Economist of the day

Apparently, economists show up on the list of the most sleep-deprived occupations.

Catherine Rampell doesn’t know why they’re there:

Personally, I would love to know why economists are on this list. Economists in academia, at least,  seem to have flexible schedules that should let them get lots of sleep. Maybe a lot of them are grad students scrambling to publish, publish, publish. Or maybe there are a lot of folks like Larry Summers who prefer allocating more hours for work.

Maybe the economists have guilty consciences for all the damage they’ve inflicted on the world? Nah, that can’t be it.

Anyone else have a good explanation?

Update

Here’s an explanation from a reader.

For left economists, the lack of sleep is living with and constantly fretting about all the “real apparitions” of the incredible suffering that you know to be the truth about modern life, and certainly for very large numbers of people worldwide living with the individual (as opposed to communal) burden of having to face each day with the fundamental uncertainty of their livelihoods under capitalism and other systems of class exploitation. For mainstreamers, it’s possibly more that they miss sleep due to the many, many late hours drinking with anyone who will listen to them, and writing their next prize paper or academic lecture on the backs of cocktail napkins.

Having now a live and ongoing experience with “home health aides,” I can only say that I would vote or fight (and I do mean fight) for any law or custom in our society that would reverse at the very least the pay given to economists (myself included) and home health aides.  The amount of good that such aides do, and their fundamental decency (ethics, anyone?), so far outstrips that of the vast number of people in our profession that a reversal, on the basis of any notion of justice which is not “market-based” and/or basically not racist or classist, should be mandated. I don’t know if this would give home health aides more sleep at night, and economists even less, but it’s one place to start.