Doing a legitimate experiment on remote seeing for instance is by definition science, just like doing experiments trying to prove luminiferous ether were science back in the 19th century. Science is a methodology, not facts and something doesn't become science just because your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.
Right, the question is whether the hypothesis or theory is falsifiable, regardless of the subject matter. Economic theories are falisifable; we can see pretty clearly how much the theoretical models deviate from observation.
economists proudly ignore real world data. They care about their models, even when they are obviously wrong.
Milton Friedman said "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions."
To me the "economics is not real science" people is much like the "evolution is just a theory" crowd. When you don't like the results, it is comforting to find a way to not believe it.
I have a pretty serious physics education, and in my older days I find Economics to be the most fascinating science. It makes much of society understandable in ays tha were not possible before.
That said, the sub field of Macro Economics is a very difficult field for several reasons, and it may be impossible to get very far on it. But that is only one branch on that tree.
I confess to being one of those people who doesn't believe Darwinian evolution explains the origin of species (let alone the origin of life). Of course, I see myself as taking an entirely empirical and scientific perspective, but I do understand that those who approach the question with a blind faith in a materialist worldview (and buy into a "materialism of the gaps" perspective) will not be able to accept any empirical evidence or scientific argument that contradicts their presuppositions.
Most of econ is still by far more scientific than sociology, psychology, other various humanities and maybe even climate science.
Okay, a Swedish institute once a year awards less money than an average startup gets at a Series A. Is it really such a disgrace compared to what’s actually going on in academia every day?
My purpose was not to be dismissive of economics as a proper science. It was just a clarification the this prize is not part of the Alfred Nobel's will, it was instituted in 1968 by Sweden's central bank (in a way that you might call a bit shady).
Nowadays, Swedish media is quite good at making this distinction, but international media is still rather confused about this.
I didn't see your initial remark, but I wanted to commend you for saying this; it's so rare to see any kind of regret or change in opinion in an online discourse. Thank you for following up.
> Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.
Somebody should superimpose the U-curve with the fertility rate graph. It might be that women employment picked up again when women gave up on having children/families. If you live in a 1st world country and you're too poor to afford to have a family (and by this I mean to be able to raise children with a certain standard of living) you might as well have a career... just to have some semblance of meaning in life.
Income negatively correlated with family fertility rates in the US. That doesn’t mean that economic strife doesn’t lower fertility as some folks will jump to claim though. But I find this proposed explanation to be unlikely.
It's a U-curve as well. Very poor people have low standards when it comes to raising children and less qualms about raising families on welfare with limited opportunities. Once people become educated and middle class but still poor, they have higher aspirations for their children and are less prone to have children if they know they won't be able to provide an adequate standard of living. Rich people have typically an above average number of children. I was mostly talking about the middle class, the ones who are educated but still poor.
I'm sure it feels intuitive when you have the answer but I am slightly surprised since women working in factories (and for lower wages) was a major issue at least from the 19th century.
Without reading into the claim I’m pretty sure it’s driven by the growth of the white collar middle class. whatever growth there was in women working in factories, it was surely less than the fall in women working on farms.
Yup. And work on even a small one-family farm (which all small farmers of all genders would be doing) counts as real work, because the products of that work are sold on the market.
But fast forward on some decades, and housewives working strictly in the home doing domestic labor of rearing and feeding the family and managing the household doesn't count as economic labor because none of the results of that labor are actually being sold on the market. Yes, it's enabling the husband to be more economically productive by not having to worry about that stuff, but that's a second-order effect.
I also recall reading that, in the agrarian Middle Ages, women in farming communities (though also men and children to a lesser degree) did things like spin cloth to sell during the winter when there wasn’t much work to do on the farm to bolster family income during the slow season.
As those “side gigs” moved to factory production (for cloth production that happened very early), I wouldn’t be surprised if families stopped participating due to it not being economically feasible.
Intuitive today, but perhaps not in days past. One criticism of the modern Nobel is that they are being given to old people for work done decades previous. Rather than spur promising scientists to extend good work, the Nobel is now more of a lifetime achievement award for people nearing the end of distinguished careers. There are exceptions, but this trend is likely tied to much of modern science taking decades between "discovery" of a thing and the "confirmation" necessary for the Nobel.
>Rather than spur promising scientists to extend good work, the Nobel is now more of a lifetime achievement award for people nearing the end of distinguished careers.
