Book review: The Economist's Craft

There is a plethora of advice available for economics PhD students and job market candidates available. For example, Chris Blattman has an excellent series of posts of advice for PhD students (not just in economics), John Cochrane provides writing tips for PhD students, Susan Athey has tips for applying to graduate school, and Pam Jakiela provides advice on the academic job market for PhD graduates. Chris Roth and David Schindler provide a bunch of links to similar sources of advice.

Despite the obvious value in all of these sources of advice, they tend to share a couple of things in common. First, with few exceptions they are very much targeted at students in top PhD programmes. Second, they are generally focused on students within the US PhD ecosystem. That makes them of limited value to students who are not in top US PhD programmes, like my students.

So, I was expecting to be disappointing in reading Michael Weisbach's 2021 book The Economist's Craft. However, I couldn't have been more wrong in my expectations. The subtitle of the book is "An introduction to research, publishing, and professional development", and it provides exactly that. Moreover, it does it in such a way that it would provide significant value for PhD students (in economics and similar disciplines) even if they are not in US PhD programmes, and not in the top programmes either. Weisbach is himself a top scholar in financial economics, and much of the advice is targeted at top students, but the underlying ideas are the same for students at all levels.

The book is organised around the PhD journey and beyond, starting with advice on choosing a research topic, writing a draft, presenting research and getting it published, and how to become a successful academic, including managing an academic career. These are the key aspects of what Weisbach refers to as the craft of an academic:

Much of what academics do can best be described as a craft. Like other kinds of craftmanship, scholarly work is a combination of time-tested techniques, strategic thinking, ethics, and imagination. These things can be learned, but they tend to be acquired in a haphazard manner.

The book does an excellent job of exposing the tacit knowledge of academia - the things that academic economists otherwise learn 'on the job', from the PhD through to the end of their academic career. The content is rich in advice, and there is far too much for me to repeat or even summarise here. Indeed, I am sure that there is something valuable in this book for every PhD student in economics, and I truly wish that this book had been around when I was just embarking on my PhD journey. In fact, I may well make an effort to give my future PhD students a copy of this book when they reach confirmed enrolment (after the first three six months of their PhD journey, when their full research proposal is complete and has been approved).

If you are a current PhD student, a future PhD student, an early career researcher newly graduated with a PhD, or a seasoned academic who supervises PhD students, then this book is a must-read. Highly recommended!