Like many things in life, "it depends."

The market for new PhDs in economics is wonderful and getting better.

I haven't looked at figures in over 7 years, but the general trend has been there are ~900 PhDs minted per year, about 100-200 academic tenure track jobs, and about 1200 industry jobs (that number has probably increased now that NABE, not just AEA/ASSA, handles recruitment conference at-scale for the techonomics/industry roles). I expect the PhD minting is approximately the same and the economists roles have boomed because economists make for great data scientists, with some reasonable onboarding and tech training.

It's a good market, generally.

Or said another way, economists are making a rational decision and choosing the highest paying industry, technology, which happens to be HQ'd in Silicon Valley.

Or maybe businesses see more of a need for causal reasoning, with or without a controlled, randomized experiment. If you're making a decision, you need to have some model of how your decision affects outcomes you care about. But that model needs to be causal--predictive models can be useful starting points but may also lead you astray due to spurious correlations.

Economists are trained to approach these kinds of problems methodically, so it makes total sense to me that there is high demand.