It makes sense in economics. You need time to be proven right. Physicists and chemists can produce a bunch of equations that we can plug in and get the results, or perform an experiment to demonstrate. Social science can only be proven retrospectively.
there is a good reason why the committee chooses older researchers with seemingly outdated, decades-old contributions over younger researchers.
you can't award the nobel posthumously. in other words, once someone dies, they take their life's work with them to the grave without any further formal recognition. so older folks are prioritized because everyone knows that the younger folks still have long lives ahead of them, and their time to shine will come.
also, the reason why nobel laureates in economics tend to be older than the other sciences is because of the lag time of proving important contributions.
in the basic sciences, new discoveries can be overnight. of course, incremental progress takes decades as well, but the culmination --- the breaking point of a new discovery --- can be instantaneous.
in economics, which is better categorized as speculation of rational and irrational human decision-making, it may take decades to prove a theorem (especially in macro). there is no "overnight success". you can say the most absurd or correct claim such as "new neoclassical synthesis is the best monetary framework!" but even if it were true, it doesn't matter unless there is substantial evidence. and that usually takes decades because of long-term business cycles and novel, unprecedented crises.
the consequence of this lag time between when the seminal paper is published and when there is consensus in the field is massive.
example:
paul romer won the econ nobel in 2018. but the paper he wrote that earned him the nobel was actually his PhD thesis from all the way back in 1983, when he 29. he hypothesized that one of the most important contributions to long-term economic growth was ideas, and how it is free to distribute and re-use innovative ideas.
even if his hypothesis were true in 1983, it wouldn't matter unless there was substantial evidence of it. and you can be sure that the rapid growth many developing countries experienced post-1980s and onwards helped to support his claim.
I don't think the U-shaped curve will be intuitive to everyone - some conservative social narratives say that married women entering the workfore is a twentieth-century innovation. Although I'm with you that the causes of these patterns seem pretty intuitive to me and to many.
(Not trying to start a political debate or flamewar here - I was raised with these narratives, so it's an interesting graph to me)
Granted, the merit of some of the awards is questionable, but I think e.g.: Nash's work on game theory or Kahneman/Tvservky's on the pyschology of judgment definitely fall under the umbrella of "science".
Turing wasn't nearly as well known as he is now. The cryptoanalysis of the Enigma remained classified until the early 1970s, long after the Turing award was established (the first award was given in 1966).
No, a newly named award shouldn't really have any existing clout associated with it, and can make it's own reputation. The Turing award is not treated like a nobel prize by pretty much anyone, though it is respected.
Economics decided that kind of thing, say a "Smith award" wouldn't get them enough clout, so better to abuse a brand name for it's value. How classic.
Very interesting examples. For Nash, Von Neumann contributions to the field were orders of magnitude more important. For Kahneman and Tversky let's not forget that the foundations are quite shaky to quote [0]
Plenty of hypothesis are formed and experiments done in economics:
> The Kansas experiment refers to Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117, a bill signed into law in May 2012 by Kansas state Governor Sam Brownback, and its impact on Kansas.[1][2] It was one of the largest income tax cuts in the state's history.[3] The Kansas experiment has also been called the "Great Kansas Tax Cut Experiment",[4] the "Red-state experiment",[5] "the tax experiment in Kansas",[6] and "one of the cleanest experiments for how tax cuts affect economic growth in the U.S."[7] The cuts were based on model legislation published by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),[8][9][10][11] supported by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer,[12] and anti-tax leader Grover Norquist.[13] The law cut taxes by US$231 million in its first year, and cuts were projected to total US$934 million annually after six years,[14] by eliminating taxes on business income for the owners of almost 200,000 businesses and cutting individual income tax rates.[14]
> Brownback compared his tax policies with those of Ronald Reagan, and described them as "a real live experiment",[15] which would be a "shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy",[16] and predicted that by 2020 they would have created an additional 23,000 jobs.[3] By 2017, state revenues had fallen by hundreds of millions of dollars,[17] causing spending on roads, bridges, and education to be slashed.[18][19] With economic growth remaining consistently below average,[4] the Republican Legislature of Kansas voted to roll back the cuts; although Brownback vetoed the repeal, the legislature succeeded in overriding his veto.[20]
When the Fed first announced 'quantitative easing' in 2010, it was an experiment on the economy and a whole bunch of folks made predictions on what would happen:
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
A bunch of others said the above was non-sense: one group's models were right, and the other groups' were wrong (the folks who wrote the letter).
Even true on Wall Street, where Gross of PIMCO famously predicted things would go a certainly way and put up a lot of money… and his predictions were wrong (as certain economists said they were):
> But why was Gross betting so heavily against Treasuries? Brad DeLong tries to rationalize[1] Gross’s behavior in terms of a coherent story about an impending U.S. recovery, which would lift us out of the liquidity trap. But Gross wasn’t saying anything like that. Instead, he was claiming that the Fed’s asset purchases — QE2 — were holding rates down, and warned that the impending spike in rates when QE2 ended would derail recovery.
