[zissou]

Finally, some basic labor market economics. Just like how employers have restrictions on the number of people they are able to hire, employees have restrictions on the number of hours they are able to work. Or for the sake of this example, whether they are able to be a data scientist or not. The aspiring data scientists' restrictions all have to do with their ability. And as you point out, the cost of human capital investment in this area is very, very high.

One doesn't need to be an econometric theorist to be a data scientist, but I feel that far too few hackers truly appreciate the elegance of some standard, say, 1st year economics grad school econometric models. Things like panel models, IVs, 2SLS, GMM and even just taking seriously the basic assumptions of OLS regression -- there's a reason most econometrics classes (grad or undergrad) always start with the ~5 assumptions of OLS regression.

TL;DR Economists would make great data scientists (and better economists) if only they understood and appreciated computer science more.