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This isn't a Nobel pick even though the name contains the word Nobel.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
51–60 of 217 posts
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#52That'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…
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#53Sustained 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…
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 grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale. They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena a…
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Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN discussions are predictable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
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 ...
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#56I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently. I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa. Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. I…
Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#58I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#59I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently. I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa. Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. I…
A park will generate less revenue than an apartment building, a sports complex, or a cafe.
Not all value is quantifiable in USD.
Re: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.
This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation. > Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life f…
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.