As an econ grad in part [double major Econ and IR] I can honestly state that no economist has ever predicted any economy. How do I know? Because if you KNEW which way the economy and the economic indexes would move, then you would be a billionaire since you could 'guess' which way the markets would move with certainty. Economics is a backward looking science -
Basically true. Though once, I knew a strange financial economist who seemed to have found a tiny inefficiency in certain financial markets that would allow one to make brief but huge arbitrage profits. One of the giant investment banks saw it and offered to pay him a gigantic sum if he would keep it secret for some brief period (six months, I think). He thought that would be counter to his role as an academic and published it immediately. (I'll readily admit that I would have taken the cash. My highly ethical classmates agreed that they would have taken the cash, too.)
I posted this elsewhere in response to an article about J.D. Vance’s “explanation” of high housing prices:
We economists don’t need lawyers miseducating the public about economic phenomena. That’s our job and we’re quite good at it.
(I’m an economist only by education and temperament; except for a very brief stint in academia I made my living doing something else.)
Regarding the devaluation of the original five Nobel categories: I read Jose Saramago’s BLINDNESS after he won his Nobel. That was the last time I used winning a Nobel as a criterion for choosing reading material.
Bob, you excoriated me for putting down economists in a previous post. I acknowledge that I was overly broad and your retort was justified. But economists so often do this. For those of us who don't read the economic literature (essentially all of us), the only view of economics we get is through politics. I guess it is because economics is essential to the fortunes of a politician. Science has the same problem (see COVID), but the scale is much smaller and many areas of science are hard to politicize. I guess we are dependent on people like you to make the points that you did here. Thank you!
If you try hard enough—and trust me, experts are trying really hard—there is almost nothing you can’t politicize.
At the very least you can make professorships and other rewards depend on expressed political allegiance. You know, like with diversity statements. Or what everyone knows about the tenure prospects of registered Republicans.
You’re welcome. And that, indeed, is why items like this letter are irritating. You’d be surprised how many areas of hard science get politicized. As Max Born explained in Experiment and Theory in Physics, the Nazis managed to politicize quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. (Jewish science, in their estimation). And, of course, any aspect of environmental science, climatology, virology, etc. etc. But yes, the problem is probably greater with economics. In college, I was one course short of a second major in Government, and yet I was not required to take a single course in economics. I decided later that that was a problem, and thus began my economics studies.
It is a pity, and likely to be consequential, that we now have two statist major parties instead of one. And sometimes a statist Libertarian Candidate.
I was just commenting on that to a friend. 10 years ago, the NYT Magazine asked, “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” If it ever did, it passed as thoroughly as the Etruscans or the Anasazi.
I remarked something like that not only did we have an unrepublican Republican candidate and an undemocratic Democratic candidate, we also had an unlibertarian Libertarian candidate, an unreformed Reform candidate, an un-American American Independent candidate, a militant Peace and Freedom candidate for unfreedom, and a things-white-people-like Green candidate.
The percentage is not important because it can be adjusted easily the problem is that rent control will destroy the rental market. As you related in your article. But maybe they will get it right this time because they really want to. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
As a teenager in Economics class I excelled at computer modeling to "Run the British Economy." I quickly achieved strong growth, low unemployment, and low inflation. I still recall that my first move was to boost the money supply by 38%. In the real world, my moves would have been highly problematic. I understood the model but also understand that it *was* a model, not reality.
The fact that economist with widely differing views have received the Nobel shows that you can't simply find the best real world policies by asking the Nobelists.
Great comments. Love the model vs reality knowledge as a teenager. And yes, Nobelists understand specific tools, not the entire edifice built with those tools.
I spent many years building relatively complicated Structural Equation Models. I soon discovered that if you have a lot of variables (some of my models had over 150 variables) and rather scant data (I once had 750 city data in a model with over 50 variables. That's really not enough data.), I could pretty much make the model do whatever I wanted, and it would be very difficult for anyone to know that. Fortunately, I have some tiny portion of ethics, and I refused efforts to get me to 'tweak' my results, but it cost me a couple of professional relationships.
Learning that made it very difficult for me to accept SEMs from anyone else.
