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

Post by currymj » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #17

Economist here… An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one. What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lo…

Post by baxtr » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #132

littlestymaar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row. > I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it. I don't have an estimate for that, but we have an estimate on how much money the Sverige Riskbank bankers were ready to spend in that effo…

> You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row. I've seen this style of argument before and I think it's a non sequitur and total BS. The fact that he may care about feeling his opinion is being misrepresented is totally different from what his original "we don't care" statement referred to.

Post by Ar-Curunir » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 7:16 PM UTC

philipallstar wrote: post #110

HSO wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who coul…

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

nibles_and_bits wrote: post #120

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #17

Economist here… An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one. What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lo…

No one in the economics profession cares. Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recogni…

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #125

carlosjobim wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.

For reducing energy use, social values matter at least as much as technology. Imagine if we had no better technology - but most people drove small cars instead of large SUV's and trucks, and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people.