The source is REPEC, here is the list.  I believe if I were starting out today, I would end up as a law professor, not an economist, though perhaps I would do economics in a legal guise.

I might add that number of citations and influence are, in my view, diverging.  Steve Levitt has had a huge influence on economics, an influence which is underrepresented in his number of citations.  You won’t cite him just because you’ve been inspired by the kind of paper he writes, and how many other economics papers are there on girls’ names or soccer kicks?  Furthermore the more that economic research fragments, and becomes less theoretical, the more that the most cited papers are likely to be macroeconomics, as this list illustrates.  At least macro papers will still share a common topic.

Hat tip to Economic Logic.

Megan McArdle writes:

As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently.

Here is more, and I hereby take Megan to be a robot pessimist. 

It is a revealing question to ask which sectors a person considers technologically stagnant.  Baumol claimed it is the performing arts, but TV and the internet have belied this; it is true that those media are not *live* performance but that is substituting objective aesthetic judgment for what consumers really care about.  People love Dexter, whether or not there is someone actually in the box.  For stagnant sectors, I will nominate:

1. Haircuts, you might as well get them in Mexico

2. Automobiles (given the overall extent of technological progress, are they really so much better than in 1957?), although the $2500 car may change this

3. Spicy food, it seems best in relatively poor countries

I’m not yet sure about teaching.  It seems to be a candidate but people are learning an awful lot from blogs these days; don’t fixate on delivering the old service the way we always have.

Your picks?  Keep in mind that something has to be stagnant in relative terms, to date it sure isn’t computer chips but they raise the bar for the average.  I expect pharmaceuticals and webcams to make it much easier to care for old people, but only on a per year of life basis; the number of years lived and thus total cost will rise too.

From the Wilson Quarterly of this January, here is one excerpt:

For better or worse, microborrowing often entails a kind of ­bait ­and ­switch. The borrower claims that the money is for a business, but uses it for other purposes. In effect, the cash allows a poor entrepreneur to maintain her business without having to sacrifice the life or education of her child. In that sense, the money is for the business, but most of all it is for the child. Such ­life­saving uses for the funds are obviously desirable, but it is also a sad reality that many microcredit loans help borrowers to survive or tread water more than they help them get ahead. This sounds unglamorous and even disappointing, but the ­alternative–­such as no doctor’s visit for a child or no school for a ­year–­is much ­worse.

The piece attempts to redress many myths of micro-credit.  For instance it is often claimed that micro-credit doesn’t involve collateral, but that isn’t quite true.  The borrowing is done in small groups, and if you don’t pay your share the neighbors come and take away your TV set.  In reality micro-credit takes the collateral-seizing function away from the bank and puts it in the hands of our neighbors, thereby increasing loan repayment rates.

My favorite part of the piece is this:

Sometimes microcredit leads to more savings rather than more debt. That sounds paradoxical, but borrowing in one asset can be a path toward (more efficient) saving in other ­assets.

…Westerners typically save in the form of money or ­money-­denominated assets such as stocks and bonds. But in poor communities, money is often an ineffective medium for savings; if you want to know how much net saving is going on, don’t look at money. Banks may be a ­day­long bus ride away or may be plagued, as in Ghana, by fraud. A cash hoard kept at home can be lost, stolen, taken by the taxman, damaged by floods, or even eaten by rats. It creates other kinds of problems as well. Needy friends and relatives knock on the door and ask for aid. In small communities it is often very hard, even impossible, to say no, especially if you have the cash on ­hand.

…Under these kinds of conditions, a cow (or a goat or pig) is a much better medium for saving. It is sturdier than paper money. Friends and relatives can’t ask for small pieces of it. If you own a cow, it yields milk, it can plow the fields, it produces dung that can be used as fuel or fertilizer, and in a pinch it can be slaughtered and turned into saleable ­meat or simply eaten. With a small loan, people in rural areas can buy that cow and use cash that might otherwise be diverted to less useful purposes to pay back the microcredit institution. So even when microcredit looks like indebtedness, savings are going up rather than down.

In other words, read Keynes’s chapter 17, go long on animals (liquidity premium exceeds carrying costs), go short on money (carrying costs exceed liquidity premium, at least in poor countries), and increase your future expected net wealth.