I would disagree that no deserving economists has ever been overlooked. What about Joan Robinson? The Economics of Imperfect Competition has, to me, been a very useful addition to the canon. She was dead wrong about Mao and China, but her sins should not block out her successes. Others agree:
“The Nobel Factor analysis shows that if you ranked by the number of citations all Nobel Memorial Prize winners in economics, only ten winners would rank above her, the other seventy-one males rank below.
Robinson was repeatedly nominated for the prize. She was held in high esteem by the mainstream American economists, with whom she often clashed. She taught two future Nobel winners in economics: Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. Many people expected 1975 to be her year. Business Week said that she was “on everyone’s list for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics”. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences missed that opportunity, and alas, never regained it.
Robinson’s exclusion may also have been due to her left-wing views, but it was undoubtedly sexism too. And, hers is not an isolated case. Many other brilliant women have been kept out of the biggest prize in economics.”
Jon, Good suggestion. I had forgotten about Robinson when I wrote the piece. She is certainly the most prominent non-winner. As suggested my Mr. Alazar in a response to your post, her gratingly leftist politics may have cost her support. she did, of course, write a virtual love song to Mao, exploring the supposedly positive, humane aspects of his reign of terror. I read your link. Sexism may be a problem with the Nobel Committee, but the link you provide doesn’t convince me of the case. I don’t know know the work of Chick and Payer, but from the descriptions I read, they sound more like able essayists than producers of theoretical or empirical insights and research agendas. i have a passing acquaintance with Mazzucato, and she very much strikes me as more polemicist than theoretician or empiricist. Polemics is an honorable endeavor, but not Nobel-worthy. (I’ll happily admit that I’m a polemicist, but then, no one has ever suggested me for a Nobel.) To answer the question the essay asks, perhaps there has only been one female winner because there just haven’t been many women who have risen to the heights in economics. Perhaps sexism is a contributing factor, but the sexism may be upstream—in the academic departments and the journals, not in the Nobels. or perhaps not many women have aspired to a Nobel-worthy level of influence in the discipline, and it’s simply a matter of the probabilities. Larry Summers was fired as president of Harvard for making similar observations on the paucity of women in tenured positions. But that doesn’t mean that he was wrong—just politically incorrect.
Somehow I cannot feel too bad for any kind of political philosopher (economist, political scientist, historian, lawyer, etc.) who, after mature consideration, adheres to Hitler or Stalin. Call me unfair. Boo hoo.
Perhaps in the past the awarding of a Nobel for Economics was not all that politically based, but can you really say that today? Sowell not being awarded one and perhaps never getting one seems to me to be based on politics; he is a conservative.
Economics and politics are a toxic mix! Economists are human and sadly many fall for the irresistible sound of the Siren (unlike Odysseus and his sailer mates)that allows them to come out from the shelter of academia and in to the light where they can be the center of attention, and possibly gain fame and maybe fortune.
Krugman book on international trade was great one and yet once he became a columnist he seemed to have had a change of tune on many things.
As I told someone else, I have the highest respect for Sowell, but he doesn’t really fit the mold of a Nobelist. He writes on doctrine and philosophy. He hasn’t launched a theoretical or empirical field. That doesn’t make him a lesser scholar, and it’s not what the Nobels are intended to reward. Krugman didn’t win the prize for the book. He won it for specific trade theory—namely the role of economies of scale in determining trade patterns. But yes, once he became a columnist, he more or less abandoned much of the economic logic and consistency that characterized his work on trade. He became no different than some guy on a barstool spewing opinions, with careless abandon of their consistency.
Worthy mentions as omissions. Wondering whether they got bumped by same-specialty colleagues. There was considerable talk about Vernon Smith and Charles Plott sharing the Nobel for Experimental Economics. Vernon ultimately shared it with Daniel Kahneman, from a somewhat related field. I’ve heard suppositions that Plott was left out to make room for Kahneman. I assume that’s speculation.
"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never." (Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, after Election Day 2016)
Over the next four years, the S&P 500 went up 56%.
