From Research Magazine
By Tim Phillips
Professor Hal Varian, New York Times columnist and the man who has tortured hundreds of thousands of students with the standard microeconomics textbook, is on a break from his job in the department of economics [and the School of Information] at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s being a chief economist – at Google.
Google prides itself on its ability to tempt the best analytical thinkers to innovate from inside its offices, and on the intellectual rigour of its interviews. One recent interviewee was asked which university he graduated from. “I said Cambridge,” he says, “and the guy said ‘Yes, but which college?’”
Only a few years ago if a media company had a chief economist, you’d assume that its accountant had printed his own business cards. But as data threatens to either swamp us or set us free, the big ideas seem to be increasingly in the domain of the quants. Varian told the New York Times exactly this after his appointment: “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statistics. And I’m not kidding.”...