'Nobel' Prize-Winning Economists Show Capitalism Is Not Efficient

The bankers at the Swedish central bank, in the 1960s, wanted to justify their political independence. It would be nice if the general public thought of them as experts in some sort of science, not making political decisions in favor of the owning class. So they set up a 'Nobel' prize, that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The first prize was awarded in 1969. You can find the start of a list here. The table below provides an inadequate overview of a selection of winners of this ‘Nobel’ prize.

Table 1: Selected 'Nobel' Prizes

Year	Economist(s)	Work
1978	Herbert Simon	When making choices all people deviate from the strictly rational. He described companies as adaptable systems, with physical, personal, and social components
2001	George Akerlof, Michael Spence, Joseph Stiglitz	Demonstrated that markets in which agents have asymmetric information can be inefficient.
2002	Daniel Kahneman	Demonstrated experimentally that people do not maximize utility. His research on decision-making under uncertainty resulted in the formulation of a new branch of economics, prospect theory
2013	Robert Shiller	Found that stock prices fluctuate much more than corporate dividends. Shiller’s conclusion was therefore that the market is inefficient.
2017	Richard Thaler	Paid special attention to three psychological factors: the tendency to not behave completely rationally, notions of fairness and reasonableness, and lack of self-control.
2021	David Card	Showed empirically that labor markets are not to be explained by supply and demand. Among other things, increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs, as was previously thought.

I do not claim that these, and other 'Nobel' prizes add up to an alternate paradigm. (I have one.) But those who want to understand capitalism might pay some attention to some of this work.