Fifty years ago this year, the King of Sweden presented with royal pomp the first ever Nobel medals in economics. The prize has been dogged by controversy ever since. Alfred Nobel the founder of the awards never wanted an economics prize, hisde scendants want it scrapped and the economist F.A. Hayek said it was dangerous.I don't know how influential the Nobel in economics, since determining the influence of causal factor in such cases by putting numbers on it is difficult to impossible. However, the Nobel in economics was instituted subsequently by Riksbank rather than according to the wishes of Alfred Nobel, so attaching Nobel's name to it is disingenuous when it is actually the called the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." But "Nobel Prize in Economics" has stuck since it widely reverberates in the media echo chamber.
That’s not the half. Serious thinkers argue that the prize in ‘economic sciences’, as it’s called, has given economic ideas which favour the rich and powerful the gloss of scientific truth. The prize, still paid for every year by Sweden’s Central Bank, has helped weaken democratic control of money, they argue, and helped one school of economic thought – known as neoclassical – dominate the rest. It has contributed to a crisis of conformity in economics and trouble well beyond the ivory tower....
And there have been some surprises, like Elinor Ostrum, who was an institutionalist rather than a neoclassical that contested the privatization argument of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons based on neoclassical assumptions about markets.
But overall, the Nobel has tended to institutionalize the neoclassical approach to economics, including political economy. This has tended to favor the market state over the welfare state on the basis of neoclassical assumptions.
Promoting Economic Pluralism
How Fifty Years Of The ‘Nobel Prize’ In Economics Redrew Our Map Of Society
Nat Dyer
Links on the Economics Nobel
ReplyDeleteEconomics claims to be a science from Adam Smith/Karl Marx onward to the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. Yet, everyone who looks closer into the matter eventually arrives at the conclusion that economics is a failure/fake/fraud or what Feynman called a cargo cult science: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”
The major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent and all got the foundational economic concept of profit wrong.
All appearances to the contrary, economics is NOT a science but political agenda pushing. Since the founding fathers, economists violate the principle of the separation of science and politics. Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. As a result, neither right-wing nor left-wing economic policy guidance ever had sound scientific foundations. Economic controversies have not to be seen as a struggle for scientific progress but as turf wars of the billionaire-sponsored academic mob.
Economics is failure/fake/fraud from the curriculum to the peer-review of journals to the Nobel Prize and orthodox/heterodox/pluralist economists are part of it ― not to forget methodologists and the historians of economic thought. For details of the big picture see
The economist as storyteller
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-economist-as-storyteller.html
Media-fake-farce-fraud-storytelling-macro
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/04/media-fake-farce-fraud-storytelling.html
Economics as storytelling and entertainment for the masses
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/01/economics-as-storytelling-and.html
If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/01/if-religion-is-opium-of-people.html
Economics: The greatest scientific hoax in modern times
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/05/economics-greatest-scientific-hoax-in.html
Macroeconomics ― dead since Keynes
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/12/macroeconomics-dead-since-keynes.html
Economists simply don’t get it
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/08/economists-simply-dont-get-it.html
If you can’t make it, fake it
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/07/if-you-cant-make-it-fake-it.html
Bill Mitchell’s dishonorable discharge from the sciences
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/08/bill-mitchells-dishonorable-discharge.html
The real problem with the economics Nobel
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-real-problem-with-economics-nobel.html
Economics: The greatest scientific hoax in modern times
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/05/economics-greatest-scientific-hoax-in.html
Why does Heterodoxy not abolish the fake Nobel?
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/10/why-does-heterodoxy-not-abolish-fake.html
The economics Cargo Cult Prize
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-economics-cargo-cult-prize.html
Swedish muddle
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2015/12/swedish-muddle.html
Swedish economists — what’s that?
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/10/swedish-economists-whats-that.html
Scientists and science actors
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/09/scientists-and-science-actors.html
Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/12/throw-them-out-orthodox-and-heterodox.html
See part 2