Post docs are not normative in economics academia and I don’t think they are in political science either. Psychology and Cognitive Science I’m sure do have post docs as the academic job market has fierce competition and I don’t think there’s much private sector demand for their skills.
At my FAANG job, we happily hired CogSci PhD’s, and I also worked with multiple political science PhDs who’d left or turned down postdocs. I’m unsure about any of the Econ PhDs that I worked with, but I strongly suspect you’re right as it did seem like they were drowning in job options relative to others (conditional on getting a FAANG job in the first place, I suppose).
