>>114430451. People don't respect you. Everything an Economist says is inherently politicized so people automatically distrust your opinion and treat you as a charlatan or a financial shill. Even if you busted your ass studying statistics, macroecon, econometrics, and so on, your opinion is ultimately distrusted and people don't care for empirical facts. It's not seen as a science. You are not respected the way a physicist, an astronomer or a biologist is.
2. The jobs may pay well but they are all soul-crushing and mind-numbing. Unless you are already rich, your choices are to be stuck in an office like a hamster on a wheel, making money for someone else. Or to do research for a thinktank or a university and get used by politicians to push their bullshit, effectively becoming a shill (even if unintentionally, people WILL abuse your work to push for their own barely related bullshit).
3. People see you as a self-absorbed materialist scumbag only out to make money. It doesn't help that Economists purely interested in the research side of it are few and far in between. Many do conform to this stereotype.
I wish I had become a pilot or a biologist as I wanted as a kid.