There is no Nobel economic prize. It's an award from the Bank of Sweden in honor of Nobel. Basically it's an attempt to gain status\reflected glory, by using Nobel's name. as opposed to just saying it's a prize from a bank. Which no one would care about outside of the economics field. Akin to companies using celebrities to indorse their products. Well if famous person uses it, it must be good.
Nobel didn't like economics (and probably not economists either) nor mathematicians. The hardest "prize" to obtain is probably the Fields Medal in math.
Economists opining on subjects out of their field is in the same vein (maybe vain) as Hollywood actors opining on everything out side of making movies. Everyone has an ego and everyone wants to be a star. Have a little Bon Mot on some of my emails: People who think they know all the answers, don't know all the questions.
Krugman is an excellent example of both as well as a great example of the persistence of belief regardless of being wrong on multiple occasions. But then he is not alone. Climate Change anyone? Also Mr. Fisher is absolutely correct.
The controversy remains, but the Nobel Foundation took this prize under its wing, so it’s kind of a Nobel now. Irving Fisher was certainly not correct at the time. He lost his shirt and his reputation on October 29. Curious character. Made loads of money by inventing the Rolodex. Was a fervent eugenicist. And subjected his daughter to quack medicine that may have killed her.
Still the greatest economist America produced before Friedman. Had he not been tempted into market prognostication, he would have been the only one with both the knowledge and the reputation to have (perhaps) fixed American policy and stopped the Depression. (I am semiquoting Friedman; I don’t have the effrontery to have an independent opinion on this.)
You may have confused the Rolodex, which was invented by Alfred Neustadter in the 1950's, with the Kardex, which Fisher called the "visible filing system" and patented in 1913.
And loads of others. So, you’re probably right, but the Fisher-Rolodex connection is certainly widely believed. Is it possible that Kardex became Rolodex? I don’t know.
The Patent Office granted Neustadter a patent on the Rolodex in 1956 so they must have considered it a sufficiently original design to qualify for patent protection.
Yes they did but I believe it is "administered" by the same group that does the Peace Prize. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also been award to some people who weren't economists. Soooo?????? See the WIKI.
The problem with Krugman and similars on both sides of the spectrum is if you don't admit you were incorrect you tend to keep going down the same path. It becomes more of an ego journey than tan anything else.
William Safire (the late NYT's columnist) use to make predictions around the end of the year, beginning of the new year. They were on a scattershot of topics, some serious some not. At the end of the next year he would make new ones but never tallied how many of the old ones were correct or incorrect. After he passed away someone looked at them and said that he was wrong about 75% of the time and the one thing he was most right about was his Oscar Picks. He was doing it as a form of amusement. But Krugman, others (again Climate Change anyone) are not. Big difference. The first Earth Day was about 40 years ago. So far (to the best of my knowledge) none of the major predictions or most of the minor ones have come to fruition. And the economic costs????
Anyone can remember the past. Remembering the future is harder.
I don’t know all the administrative details. I have often said (and written) that one of the BEST things about the Economics Nobel is that they sometimes award the prize to people from outside of the field of economics—include staunch critics of mainstream economics. Daniel Kahneman and the like greatly influenced the economists—and I think it behooves my profession that we are happy to gain insights from critics in other fields. John Nash was more mathematician than economist.
And yes, I always get amused by pundits issuing lists of predictions and then brushing all the errors under the rug. But yes, experts-as-dilettantes are extraordinarily costly.
Maybe the enrollment of Jews in the Ivies dropped from about 20% in 2000 to about 10% in 2020 because of our suddenly and notoriously grating personalities, a trait we apparently share with East-Asian-Americans.
The interesting thing about that is if Simon had picked a shorter Time Line, say 7 years than Ehrlich would have won the bet for that time period. In the long term Simon was right of course, but markets go up and markets go down and there are lots of price fluctuations in-between. Ehrlich is amusing because his area of expertise is Lepidoptera. There was a debate many years ago about Monarch Butterflies and if their ability to migrate to Mexico every year was genetic or learned the novelist Nabokov (Lolita) was an amateur butterfly collector. He and others argued that it was genetic and I believed Ehrlich argued it was learned. The science of genetics wasn't advanced enough to answer the question originally but science marches on. Nabokov was right. Ehrlich was wrong. Two for two. And that was what he was an "expert" on!
