An Econ PhD student at the 20th ranked program who is working on stuff they are passionate about will have a better job market than one at MIT who's been doing nothing but phd-app-maxxing since undergrad.
People get confused by this because they don't observe *how* successful people came about their insane knowledge bases. It wasn't by relentlessly grinding away at stuff because they had to.
They look at Scott Kominers and say "if i grind and learn as much math as he did, i will be successful." You can't! *You* can't learn as much math as Kominers because he gets energized by configuration results for type ii lattices. You will burn out if you try to do it this way.
You cannot, through grind alone, learn more about the economics of cities than Glaeser, or about how to maximize a value function than Acemoglu.
Research careers are long. Most people give up and stop working on research (graph is share of elite PhD graduates with at least one publication in year X after graduation).
If you're starting a PhD, you're presumably doing it to have a successful 40-year research career. The number one factor in whether that happens is not which program you get into, it's whether you find a research angle that energizes you enough to push through the endless barriers an academic career throws in your path.
This is why a lot of the received wisdom around PhD applications is wrong. If you're 100% consumed by the predoc rat race already, it's going to be a long, hard road ahead.
Obv you still have to do admissions, you should study a lot for the GRE, sigh it seems like taking real analysis is probably worth it.
But spending time on the things that energize you about economics is a no-brainer, whether it's policy, or blogging, or whatever, you gotta do the things that light your fire and make you want to be on this road.
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The top Hermes integrations to give your agent superpowers:
1. Firecrawl
Basically web search built for agents.
It's better than the native Hermes web search because it gives you clean web data, so responses come back faster and uses fewer tokens.
I keep this on by default.
2. Browserbase
Gives Hermes browser access for actually interacting with sites.
Logging in, clicking buttons, booking stuff, anything that needs a real browser session.
Hermes will automatically pick between Firecrawl and Browserbase depending on what the task needs, so you just plug both in.
3. Google Workspace
Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets in one connector.
If Hermes can't read your inbox, see your calendar, or write to your docs, it can't really work for you. Plug this in first.
4. Reddit
The best signal you'll find on what people actually think about any product, niche, or problem (bc its real opinions from real users)
Amazing for market research.
5. YouTube transcripts
Pulls captions from any video. Long podcasts, tutorials, interviews etc become searchable notes in seconds.
Probably the highest-leverage research integration nobody plugs in.
6. Discord
I host my business in Discord, so this one's huge for me.
I plug Hermes into different channels and have it run specific workflows in each.
Example: I have a dedicated customer support channel where Hermes scans my email every morning for support tickets and drops them in organized.
7. GitHub
Code, issues, PRs. Turns Hermes into an actual engineering teammate.
Non-negotiable if you write code.
8. Stripe
Payments, customers, failed charges, refunds.
You can just ask "why did this customer churn" and get a real answer.
Also can't wait for this...Stripe is releasing agentic payments, so soon Hermes will be able to actually book stuff with your card.
9. Bland (or Twilio)
Gives Hermes a voice so it can place real phone calls (like booking reservations etc).
I love listening to the recordings haha
10. Apify
Pre-built scrapers for X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Maps, etc. The way to get X data without paying $5k/mo for the official API.
11. Readwise
Every highlight you've ever saved from books, articles, tweets, and podcasts, all queryable. Solves the "dead knowledge" problem.
12. Granola (or Fathom)
Searchable transcripts of every meeting you've had. Hermes can answer "what did that client say about pricing last month" instantly.
13. Obsidian
For Karpathy LLM wiki second-brain maxxing.
If I had to set up only 5, I'd do Firecrawl, Browserbase, Google Workspace, GitHub, and Obsidian.
Covers ~80% of what most people need.
I use Composio to add these in one click, makes setup basically zero effort instead of messing w technical stuff.
Anything I'm missing?? What's in your stack?
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