yazadjal.com

Samuel Brittan adds his voice to those wanting reform in the economics Nobel prize.

If Caldwell is right then the Nobel Prize for economics was a mistake as the subject could not expect the kind of steady incremental progress achievable in the physical sciences - or for that matter in ancillary studies such as statistical theory. But having the Prize we are now stuck with it. To abolish would simply increase the influence of the kind of anti-economics which embraces for instance rent controls, minimum wages and arms promotion “for the sake of jobs”. The best way forward would be to follow the tentative gropings of the Swedish Academy of the mid-1990s and extend the Prize to the social sciences in general and really mean it

A bit of deja vu as Brittan quotes similar Hayekian doubts about the Nobel that yours truly had noted two months earlier. It also reminds me of a famous joke said by another economics Nobel laureate, George Stigler. When asked why there was no Nobel Prize in other social sciences, Stigler is supposed to have replied “Don’t worry, they already have a Nobel Prize in … Literature”