As for awarding the prize to people outside of the purview of the science. Well, maybe rename it.
"The close enough to count Nobel Prize for work in Economics and\or maybe other stuff also". Cover all your bases.
When I was a forecaster, someone told me (jokingly) “Never include both a quantity and a date in your forecast. One or the other. Then, you’ll never be wrong.”
I didn’t know that Ehrlich was a butterfly guy. Or Nabokov’s interest.
And no, the Economics Nobel has the right name. Kahneman, Nash, etc. influenced the field of economics. The field, in effect, judges on your contribution, not on your CV. Jefferson contributed to architecture without being an architect. The Wrights contributed to aviation without being credentialed aviation engineers.
Nabokov wrote about it somewhere but I don't remember where. New Yorker maybe. He came to come to the US every year just to hunt butterflies. I think it was on one of these sojourns that he got the idea for Lolita. His collection is at Harvard though I don't know where. Technically Ehrlich is an entomologist but his specialty is butterflies . So who better to lecture on economics or population? Beats me.
Don't think there were any aeronautical engineers back when the Wrights were tinkering in their bicycle shop. Academics spoil everything. The doing came first. The figuring out why came later.
The problem with economics as a science is there is a higher rate of handwaving when thing don't go as predicted. than in Physics or Chemistry. I wouldn't' trust a bridge built by an economist. Or an airplane. I tthink the Uncertainty Principal is actually an Economist's invention. That and Schrödinger's cat. Don't know if dead or alive until you open the box. Economists have enough problems explaining the past booms and bust. The reason for. that depression or that recession or that boom..seems to change or be modified about every 20 years or so. Everything looks good on paper. Real life? Not so much
Hey wait a minute, you can't drag chemistry and physics through the same mud you pulled peace, literature, and physiology/medicine without giving examples, that's bad form.
Chien-Shing Wu excluded from 1957 Physics prize (over protests of the winners); Jocelyn Brunell from 1974; Einstein never got the prize for relativity; Satyendra Bose (of Bose-Einstein statistics) never got one; Lise Meitner, who discovered fission, never got one (Otto Hahn, who had discovered barium salts in a neutron-bombarded uranium salt sample, got the credit!).
Mendeleev (d. 1907) never got one; neither did Gilbert Lewis; Gabor Samorjai’s exclusion from the 2007 prize was criticized by, inter alia, the sole winner; Rachid Yazami was omitted from the 2019 prize but at least in that case there were three deserving winners.
I wanted to, but I’m not that well acquainted with chemistry winners or should-have-beens. I know quite a few Physics winners and might-have-been, but I don’t know enough about the field to name any winner who shouldn’t have won or any egregious omissions. Happy to take examples.
My favorite moment in that clip was the look on Krugman's face when the camera panned over to him. Priceless.
Indeed.
As an econ grad in part [double major Econ and IR] I can honestly state that no economist has ever predicted any economy. How do I know? Because if you KNEW which way the economy and the economic indexes would move, then you would be a billionaire since you could 'guess' which way the markets would move with certainty. Economics is a backward looking science -
Basically true. Though once, I knew a strange financial economist who seemed to have found a tiny inefficiency in certain financial markets that would allow one to make brief but huge arbitrage profits. One of the giant investment banks saw it and offered to pay him a gigantic sum if he would keep it secret for some brief period (six months, I think). He thought that would be counter to his role as an academic and published it immediately. (I'll readily admit that I would have taken the cash. My highly ethical classmates agreed that they would have taken the cash, too.)
I posted this elsewhere in response to an article about J.D. Vance’s “explanation” of high housing prices:
We economists don’t need lawyers miseducating the public about economic phenomena. That’s our job and we’re quite good at it.
(I’m an economist only by education and temperament; except for a very brief stint in academia I made my living doing something else.)
Regarding the devaluation of the original five Nobel categories: I read Jose Saramago’s BLINDNESS after he won his Nobel. That was the last time I used winning a Nobel as a criterion for choosing reading material.
Love the second paragraph.
I’ve heard similar reviews about Saramago.
