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

nobelprize.org

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

#201

Post by bryan_w »

bell-cot wrote: post #146
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people So lower standards of living.

Feel free to live in a modest-sized, well-insulated version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers with a live-in domestic staff serving your meals on solid gold plates. Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(

> the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity.

Back in the early 2000's when I saw Pres. Bush on the TV, he would say something like, "... and they hate our way of life" and I assumed that had to do with our secular way of having different religions around or something.

As I get older, I realize that he was talking about the above quote.

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

#202

Post by BurningFrog »

I-M-S wrote: post #192
BurningFrog wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the West got wealthy from the Industrial Revolution is a commonly accepted fact AFAIK. We didn't steal that wealth from Africa, in part because Africa had very little wealth. I don't have a great link laying out this in more detail, but I know Johan Norberg has written and talked a fair amount about this.

Aren't natural resources wealth? Isn't forced work wealth? "Stealing" seems like the best word to describe the situation without obfuscating the matter with grander narratives (the kind that might win you the "Nobel prize" for economy, incidentally).

You're implying that the colonial powers got rich by taking natural resources from Africa and forcing Africans to work without pay.

Since you don't offer any evidence for this scenario, I can't really refute it :)

But note that 90% of Africa didn't even get colonized before 1884. That was over a century into the Industrial Revolution era, during which Western Europe had roughly doubled it's population and tripled their GDP.

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

#203

Post by lostlogin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #139
bell-cot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people So lower standards of living.

Does going on a jet plane mean you have a higher standard of living?

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

#204

Post by littlestymaar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #159
331c8c71 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing. Don't you agree it's much more of a tool than a theory of how the world works.

> What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion. The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis. It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics. It’s been a classic complaint ab…

> This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion.

Using a model derived from physics is not having physics envy.

> The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis

No, physics envy is about thinking you can have the same prediction power as physics using simple mathematical tools just because some branch of physics do (while not understanding physics at the same time, because all of physics definitely doesn't work like that).

> It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics

Well, if you consider Ricardo to be recent, maybe…

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

#205

Post by tovej »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #180
tovej wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide some proof that neoclassical economics has done this.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32874648/ -- "they expect replication rates to differ between fields, with the highest replication rate in economics (average survey response 58%), and the lowest in psychology and in education (average survey response of 42% for both fields). " https://replicationnetwork.com/2021/01/06/reed-the-state-of-... -- "indeed, there has been an increase in the number of replications over time…

Replication != validation, replication would be purely for experiments, which usually do not use that much causal language or attributions to theory. I'm talking about validating theory, and specifically neoclassical theory.

But still, that is interesting. Thank you for taking the time. Although you first source is a survey of expectations by authors on replicability over time, not an actual measurement of replicability.

Your second reference says there are historically more replication studies being published now than before (people trying to replicate other studies), not that more studies replicate.

As you might be aware of, the number of scientific publications in general is growing, so I would also expect the subset if replication studies to grow. This is not very surprising or meaningful, but interesting.

The third one is actually about reproducibility, the authors have taken open data sets published together with papers and see if they can produce the figures and final values in the papers from the original data sets. That is an entirely different thing.

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

#206

Post by atwrk »

belter wrote: post #117
atwrk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Poppers demarcation criterion is falsifiable?

It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science. Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...

> It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science.

And if the source of that framework is not (part of your definition of) science, how do we know whether that framework is true?

That was sort of my point: Poppers criterion is nice, but only works for a small subset of (natural) science - and even there has to face criticism because it is simply too naive for many edge cases.

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

#207

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

331c8c71 wrote: post #136
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, there is consensus in economics. It's a field which is mostly interested in models and anyone can agree that a model is consistant and implies surprising things even if they think the hypotheses it makes don't faithfully represent reality. It's endlessly fascinating to me how some people will happily disparage economics while having very little idea of what it's actually about.

Modelling isn't the higher intellectual pursuit it's made out to be. Imo designing theoretical models post-hoc to "support" a desired conclusion is not unheard of in econ/finance.

It's tautological but models are models.

It doesn't really change anything to their inherent value that you build them from the hypotheses up or from the conclusions down. It holds the same that this set of interactions lead to this behaviour.

Sometimes going down can be equally interesting: "What would a system where tariff improves the overall well being of a country inhabitants look like?". Contrast the model requirements with empirical data and you have an interesting paper.

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

#208

Post by lanfeust6 »

astrange wrote: post #186
331c8c71 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modelling isn't the higher intellectual pursuit it's made out to be. Imo designing theoretical models post-hoc to "support" a desired conclusion is not unheard of in econ/finance.

The 2019 economics prize went to empirical research. The non-mainstrean economists (aka heterodox, aka cranks) are usually more obviously pursuing an agenda, but they definitely usually don't have better empirical evidence.

The bait-and-switch rhetorical tactics from the cranks like "not a science" is to feign that empirical evidence doesn't exist (for thee) and therefore we should embrace ideology (theirs). This is why the Is-ought problem is frequently brought up. Though this mostly only flies in sloppy online space; in academia, progressives became Rawls acolytes and eschewed Marx, because of baggage and serious errors that can't be overcome. This seems to have translated to a chimera everything-bagel ideology on social media, where they're Rawlsian (qua social justice) but also many don't want to give up Marx, 'cause Capitalism bad, and this doesn't square.

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

#209

Post by andrepd »

astrange wrote: post #186
331c8c71 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modelling isn't the higher intellectual pursuit it's made out to be. Imo designing theoretical models post-hoc to "support" a desired conclusion is not unheard of in econ/finance.

The 2019 economics prize went to empirical research. The non-mainstrean economists (aka heterodox, aka cranks) are usually more obviously pursuing an agenda, but they definitely usually don't have better empirical evidence.

> The non-mainstrean economists (aka heterodox, aka cranks)

L M A O

M

A

O

Mate, this is not physics. This is not a field with a measurable reality where you can, in fact, say that those who reject the empirical evidence are cranks. Economics allows for multiple incompatible interpretations of the same empirical observations.

Economics has several characteristics that make it unlike other sciences: basically the "underlying observable" is not an objective thing with an independent existence; unlike an atom, the object of economics changes when it's being studied and changes with the underlying changes in political and economic structure. Even its aims are open for discussion! Economics has more in common with sociology or philosophy than any of the hard sciences.

It's easy to see, if nothing else, because economic theories fall in and out of fashion just like political ideologies do.

I think it's perfectly fine to disagree with non-mainstream economics, or to criticise it on some concrete grounds. But to pretend anyone who disagrees with $current_view is a crank... Well it's symptomatic of the quasi-orwellian reality which certain sectors want to impose: it's not enough to say "ours is the right way", they want to say "ours is the only possible way".

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

#210

Post by lanfeust6 »

genericresponse wrote: post #130
lanfeust6 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Argentina didn't manage shit You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion

Ehh... you're both wrong. Argentina ended 2024 with an annual inflation rate close to 100%. That's significantly lower, but still hyperinflation. It should be lower this year, but how much is the question. Whether that's maintainable long term is probably the decisive judgement. Argentina has had many cycles of hyperinflation, reset, hyperinflation again. The current bailout is not exactly a positive indicator.

It's all relative, but yes, they're still in trouble. Currency manipulation is also unsustainable. The markets are reacting poorly now in anticipation of the Peronists winning the next govt as well.
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