Thursday, October 09, 2008

Who Should Win The "Nobel" Prize In Economics?

I say Paul Davidson and Luigi Pasinetti should win it.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know dead ones are not valid, but how about Karl Marx? Oh, I forgot, they kinda gave to him a few years back...

And the Nobel prize for economics goes to... Karl Marx!

Still, hopefully the current crisis will mean a significant move from the neo-classical nonsense which is the mainstream. Back in the 1930s, it happened to some degree but the changes started around Keynes were stuck back into neo-classicalism (thanks partly to Keynes himself, as Joan Robinson later lamented).

Paul Davidson would be nice, but I doubt it.

I half hope they pick some neo-classical economist whose major contribution is on finance markets and why they are rational and efficient... That way the ideological bias of the whole thing would be obvious.

Iain
An Anarchist FAQ

YouNotSneaky! said...

"Luigi Pasinetti should win it"

Well, I doubt he'll get the It-May-Be-Fake-But-At-Least-We-Never-Gave-One-To-Kissinger-Or-Arafat Prize, but he did recently get his own Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Pasinetti

Please expand and correct. If you want, I won't be offended if you start with a [[Criticisms]] section.

Robert Vienneau said...

Richard Goodwin was available for much for most of the time the prize was around, and I think of him too as at that level. As my previous post shows, he too developed ideas related to Marxist cycle theory.

They had a couple of years when they could have given it to Kalecki for ideas much like Keynes'.

YNS, one of the first thing that strikes me about that page is the need to expand journal titles and to put journal and book titles in italics. I don't think I'll do that sort of copyediting. But thanks for the page.

Anonymous said...

Well, Paul Krugman got it. He is quite innovative, if limited by his neo-classical Keynesian roots. I can think of worse people to give it too (and many have been so honoured!).

The appropriate link is: "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"

His blog can be of interest.

And people like Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor were overlooked along with Kalecki. In the case of Kaldor, apparently destroying Friedman's Monetarism and what von Hayek got the prize for does not count!

But I think their politics more of less excluded them being given it, particularly as their economic contributions exposed a lot of the problems with neo-classical economics.

Iain
An Anarchist FAQ

YouNotSneaky! said...

Hmm, yeah. Not fan of such copy editing myself. That free labor supply drops to zero when it comes to the tedious stuff. Also created one on Goodwin and plan for one on the Goodwin model. Mind if I base it mostly on this post?

Robert Vienneau said...

I've been thinking, Iain, of saying something about why I'm ambivalent about Paul Krugman. Since I have no such post, you can see how well I've thought this through. They could have given Kaldor the prize for the Kaldor-Hicks criterion in welfare economics. I agree that they deliberately overlooked some.

YouNotSneaky, yes, you can base that Wikipedia entry on my previous post, including the diagrams. Goodwin's original model had all profits saved (s = 1). That's gracious of you, so I will not comment on your behavior at Crooked Timber.

YouNotSneaky! said...

Thanks. I'm gonna use your Figure 2 in the article. Here's the article but it's still pretty preliminary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwin_Model