> So why did he believe all that? It all comes down, I’d argue, to liquidity trap denial.
> Since 2008 the basic logic of the economic situation has been that the private sector is trying to run a huge surplus, and the public sector isn’t willing to run a corresponding deficit. The result is an economy awash in desired savings with nowhere to go. This in turn means that budget deficits aren’t competing with private borrowing, and therefore need not drive up interest rates. This isn’t hindsight; it’s what I and others hav...
Einstein's models made a prediction, people tested/measured that prediction, it turned out true/accurate. General theory has made other predictions, and empirical observations have found them to be accurate as well.
A phenomena was going to happen (e.g., tax law changes): some economic models predicted X would happen, and some predicted Y would. We can see which were more accurate.
Plenty of "real" science is/was done outside of controlled experiments.
When you branch of from real sciences, defining a lower of bar of quality, unable to meet the standard of the established field.
Also if you branched off of social sciences some time ago and you never bothered to implement reproducibility reforms.
That's not to say all papers of such a science are garbage, just most will be, since not only is the bar for acceptance lower, those sciences also attract people who are unable to meet the standards of other fields.
Feels like everything other than theology is really just junk science, isn't it? After all, that is what universities were largely created for to start with.
Falsifiability, controllability. Most hard sciences study and explain phenomena in an isolated and controlled system. You have well defined input parameters, some starting context, and you observe the output over time. You change your input and/or the context and you note the change in the output. Because the system is controlled and isolated, the experiment, if repeated by a different observer, should in theory give them the same results. From those observations, you can begin to infer what the plausible relationships are between the actors in your experiment and devise your hypotheses. Physics and chemistry for example leave little room to ambiguity. Biology because of factors like aging and mutation has to account for some variance.
But the further away we move from an isolated system and include increasingly unpredictable or difficult to account for inputs or context, the less we can claim to have predictable output. Some nutrition advices for example are questionable, because they aim to give simplistic recommendations based on isolated observations of a phenomenon, that must eventually work as part of a sophisticated synergistic system. Many disciplines currently considered (or disputed) to be science allege to map inputs to output in similarly complex systems. Economy must account for human behaviour, culture, environment, leadership, just to name a few volatile factors (plus a crystal ball for things like COVID-19, remote work, Russia vs Ukraine).
Einstein's models made a prediction, people 'tested' that prediction in Nature, and it turned out accurate. General theory has made other predictions, and empirical observations have found them to be accurate as well.
Plenty of "real" science is/was done outside of controlled experiments in a lab.
A phenomena was going to happen (e.g., tax law changes): some economic models predicted X would happen, and some predicted Y would. We can see which were more accurate and which were falsified:
Every time the Federal Reserve makes a policy change there are people running their models on what will happen, and if their models are right they make a lot of money, and if they're wrong they lose a lot of money:
> But why was Gross betting so heavily against Treasuries? Brad DeLong tries to rationalize[1] Gross’s behavior in terms of a coherent story about an impending U.S. recovery, which would lift us out of the liquidity trap. But Gross wasn’t saying anything like that. Instead, he was claiming that the Fed’s asset purchases — QE2 — were holding rates down, and warned that the impending spike in rates when QE2 ended would derail recovery.
> So why did he believe all that? It all comes down, I’d argue, to liquidity trap denial.
> Since 2008 the basic logic of the economic situation has been that the private sector is trying to run a huge surplus, and the public sector isn’t willing to run a corresponding deficit. The result is an economy awash in desired savings with nowhere to go. This in turn means that budget deficits aren’t competing with private borrowing, and therefore need not drive up interest rates. This isn’t hindsight; it’s what I and others have been saying since the very beginning[2].
If people don't want to bother accepting the results of these experiments and continue following models for reason other than accuracy, that's hardly the fault of the field of study. See the movie Behind the Curve on folks doing perfectly valid experiments and completely ignoring the results:
If the ACM, instead of founding the Turing award, had attempted to pay to get a Nobel memorial prize in Computer Science, we would have easily recognized it for what it was - a pathetic play for respectability.
Or an acceptance of the fact that many orders of magnitude more people would recognize that a Nobel Prize in Computer Science represented a notable achievement than would have any idea what the Turing award is and why they should care.
(Obviously they didn't and there are many important awards in their respective fields that don't have Nobel in their titles but it's hard to dispute that the Nobel prizes carry a lot of brand recognition.)
