The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#71

Post by mallowdram » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #50

mallowdram wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.

Look up reforestation work. It is a light in dark times.

We're inside the first animal created mass desertification project. Reforestation is nonsense.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...

We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.

And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8

"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#72

Post by lanfeust6 » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

thrance wrote: post #9

nabla9 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN discussions are predictable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804

The issue with this prize isn't that economics is not a real science. Nobel prizes are primarily vulgarization and communication tools, and as such are inhenrently political. The Sveriges Riksbank is piggy-backing off the popularity of Nobel Prizes to advocate for a certain vision ( their vision) of economic orthodoxy. It is overwhelmingly awarded to white western men, who, more relevantly, all share an anglocentric…

White western men are no more represented in Economics than other hard sciences, and concensus in Economics is no different in East Asia and the rest of the world excepting the authoritarian Socialist experiments.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#73

Post by addcommitpush » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

HSO wrote: post #42

jacquesm wrote: post #10

That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proo…

This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently) Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor. Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and…

This is in line with Pommeranz (a western economic historian) and most of the whole "Great divergence" litterature.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#74

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

mallowdram wrote: post #20

Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron. There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias. Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/ Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bia…

> Downvoting only proves the point

You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.

In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#75

Post by xbar » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

Fantastic selection. As ever, it is worthwhile to be familiar with the winners' works, particularly this audience and this year.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#76

Post by belter » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

rtsil wrote: post #31

belter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692 Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables. When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ... Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.

Neither are litterature and peace.

They are not pretending to be sciences.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#77

Post by addcommitpush » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

mallowdram wrote: post #20

Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron. There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias. Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/ Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bia…

Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#78

Post by belter » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

IAmBroom wrote: post #55

belter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692 Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables. When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ... Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.

> When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ... When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...

Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions...

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#79

Post by mallowdram » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #53

sethammons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot. Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.

A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it g…

It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.

Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

#80

Post by mallowfram » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 3:02 PM UTC

addcommitpush wrote: post #77

mallowdram wrote: post #20

Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron. There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias. Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/ Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bia…

Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?

Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.

“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald

That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).

Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.

We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.