On Entering the Canon: Who Wins the Nobel Memorial Prize?

Meanwhile, my department – along with some others, I suspect, – created a form for predicting the future Nobel Memorial Prize winner(s) in economics. In fact, it might be a good exercise for a sociologist of the economics profession (although a bit too narrow one).

     Who will get the Nobel? Many think of Olivier Blanchard (as Web of Science does) – and indeed, Blanchard might be easily confused with those who already got the Nobel long ago, leaving us puzzled that he is still not among them. It will be an interesting twist if Paul Romer gets the prize (recall his recent devastating critique of macroeconomics, as well as previous ones). From the older generation people like Martin Feldstein seem to be overlooked. All these scholars are known for their penchant for ‘macroeconomic’ issues  – whatever this means today (and the last ‘macroeconomic’ Prize winner was Thomas Sargent in 2011).

     Anyway, the intrigue is still present, since the result can often be unexpected (as it was the case, say, with Elinor Ostrom or could have been, for some, with Maurice Allais or James Buchanan). Current priorities, despite the fact that one gives the Prize for the work done long ago, still might play a role – thus juxtaposing the past economic science and the ever growing complexity of the present one. Multiple winners are also possible and ubiquitous, and here we might get most striking combinations interweaving times, schools and sub-disciplines. One could, for example, pull together Elhanan Helpman, Avinash Dixit and Marc Melitz as theorists of international trade, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Robert Barro as economic growth giants (oops, no Romer and too much Harvard here), or William Easterly and Robert Townsend as classics in ‘economic development’. A more  interdisciplinary – but less probable – perspective would involve Harold Demsetz and Richard Posner as ‘institutionalists’ and, of course, people like H. Peyton Young and W. Brian Arthur or Ernst Fehr (to my mind, Fehr should at some point get the Prize by all conceivable standards) or even Samuel Bowles/Herbert Gintis (with Robert Axelrod as another disciplinary counterpart to Ostrom), many of them could be also paired with the  previously nominated William Baumol or Israel Kirzner. I know much less about econometricians, perhaps those who know more could give their suggestions.

    But this is still a game. What would interest me a lot (and what, as far as I know, is only partly touched upon in the new book by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg – which nonetheless should be fascinating) is the internal mechanics and tensions of the selection process, the struggles behind the nominations and their evaluation, and the techniques of compiling Nobel press releases and «scientific backgrounds». We will never learn the ’true’ story, but we have to come closer to it, because this kind of historical/sociological inquiry might be at least as instructive for understanding the dynamics of economic knowledge as the exercise in prediction.