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This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

economist.com

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Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#121

Post by cyborgx7 »

jtms wrote: post #61
ralph84 wrote: post #9

Worth noting that The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is not an actual Nobel Prize. It was established by a central bank so they could award people who justify the existence of central banks.

Yes, it is technically separate from the other Nobel prizes, but no one treats it any differently than the rest of them.

> but no one treats it any differently than the rest of them

Which is precisely the problem, and the intended effect. It's a propaganda effort.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#122

Post by cyborgx7 »

sedeki wrote: post #120
cyborgx7 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now we have to qualify any sentence referencing the Economics price each time we say it. They should have to do that, but they don't. Which is precisely the point, and why they didn't name it something else.

I think you are overestimating the intellect of Sweden’s central bankers.

I don't know. "If our discipline had a Nobel Prize, people would consider it most legitimate" isn't really a genius level plan.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#124

Post by cyborgx7 »

wyattpeak wrote: post #55
anoncake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics already existed when Nobel died. It's not an oversight that there is no Nobel prize in economics, he didn't consider it a science worth a Nobel prize. That's why his family still tries to get his name off the Riksbank prize.

Do they? From what I can tell in admittedly fairly brief reading, a single member of the family is trying to remove the name, while the rest of the family simply want it distinguished from the other prizes while not objecting to the use of the name per se. This statement from Peter Nobel[0], the man actively trying to remove the name, presumably sums up the best arguments he had available against using the name, and…

I know you are just responding to the argument made by the comment you are responding to. But I would argue that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how the Nobel family feels about the Prize. The Ecenomics Prize is sham regardless, and if the Nobel family participate in that sham, it doesn't make it less so.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#125

Post by leereeves »

ummwhat wrote: post #110
jerf wrote: post #21

These critics should spend some time speaking to the medical research community. These aren't new questions. It kinda reveals the deep underlying assumptions; "of course we can know the results of these interventions in advance, so we must base our ethics on that"... ok, but if you already know the effects, why are you testing them? You're testing them because you don't know. Unfortunately, there's no royal road to s…

I think what you're missing is that economics has a serious case of physics envy. They like to imagine that their handful of reductionist principles can model a scenario as well as Newton's laws can model n bodies. The experiments are only needed to fine tune a handful of parameters. What is represented by this pivot towards emperical testing everything is a concession that there are no universal economic laws from w…

Even physics is not so simple as that anymore. The proof that the Higgs boson exists was a statistical test on a sea of noise. And CERN was recently recruiting machine learning experts to help them find other patterns in that noise.

Modern physics uses many of the same methods as softer fields like economics. The problem in economics (and other soft sciences) is the low standard of evidence they're willing to accept.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#126

Post by narrator »

thegranderson wrote: post #31

Though I know the Nobel is focused on theoretical contribution, I found this discussion interesting: https://andrewbatson.com/2019/10/25/who-deserves-the-nobel-f... The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions…

China has also not suffered a Japan style economic crash, even though The Economist has regularly predicted it would happen since the early 90s. Even though this is an economic anomaly that has to do with a very large percentage of the earth's population, somehow this development has escaped triggering any serious curiosity in western economics circles.

This lack of serious inquiry in the face of enormous empirical evidence that contradicts theory is what makes Economics a dying field.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#127

Post by hangonhn »

kortilla wrote: post #36
jfengel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are exactly correct. RCTs are hard, not just for ethical reasons but also logistical ones. It's hard to get the money and authority to conduct an experiment in the first place, and it's often impossible to create a true control group. "Hard" scientists like to pat themselves on the back for rigor, but they get that because they're studying comparatively simple things. Studying the lives of people is hard, but it'…

> It's a bit like medicine: we're not going to stop treating people just because we don't understand the mechanism of action and can't guarantee that it will work. Yet medicine actually focuses on scientific measurement of effects. They don’t just throw their hands up and go, “experiments that affect people’s lives are too hard.”

There's quite a bit of medicine that "works" but the specifics of why it work isn't well understood, especially in mental health. One of my friends who works in the mental health pharmacology field told me one of the challenges with the field is measuring the efficacy of those drugs. What do you do? Do you ask someone if they are feeling better or happier? Is that trust worthy? Or is it too fuzzy? Was it the drug that did it or something else? In that regard, they face similar challenges as the social sciences.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#128

Post by xyzzy2020 »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #23
xyzzy2020 wrote: post #3

Totally bonkers: economists using science to approach "social science" issues. Social sciences should be ashamed that this is not the norm, we should all be startled and surprised that this is a new thing and evidently people have just been using a system of high-fives and good wishes to solve the world's social problems.

Define "science". For most topics in economics it's basically impossible to an RCT. You can't say "Let's turn the US into a centrally planned economy, and see what happens." RCT based macroeconomics, or trade economics are basically impossible. Instead people have long relied on observational data, and did the best they could to handle the issues this caused. RCTs didn't start with Duflo. (Duflo isn't even the first…

Define science the usual way, the essence of science is reproducibility: if you can't achieve that you are not practicing science.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#129

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #124
wyattpeak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? From what I can tell in admittedly fairly brief reading, a single member of the family is trying to remove the name, while the rest of the family simply want it distinguished from the other prizes while not objecting to the use of the name per se. This statement from Peter Nobel[0], the man actively trying to remove the name, presumably sums up the best arguments he had available against using the name, and…

I know you are just responding to the argument made by the comment you are responding to. But I would argue that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how the Nobel family feels about the Prize. The Ecenomics Prize is sham regardless, and if the Nobel family participate in that sham, it doesn't make it less so.

Sham? Really? What makes it a sham? They hand out counterfeit money as the prize? Some dudes on a bar stool in Liverpool decide who wins? It's a prize that is awarded by the Nobel committee, that has Nobel's name in the title, that for the sake of shortness we call the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though the full name is something longer. What about that is a sham?

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#130

Post by cyborgx7 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #129
cyborgx7 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you are just responding to the argument made by the comment you are responding to. But I would argue that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how the Nobel family feels about the Prize. The Ecenomics Prize is sham regardless, and if the Nobel family participate in that sham, it doesn't make it less so.

Sham? Really? What makes it a sham? They hand out counterfeit money as the prize? Some dudes on a bar stool in Liverpool decide who wins? It's a prize that is awarded by the Nobel committee, that has Nobel's name in the title, that for the sake of shortness we call the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though the full name is something longer. What about that is a sham?

>that for the sake of shortness

This is the part that makes it a sham. You call it that to give it a legitimacy it doesn't have. The entire thing is a project in giving economics as a field a legitimacy it doesn't have.

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