I think Biden is on the way out. But the selection of Vance suggests that Trump will wind up being the most consequential demagogue since FDR.
Great column! I laughed at several points.
Glad to brighten your day. I’ll try to figure out where you laughed. :)
Bob, you excoriated me for putting down economists in a previous post. I acknowledge that I was overly broad and your retort was justified. But economists so often do this. For those of us who don't read the economic literature (essentially all of us), the only view of economics we get is through politics. I guess it is because economics is essential to the fortunes of a politician. Science has the same problem (see COVID), but the scale is much smaller and many areas of science are hard to politicize. I guess we are dependent on people like you to make the points that you did here. Thank you!
If you try hard enough—and trust me, experts are trying really hard—there is almost nothing you can’t politicize.
At the very least you can make professorships and other rewards depend on expressed political allegiance. You know, like with diversity statements. Or what everyone knows about the tenure prospects of registered Republicans.
You care correct. Medical schools are as bad as non-medical academia.
You’re welcome. And that, indeed, is why items like this letter are irritating. You’d be surprised how many areas of hard science get politicized. As Max Born explained in Experiment and Theory in Physics, the Nazis managed to politicize quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. (Jewish science, in their estimation). And, of course, any aspect of environmental science, climatology, virology, etc. etc. But yes, the problem is probably greater with economics. In college, I was one course short of a second major in Government, and yet I was not required to take a single course in economics. I decided later that that was a problem, and thus began my economics studies.
You can actually get a degree in economics without learning any economics. Looking at you, Ocasio-Cortez.
Someone commented that you have to put incredibly drunk to elect your bartender to Congress.
It is a pity, and likely to be consequential, that we now have two statist major parties instead of one. And sometimes a statist Libertarian Candidate.
I was just commenting on that to a friend. 10 years ago, the NYT Magazine asked, “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” If it ever did, it passed as thoroughly as the Etruscans or the Anasazi.
I remarked something like that not only did we have an unrepublican Republican candidate and an undemocratic Democratic candidate, we also had an unlibertarian Libertarian candidate, an unreformed Reform candidate, an un-American American Independent candidate, a militant Peace and Freedom candidate for unfreedom, and a things-white-people-like Green candidate.
You are a poet. :)
Did the sixteen take into account Biden’s just-announced plan for national rent control at a rate of $55?
Well, I mention the rent control plan, but thinking of the 5% version rather than his $55 misreading version. :)
The percentage is not important because it can be adjusted easily the problem is that rent control will destroy the rental market. As you related in your article. But maybe they will get it right this time because they really want to. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
I have a bridge in Brooklyn to RENT. And the government guarantees that I won’t increase your rent by more than 5% or $55 next year.
As a teenager in Economics class I excelled at computer modeling to "Run the British Economy." I quickly achieved strong growth, low unemployment, and low inflation. I still recall that my first move was to boost the money supply by 38%. In the real world, my moves would have been highly problematic. I understood the model but also understand that it *was* a model, not reality.
The fact that economist with widely differing views have received the Nobel shows that you can't simply find the best real world policies by asking the Nobelists.
Great comments. Love the model vs reality knowledge as a teenager. And yes, Nobelists understand specific tools, not the entire edifice built with those tools.
I spent many years building relatively complicated Structural Equation Models. I soon discovered that if you have a lot of variables (some of my models had over 150 variables) and rather scant data (I once had 750 city data in a model with over 50 variables. That's really not enough data.), I could pretty much make the model do whatever I wanted, and it would be very difficult for anyone to know that. Fortunately, I have some tiny portion of ethics, and I refused efforts to get me to 'tweak' my results, but it cost me a couple of professional relationships.
Learning that made it very difficult for me to accept SEMs from anyone else.
Absolutely!
I would disagree that no deserving economists has ever been overlooked. What about Joan Robinson? The Economics of Imperfect Competition has, to me, been a very useful addition to the canon. She was dead wrong about Mao and China, but her sins should not block out her successes. Others agree:
“The Nobel Factor analysis shows that if you ranked by the number of citations all Nobel Memorial Prize winners in economics, only ten winners would rank above her, the other seventy-one males rank below.
