So, obviously, this topic and the questions you raise are near and dear to me, as I wrestle with them every day.

On the decline in economic intuition in the professionOn the decline in economic intuition in the profession

Mostly true. My own PhD education was more heavy on math and stat than on building verbal intuitions. These days, if I see a freshly minted PhD economist, I trust that they're pretty well geared up on mathematical modeling and statistical inference, but not necessarily on economic intuition. At a personal level, I didn't start building solid economic intuition until after PhD, when I was forced to teach introductory level economics.

That being said, the mathematical foundation helped me build my intuitive reasoning more confidently. As someone who gravitates towards math, I was never convinced by verbal economic reasoning. Knowing the underlying math gives me confidence in expressing the results verbally.

On the presence of random social science topics in topic journalsOn the presence of random social science topics in topic journals

A lot of econ journals these days are just "empirical social science". It's partly because the statistical tools we use would not be well understood by professors in the other social sciences. @Scorseby's post on the replication crisis being especially bad for econ is genuinely surprising. But I expect it has more to do with economists' willingness to apply our tools to more difficult statistical settings (unrepeatable events, observational macro data, etc.), and less to do with economists being less rigorous.

On hedge fund hiringOn hedge fund hiring

That's probably because automation and speed matters more than economic thinking. The ironic thing is, even an economist will tell you that. You can't get a return in the financial markets with economic reasoning because your economic reasoning is already priced in. However, if you can act faster than the next guy, you could front-run him. If you can do more volume, you can exploit super miniscule arbitrage opportunities.

In my opinion, this doesn't say anything good or bad about the profession as an academic field of study. A body of knowledge isn't measured by whether it can help Wall Street, but rather by how it contributes to the human understanding of how the world works. I think econ, for all its flaws, is still the single best subject for grounding yourself in the real world and understanding why things are happening.

On the future and on AIOn the future and on AI

Can AI replace the work of an economist? Certainly, some aspects of it. Indeed, economics departments around the country are seeing declines in enrollments, and it's a troubling trend for someone in my shoes. But are economists more threatened than any other knowledge-based profession? That isn't as clear.

I think about this a lot, of course, because it impacts me directly. But not being able to see the future, I am pretty much just "following the first derivative" right now. See where short-run optimization leads me, because the long-term picture seems too fuzzy. "Flying by the seat of my pants", if you will.