From The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution:

The day before drafting this paragraph, I blogged a paper on confidence gaps between men and women. It was a paper written by economists, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, the profession’s number one journal. Is this actually sociology, or personality or social psychology, or part of some gender studies field? No one in the economics profession cares to discuss that anymore. It is not that there is a dogmatic attachment to what used to be called “economic imperialism,” rather the view is that if the paper is good enough … it is good enough to publish. I also recently read a paper on using cell phone data to estimate how many people actually were attending church. Freakonomics guru Steve Levitt wrote and published well-known papers on the choice of baby names and corruption in Sumo wrestling.

The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs. That is the real (dare I say marginal?) contribution of “empirical economics today,” not marginalism per se, though of course contemporary models typically are consistent with marginalist reasoning…

One modest sign of all these changes is how many advisors, when speaking to individuals considering economics graduate school, recommend math or even computer science as a possible background undergraduate major. While most are still undergraduate economics majors, if only because that is where their interest in economics came from, no one seems to mind if they are not. These days, a background in mathematics or computer science is at least as useful for the graduate work to come. Once you get to graduate school, you will have to learn plenty of math and programming anyway, so why not start off in those fields? The prevailing attitude is that the economics you can figure out along the way, or for some topics you may not need to know much of it at all. How complicated are all those economic principles anyway? General skills of apprenticeship and plain ol’ hard work are growing in importance too, as top graduate programs increasingly want their incoming students to have done a “predoc” with an accomplished researcher somewhere along the way.

That is from the chapter on the future of economics in a world with advanced AI.

Addendum: On The Marginal Revolution book, I would most of all like to thank Jeff Holmes for the great job he did on the project, all of the actual work (other than the writing) is from him.  He is also producer of CWT, I owe much to him!