Robinson was repeatedly nominated for the prize. She was held in high esteem by the mainstream American economists, with whom she often clashed. She taught two future Nobel winners in economics: Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. Many people expected 1975 to be her year. Business Week said that she was “on everyone’s list for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics”. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences missed that opportunity, and alas, never regained it.
Robinson’s exclusion may also have been due to her left-wing views, but it was undoubtedly sexism too. And, hers is not an isolated case. Many other brilliant women have been kept out of the biggest prize in economics.”
https://primeeconomics.org/articles/how-the-sexist-nobel-prize-in-economics-has-warped-the-world/
Jon, Good suggestion. I had forgotten about Robinson when I wrote the piece. She is certainly the most prominent non-winner. As suggested my Mr. Alazar in a response to your post, her gratingly leftist politics may have cost her support. she did, of course, write a virtual love song to Mao, exploring the supposedly positive, humane aspects of his reign of terror. I read your link. Sexism may be a problem with the Nobel Committee, but the link you provide doesn’t convince me of the case. I don’t know know the work of Chick and Payer, but from the descriptions I read, they sound more like able essayists than producers of theoretical or empirical insights and research agendas. i have a passing acquaintance with Mazzucato, and she very much strikes me as more polemicist than theoretician or empiricist. Polemics is an honorable endeavor, but not Nobel-worthy. (I’ll happily admit that I’m a polemicist, but then, no one has ever suggested me for a Nobel.) To answer the question the essay asks, perhaps there has only been one female winner because there just haven’t been many women who have risen to the heights in economics. Perhaps sexism is a contributing factor, but the sexism may be upstream—in the academic departments and the journals, not in the Nobels. or perhaps not many women have aspired to a Nobel-worthy level of influence in the discipline, and it’s simply a matter of the probabilities. Larry Summers was fired as president of Harvard for making similar observations on the paucity of women in tenured positions. But that doesn’t mean that he was wrong—just politically incorrect.
Somehow I cannot feel too bad for any kind of political philosopher (economist, political scientist, historian, lawyer, etc.) who, after mature consideration, adheres to Hitler or Stalin. Call me unfair. Boo hoo.
Perhaps in the past the awarding of a Nobel for Economics was not all that politically based, but can you really say that today? Sowell not being awarded one and perhaps never getting one seems to me to be based on politics; he is a conservative.
Economics and politics are a toxic mix! Economists are human and sadly many fall for the irresistible sound of the Siren (unlike Odysseus and his sailer mates)that allows them to come out from the shelter of academia and in to the light where they can be the center of attention, and possibly gain fame and maybe fortune.
Krugman book on international trade was great one and yet once he became a columnist he seemed to have had a change of tune on many things.
As I told someone else, I have the highest respect for Sowell, but he doesn’t really fit the mold of a Nobelist. He writes on doctrine and philosophy. He hasn’t launched a theoretical or empirical field. That doesn’t make him a lesser scholar, and it’s not what the Nobels are intended to reward. Krugman didn’t win the prize for the book. He won it for specific trade theory—namely the role of economies of scale in determining trade patterns. But yes, once he became a columnist, he more or less abandoned much of the economic logic and consistency that characterized his work on trade. He became no different than some guy on a barstool spewing opinions, with careless abandon of their consistency.
I call your Jagdish Bhagwati with an Armen Alchian and a Harold Demsetz.
Worthy mentions as omissions. Wondering whether they got bumped by same-specialty colleagues. There was considerable talk about Vernon Smith and Charles Plott sharing the Nobel for Experimental Economics. Vernon ultimately shared it with Daniel Kahneman, from a somewhat related field. I’ve heard suppositions that Plott was left out to make room for Kahneman. I assume that’s speculation.
"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never." (Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, after Election Day 2016)
Over the next four years, the S&P 500 went up 56%.
There is no Nobel economic prize. It's an award from the Bank of Sweden in honor of Nobel. Basically it's an attempt to gain status\reflected glory, by using Nobel's name. as opposed to just saying it's a prize from a bank. Which no one would care about outside of the economics field. Akin to companies using celebrities to indorse their products. Well if famous person uses it, it must be good.
