The 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was awarded for the 50 th time today, to William D. Nordhaus of Yale University and Paul M. Romer of New York University. Although Austrian school economists might find common ground on a few aspects of Nordhaus and Romer’s work, such as Romer’s criticism of “mathiness” in economics, there is not much for Austrians to celebrate about this year’s prize.
“In the long run we are all dead.”
This famous retort of the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, was meant as a rebuttal to the views of the classical or free market economists. The entire quote reads:
But the long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again. [A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 80]
In the July 1894 issue of American Mathematical Monthly, amateur mathematician Edward J.
Recently, I read a Los Angeles Times article that referred to high-deductible health plans as “much hated by employees.” That struck me as incongruous, since high-deductible — or catastrophic — plans are what insurance principles support. If that is true, why would employees hate them?
How do insurance principles support high-deductible, or catastrophic, plans?
The 2018 Nobel Prize in economics has gone to Yale’s William Nordhaus for work in environmental economics and NYU’s Paul Romer for work on economic growth. Both have long been considered front-runners for the award (Romer was described as a likely winner back in the 1990s) though the combination is unexpected.
Police departments in a number of U.S. cities — Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans — are receiving increased attention for their failure to clear even half of the homicides that occur in their jurisdiction.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is a dubious thing at best.
The Royal Academy made a clear political statement with this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. Coming a day after the United Nations panel on climate change issued its dire warning on climate change, this award attempts to emphasize the long term impact of climate change on the economy and economic growth. In Mr. Nordhaus case, he emphasizes how climate change has a significant economic cost.
