 to $160,000; Ph.D. corporate economists, $71,000 to $207,000; economics full professors, $89,000 to $137,000; economics associate professors, $59,000 to $156,000, and economics assistant professors, $72,000 to $100,000.
===== United Kingdom ===== The largest single professional grouping of economists in the UK are the more than 3500 members of the Government Economic Service. Analysis of destination surveys for economics graduates from a number of selected top schools of economics in the United Kingdom (ranging from Newcastle University to the London School of Economics), shows nearly 80 percent in employment six months after graduation – with a wide range of roles and employers, including regional, national and international organisations, across many sectors.
== Sociology and public perception ==
=== Status among the social sciences ===
==== Boundaries and insularity ==== Some authors argue that economics occupies a distinctive and often dominant position among the social sciences, often perceived (both inside and outside the discipline) as more scientific and formalized than its sister disciplines. This perceived superiority is visible inside the profession itself, but is also reinforced from the outside: economists earn significantly higher salaries than other social scientists, both in academia and on the wider labour market. They also have their own major prize: the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Economics”), and they occupy a role in the making of public policy that no other social science enjoys. These features are contributing to disciplinary “insularity” and to a self-reinforcing dynamic of confidence and perceived legitimacy. One explanation for this insularity, would be the path economics took after the Second World War: it largely set aside its moral and discursive dimensions and moved closer to the formalism of natural sciences such as physics, grounding itself in mathematics and abstract models. This formalist trajectory set economics apart from other social sciences at both epistemological and methodological levels, as economists seek to derive behaviour from theory through such models. At the end of the twentieth century, an “empirical revolution” pushed economists to work on topics traditionally associated with sociology, without substantially reducing their insularity: Economists continue to cite each other overwhelmingly, whereas other social sciences cite one another more frequently and also cite economists. Moreover, disciplinary boundaries also reflect status relations: since economists tend to view their own discipline as more scientific than other social sciences, they may be less inclined to rely on those fields. In a Bourdieusian perspective, they describe economists as a dominant group and argue that interdisciplinary work is often not regarded as particularly valuable within the discipline.
==== Internal hierarchy and journals ==== Another distinctive feature of the field, which reinforces its special status, is an internal hierarchy that adds itself to this external one. Economics is structured around a set of methods and tools largely defined as the right ones by the top of the discipline and then diffused to the rest of the field. This hierarchy can hide or marginalize internal controversies and contribute to economists speaking with one voice, reinforcing their insularity, credibility and legitimacy in the public arena. This structure can be described as overseen by a disciplinary elite made up of prestigious departments, leading journals, and the scholars who move from the former to publish in the latter. The resulting hierarchy sets norms and standards that extend to hiring and the job market, one of the most organized and standardized in the social sciences. A Post-war shifts can be observed in leading economics journals: a phase of intense mathematization and reliance on statistics, alongside sharply declining citation links to sociology, political science and law. From the 1980s to the 2000s, a further shift in this landscape can be observed: mathematics, which provided a methodological anchor, retreated as the main external point of reference, and finance journal citations rose in prominence in citation patterns, becoming one of the principal branches of reference within the discipline.
=== Economists in public policy and technocracy ===