Nobel didn't like economics (and probably not economists either) nor mathematicians. The hardest "prize" to obtain is probably the Fields Medal in math.
Economists opining on subjects out of their field is in the same vein (maybe vain) as Hollywood actors opining on everything out side of making movies. Everyone has an ego and everyone wants to be a star. Have a little Bon Mot on some of my emails: People who think they know all the answers, don't know all the questions.
Krugman is an excellent example of both as well as a great example of the persistence of belief regardless of being wrong on multiple occasions. But then he is not alone. Climate Change anyone? Also Mr. Fisher is absolutely correct.
The controversy remains, but the Nobel Foundation took this prize under its wing, so it’s kind of a Nobel now. Irving Fisher was certainly not correct at the time. He lost his shirt and his reputation on October 29. Curious character. Made loads of money by inventing the Rolodex. Was a fervent eugenicist. And subjected his daughter to quack medicine that may have killed her.
Still the greatest economist America produced before Friedman. Had he not been tempted into market prognostication, he would have been the only one with both the knowledge and the reputation to have (perhaps) fixed American policy and stopped the Depression. (I am semiquoting Friedman; I don’t have the effrontery to have an independent opinion on this.)
You may have confused the Rolodex, which was invented by Alfred Neustadter in the 1950's, with the Kardex, which Fisher called the "visible filing system" and patented in 1913.
Question: are you The Shadow, John Olson or just have the same name?
Wasn’t Lamont Cranston The Shadow? I see some John Olsen wrote a book about the character.
Interesting. I’ve used that example for years. This site (https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Irving_Fisher) says his system was “later called Rolodex”, but I’m not sure that’s correct. This site (http://hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/fisher.htm) says his product was “ancestral” to the Rolodex. Also https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/RolodexofFamousEconomists.html
And
https://glencoe.mheducation.com/sites/0025694212/student_view0/chapter14/origin_of_the_idea.html
And
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/07/preexisting-condition
And loads of others. So, you’re probably right, but the Fisher-Rolodex connection is certainly widely believed. Is it possible that Kardex became Rolodex? I don’t know.
Thanks.
The Patent Office granted Neustadter a patent on the Rolodex in 1956 so they must have considered it a sufficiently original design to qualify for patent protection.
True; but they can be idiosyncratic.
Yup. Something to check out. Just curious whether Kardex and Rolodex were organizationally related or just items in the same sector.
Yes they did but I believe it is "administered" by the same group that does the Peace Prize. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also been award to some people who weren't economists. Soooo?????? See the WIKI.
The problem with Krugman and similars on both sides of the spectrum is if you don't admit you were incorrect you tend to keep going down the same path. It becomes more of an ego journey than tan anything else.
William Safire (the late NYT's columnist) use to make predictions around the end of the year, beginning of the new year. They were on a scattershot of topics, some serious some not. At the end of the next year he would make new ones but never tallied how many of the old ones were correct or incorrect. After he passed away someone looked at them and said that he was wrong about 75% of the time and the one thing he was most right about was his Oscar Picks. He was doing it as a form of amusement. But Krugman, others (again Climate Change anyone) are not. Big difference. The first Earth Day was about 40 years ago. So far (to the best of my knowledge) none of the major predictions or most of the minor ones have come to fruition. And the economic costs????
Anyone can remember the past. Remembering the future is harder.
I don’t know all the administrative details. I have often said (and written) that one of the BEST things about the Economics Nobel is that they sometimes award the prize to people from outside of the field of economics—include staunch critics of mainstream economics. Daniel Kahneman and the like greatly influenced the economists—and I think it behooves my profession that we are happy to gain insights from critics in other fields. John Nash was more mathematician than economist.
And yes, I always get amused by pundits issuing lists of predictions and then brushing all the errors under the rug. But yes, experts-as-dilettantes are extraordinarily costly.
Check out the great wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
You have given me an idea for a column. Stay tuned.
Yes, but for the Calculus of Consent they prized Buchanan but not Tullock.
I never met Tullock but knew lots of his friends. I suspect his grating personality cost him the prize.
