William Watson writing in the National Post on economics and knowledge: “Professional achievement isn’t everything in life, but a Nobel presumably helped him die a happy man. So hope remains. The only problem now is coming up with a Nobel-sized idea or two.
Mind you, some people think there shouldn’t be a Nobel Prize for economics. Alfred Nobel didn’t. His will mentioned only medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace. The Bank of Sweden established the economics prize 70 years after he died and got the Nobel Foundation to go along. People have been wondering why ever since. Nobel’s will says the prize should to go to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” When someone wins the medicine prize for inventing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as an American and a Brit did this week, that may not be the very biggest still unPrized contribution to human welfare made in medicine, but it’s clearly big.
When this year’s physics winners are recognized for studying the strange behaviour of really cold particles, people may question whether superconductivity is such a big benefit to mankind, but we do at least now know something about the universe that we didn’t know before.
That’s something white-coated scientists always harp on when explaining to us social scientists why we aren’t real scientists: The things they discover stay discovered. But we economists keep changing our minds. You know: If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. (Or as a friend of mine says: If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, you should leave them there.)
For instance, how in the space of five years could the Nobel Committee give prizes to both Milton Friedman (1976) and James Tobin (1981), monetary theorists with diametrically different views of how the U.S. Fed should conduct monetary policy? You wouldn’t see that in physics or medicine, would you?”
