Economist in 1776: The Wealth of Nations

There is no license to practice and no protected title — anyone may be called an economist — yet the working hierarchy is among the most credential-bound of any profession. Research posts at central banks, the IMF or a university effectively require a PhD that takes five to six years after a mathematics-heavy degree, and a single annual hiring ritual, the job market, decides where most new doctorates in the field begin.

This page follows the trade from Xenophon's estate manual and Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah through Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes to the econometricians and randomistas of the present. It covers how people actually enter the field today, what the daily work looks like inside a central bank or a faculty, who reached the top of the profession and how, and how much of the job AI can realistically absorb.

What does an economist actually do all day? Three broad tracks share the title: academics who research and teach, policy economists at central banks, ministries and bodies like the IMF, and private-sector economists at banks, consultancies and tech firms. The daily work is similar everywhere — cleaning data, estimating models, writing, and explaining the results to people who must act on them.