The ‘Economics Nobel Prize’ — what is it good for? – Economic Sociology & Political Economy

2024-10-12 03:04:00

This Nobel Prize season spurs to once again air an observation that in the past economists were awarded the Nobel prize for explaining to the general public something that only economists understood, but in recent decades they win it for explaining to their fellow economists something that the public has always known 😉
– Politicians care about themselves (Buchanan)
– You can’t fool all of the people all of the time (Lucas)
– Some people know more than others (Akerlof, Spence, Stiglitz)
– The more you know about something affects how much you’ll pay for it (Wilson and Milgrom)
– Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (Markowitz, Miller, and Sharpe)
– When banks go bankrupt, it’s really-really bad (Bernanke, Diamond and Dybvig)

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nonel prize neoliberalism economics

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On a more serious note, the ‘Nobel Prize in Economics’ topic is anyway of enormous importance. I recommend to read these two excellent and revealing studies about the institutional history of the prize’s purposeful and political creation, the ways it changed economics as an academic discipline, and its extensive influence in promoting neoliberalism and market fundamentalism:
— Victim, Avner and Gabriel Söderberg. 2016. The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. Princeton University Press
— Mirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalismedited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso.

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