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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Re: BLS, the stat agencies all lost a lot of people, but no RIFs or firing of probationaries so far to my knowledge.

A lot of people took DRP or VERA though, for a few reasons. A large cohort of people were close to retirement age. Loss of telework was also big, as many people had been mostly WFH before COVID, and Census in particular had been fully remote for nearly 5 years while their building was renovated. For BLS, a lot of people didn't want to change their commute to Suitland (Former HQ was next to Union Station).

Also, a bunch of senior leadership who deal with the Decennial Census left, presumably because they didn't want to go through a repeat of how the admin tried to politicize the 2020 Census.

The job market for statisticians and economists is OK, there are private sector employers that pay more money, and it's historically been easy for good people to pivot. The thing is, most people at the stat agencies don't really want those private sector jobs, they want to contribute to public statistics and knowledge. The other ways to do that (like academia or think tanks) are all hurting right now, and they depend heavily on stat agency data that might just go away if too many people leave. So people either left right away, or they are hunkered down and planning to ride it out.[/quote]

What private sector employers hire labor economists? I thought they mostly focused on macro/financial economists?[/quote]

Amazon and litigation consulting have a pretty long history of hiring labor economists. There's also general private sector demand, e.g., lots of corporate chief economist jobs don't require a specific field. And, there are random things like AI firms hiring labor economists to analyze the usage and impacts of their tech.

Private sector transitions have gotten a little harder over time though. Economists used to move into general "data science" jobs because there was a dearth of people with data analysis technical skills. Now there's a broader supply of people with those skills, so there's more competition for those jobs. Economists' specialty is causal inference, but lots of data science work cares only about prediction, not causality. Also, the typical economist is a self-taught programmer who's learned by reading problem sets and code from other self-taught programmers. That can make them uncompetitive for some types of roles against people with a stronger CS background.[/quote]

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