Hal Varian, has taken up the position of Chief Economist at Google, Inc. He believes the best and brightest of quantitative economists will drift towards jobs in marketing.
Varian: I think marketing is the new finance. In the 1960s and 1970s [we] got interesting data, and a lot of analytic fire power focused on that data; Bob Merton and Fischer Black, the whole team of people that developed modern finance. So we saw huge gains in understanding performance in the finance industry. I think marketing is in the same place: now we’re getting a lot of really good data, we have tools, we have methods, we have smart people working on it. So my view is the quants are going to move from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.
Read the full Wall Street Journal blog interview here.
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