The Nobel Prize in Economics Is Fake
2nd October 2024
The Nobel Prize in Economics does not exist. UChicago should stop pretending otherwise—hinging our university’s reputation on an outright fraud is not a good look. And UChicago Booth students and staff should be more skeptical of our economics faculty, whose work relies heavily on arbitrary neoliberal assumptions and overly technical methods that cannot be explained in plain English.
When Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he established five Nobel Prizes in his will: physics, chemistry, “physiology and medicine,” literature, and peace. Not economics. The Nobel family’s descendants have protested the economics prize, with one of them calling it a “PR coup by economists to improve their reputation” and a “cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest.”
The award most people today call the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is more properly called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was established in 1968 by the economists running Sweden’s central bank, partly to shield the bank from democratic accountability and support their push to make it “independent.” To do this, those economists needed to market their discipline to the world as a “science” with technical, correct answers that only experts could fully understand and that lowly voters did not get to question.
Any prize that Paul Krugman can win is not a real prize.
Economics is not a science because it is not predictive; it is merely suggestive.
Like medicine, it deals with humans, and (as with medicine, which isn’t a science either) humans are too complex to predict. Oh, it has scientific aspects — anything you can measure is, after all, scientific — but to be a science means to be able to make predictions that come true and do so invariably.
Like all pseudosciences, economics depends on statistical correlation rather than actual causation (like a real science, such as physics) for it’s ‘predictions’, which quite often don’t come true; anybody would be a fool to depend on such a ‘science’.