EXPOSED
The daily work of a median economist — cleaning datasets, running regressions and time-series models, writing literature reviews, producing forecast memos and chart-heavy briefs — sits squarely in the zone where LLMs plus statistical tooling already produce usable first drafts. What resists is causal identification judgment: choosing the instrument, defending the counterfactual, deciding which model failure matters, and putting your name on a forecast or damages estimate that a court, a central bank committee, or a CFO will act on. There is no license, so the moat is reputation and accountability rather than regulation, and it is thinner for the many economists doing routine industry analysis than for those testifying or advising policy.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Pulling BLS/Census/Compustat series, coding a fixed-effects or VAR specification in Stata/R, drafting the literature review and the CPI-outlook memo are now first-draftable by machine, and an 8 rather than a 4 reflects that the identification step — arguing why your instrument is exogenous, why the pre-trends hold, why the 2020 structural break invalidates the pre-pandemic elasticity — still has to be reasoned by a person who will be cross-examined on it.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The job is a laptop, a data extract, and a seminar room; the only physical duty is standing at a whiteboard or a hearing podium, which is why this is 1 and not 0.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no economist license, no exam, no board that can strike you off — a 3 rather than 0 only because expert-witness work runs through Daubert admissibility and federal disclosure rules that attach your name and CV to the damages calculation.
Some relationship component. A 10 fits the split in the occupation: the Fed regional director, the chief economist a CFO calls before a pricing decision, and the retained damages expert are hired as named individuals, while the bulk of industry and consulting economists deliver forecast tables and sector notes under an institution's masthead that clients would accept from whoever filled the seat.
Meaningful discretion. You choose the counterfactual, set the discount rate and the horizon, decide whether to strip an outlier quarter, and defend a number that becomes a rate vote, a merger remedy, or a nine-figure damages award — high stakes with genuine ambiguity, held below 14 because the model, the data vintage, and the peer-review or committee process absorb much of the blame when the forecast misses.
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