I sympathize, one grating personality to another.
Maybe the enrollment of Jews in the Ivies dropped from about 20% in 2000 to about 10% in 2020 because of our suddenly and notoriously grating personalities, a trait we apparently share with East-Asian-Americans.
The interesting thing about that is if Simon had picked a shorter Time Line, say 7 years than Ehrlich would have won the bet for that time period. In the long term Simon was right of course, but markets go up and markets go down and there are lots of price fluctuations in-between. Ehrlich is amusing because his area of expertise is Lepidoptera. There was a debate many years ago about Monarch Butterflies and if their ability to migrate to Mexico every year was genetic or learned the novelist Nabokov (Lolita) was an amateur butterfly collector. He and others argued that it was genetic and I believed Ehrlich argued it was learned. The science of genetics wasn't advanced enough to answer the question originally but science marches on. Nabokov was right. Ehrlich was wrong. Two for two. And that was what he was an "expert" on!
As for awarding the prize to people outside of the purview of the science. Well, maybe rename it.
"The close enough to count Nobel Prize for work in Economics and\or maybe other stuff also". Cover all your bases.
When I was a forecaster, someone told me (jokingly) “Never include both a quantity and a date in your forecast. One or the other. Then, you’ll never be wrong.”
I didn’t know that Ehrlich was a butterfly guy. Or Nabokov’s interest.
And no, the Economics Nobel has the right name. Kahneman, Nash, etc. influenced the field of economics. The field, in effect, judges on your contribution, not on your CV. Jefferson contributed to architecture without being an architect. The Wrights contributed to aviation without being credentialed aviation engineers.
Nabokov wrote about it somewhere but I don't remember where. New Yorker maybe. He came to come to the US every year just to hunt butterflies. I think it was on one of these sojourns that he got the idea for Lolita. His collection is at Harvard though I don't know where. Technically Ehrlich is an entomologist but his specialty is butterflies . So who better to lecture on economics or population? Beats me.
Don't think there were any aeronautical engineers back when the Wrights were tinkering in their bicycle shop. Academics spoil everything. The doing came first. The figuring out why came later.
The problem with economics as a science is there is a higher rate of handwaving when thing don't go as predicted. than in Physics or Chemistry. I wouldn't' trust a bridge built by an economist. Or an airplane. I tthink the Uncertainty Principal is actually an Economist's invention. That and Schrödinger's cat. Don't know if dead or alive until you open the box. Economists have enough problems explaining the past booms and bust. The reason for. that depression or that recession or that boom..seems to change or be modified about every 20 years or so. Everything looks good on paper. Real life? Not so much
Hey wait a minute, you can't drag chemistry and physics through the same mud you pulled peace, literature, and physiology/medicine without giving examples, that's bad form.
Chien-Shing Wu excluded from 1957 Physics prize (over protests of the winners); Jocelyn Brunell from 1974; Einstein never got the prize for relativity; Satyendra Bose (of Bose-Einstein statistics) never got one; Lise Meitner, who discovered fission, never got one (Otto Hahn, who had discovered barium salts in a neutron-bombarded uranium salt sample, got the credit!).
Mendeleev (d. 1907) never got one; neither did Gilbert Lewis; Gabor Samorjai’s exclusion from the 2007 prize was criticized by, inter alia, the sole winner; Rachid Yazami was omitted from the 2019 prize but at least in that case there were three deserving winners.
A magnificent list! Especially given that it begins with my dear, lovely, long-ago neighbor, Madame Wu. I will add a piece to the article from this.
I wanted to, but I’m not that well acquainted with chemistry winners or should-have-beens. I know quite a few Physics winners and might-have-been, but I don’t know enough about the field to name any winner who shouldn’t have won or any egregious omissions. Happy to take examples.
If that's the case, I would modify the statement...
"The five original Nobels have been marred by undeserving recipients and eye-opening nonrecipients. Not so with the Economics Nobel."
...to not include chemistry or physics unless/until the time comes when such examples are forthcoming
Thanks! I’ll give it some thought and append a note.
Why only sixteen Nobel winners? It took 51 former intelligence officials to explain to us how the Russians put Trump into office.
:)