Underwhelming economics Nobel

The three winners this year explain little that we didn't already know. What they don't reveal would fill an encyclopedia

- R JAGANNATHAN

Sometimes, prestigious awards are best left unawarded, especially when the quality of claimants do not live up to certain standards. This year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, known as the Economics Nobel, was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson, allegedly for advancing our "understanding of the differences in prosperity between nations".

Here are my reasons. One must start with the inherent flaw in how the award is named. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sees the Prize as a recognition of excellence in the "Economic Sciences". Physics is a science, chemistry is one too, and so is biology. But economics is about human responses to economic incentives and penalties, and its success (or failure) follows from an understanding of psychology and sociology. So economics is not a precise science, and no Nobel winner is a scientist of any kind.

Next, given the likely paucity of groundbreaking research—especially as many economic theories, like modern monetary theory, seem to be collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions—the committee seems to find safety in numbers. It awards a bunch of economists and not just one. In the last four years, only once—in 2023—did the Nobel committee award the Prize to a single recipient (Claudia Goldin, who documented women's wages and labor market participation rates over centuries). To be fair, research is often a team effort, but we also must note the tendency to award the prize to multiple recipients at the same time.