Economic is a very broad field. But this might be the most chic way of being an economist in 2025: a designer.
Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products
Susan Athey | American Economic Review, April 2025
This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to each stage of the innovation process. Key contributions include identifying problems, developing theoretical frameworks, translating goals into measurable outcomes, analyzing historical data, and estimating counterfactual outcomes. The paper also surveys recently developed tools designed to address challenges in designing and analyzing data from complex experiments.
A first pass gives me the impression that economists are picking up the lost details from our usual tendency for generaling as much as we can—sounds operational management to me. I remember reading Susan Athey’s papers for the first time and mistaken her as a computer scientist… and being awed by her YouTube video about economist’s career outside academia, in tech (see the blog “two economists walk into a bar”).
I think I will revisit it someday and have new perspectives on this.