The name Computer Science itself is a marketing ploy to convince people that it is a real science (and not just another branch of engineering). Seems to be working for CS, and I can easily imagine people on this forum would be happy to defend the legitimacy of the Swedish Institute of Sciences Nobel Memorial Prize in Computational Science.
I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.
Historically Computer Science was often more associated with mathematics in academia than it was with electrical engineering--depending upon the school. Today, most people would probably agree that it's mostly an engineering discipline, albeit perhaps lacking some of the formal methods and practices that other branches of engineering tend to have. But it was presumably less clear when the term was coined in the early 1960s.
> albeit perhaps lacking some of the formal methods and practices that other branches of engineering tend to have.
I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").
> I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").
But compare usage of formal methods and practices in software engineers in a startup (or even well-established company) with engineers designing a bridge, for example.
Isn't CS proper (not software engineering) much more a field of math?
> I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.
Hmm, good point, I wonder if it's that or just good old internet "ackhuallyyy".
Much of theoretical computer science is math, like much of modern theoretical physics is also math. “Computational science” brings up images of computational complexity theory, computability, information theory, distributed consensus, type theory etc.
> Much of theoretical computer science is math, like much of modern theoretical physics is also math.
Math is not science - regardless of whether it’s masquerading as computer science or certain branches of theoretical physics.
This makes me sound down on mathematics which I’m certainly not. It’s both useful and can be profoundly beautiful. And it can be an integral tool in science — or studied on its own merits. But it’s not science.
I used to do the "it's not a real nobel" take as well when I was young and edgy, and then I realized that Alfred Nobel was just another rich guy buying his way post-mortem prestige*, not even doing so during his life. Even if "most of the applications were civil", with the economic devastation it brought and the undeniable military uses, I'm not sure the "merchant of death" moniker was unearned.
So by now, I think that the Sveriges riksbanks pris might have "better pedigree" and that Alfred Nobel is honored by the dedication, especially given the stellar research that it is often recognizing
The moral burden that Nobel's memory should bear is probably worth debating but we absolutely should take the opportunity to remind ourselves that the Nobel prize (whether the 'actual' one or this riksbanks thing) is one possible prize among many others much lesser known, and that there frequently is highly important research that never wins any notable prize at all. Examples: Freeman Dyson, Gilbert Lewis, Margaret Burbidge -- none of them won the Nobel but won other prizes for arguably equally important work. I'm not even suggesting going 'out there' and mentioning someone like Stephen Wolfram.
The way that the Nobel prize gets referred to in American media sometimes makes me feel like it is an almost religious invocation (except that they do not actually say the words "hallowed" or "blessed") -- if a Nobel laureate has said X is the case, who are you to say X is not the case, etc.
> During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men.
> However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between [sic] and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.
Interesting situation developing if the main effort is in educating women who then leave the workforce. I assume one of these is going to have to give - presumably who takes primary caregiver responsbilities.
I wonder how much, if any, this is balanced on the male side. How many young men re-enter or double down on work once their first child appears? Women may drop out to become primary caregivers but how many men drop into jobs that they previously would not have taken? Go to any military recruitment center and you will find young men with same story: "My girlfriend is pregnant; I need a real job." I'm reminded of that classic Simpsons story where Homer has to abandon his dream job at the bowling alley to take a soul-crushing but higher-paying job at the nuclear plant. Is decreased workforce participation by Marge offset by increased productivity from Homer?
A corollary to this is that Homer's choice of job was dictated by the needs of his family. For many today, the big raise must appear before any decision to have kids. Work now dictates family.
A more egalitarian solution would be longer paid parental leave and earlier free childcare. Are women leaving jobs due to a genuine desire to be a full-time parent, or are women leaving jobs because the alternative is putting a three-month-old in prohibitively expensive daycare?
"the impact on earnings for the birth mother is [almost identical in both family types](https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2016/wp2016-08-does-...). Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones"
Hungary, a country I'd not usually quote for progressive policy has a great solution to this: Women get their subsequent income taxes reduced by 25% for each child they get.
This heavily incentivises mothers to return to the workforce, and couples to plan around this. It is also generous enough to be a real boon to young parents.
> Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
> …
> The weight of the evidence, however, is what we find most persuasive and what we have emphasized. The point estimates, moreover, are almost all economically significant.
Andrew Gelman:
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions. And the bit about the point estimates being “economically significant”—that doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s just what you get when you have a small sample and noisy data, you get noisy estimates so you can get big numbers.
This is incredibly common due to multiple levels of media hype. I got interviewed by someone from university PR for a series on what different grad students were working on during my PhD. We had a 30 minute phone call and the result a week later was an article that I was allowed to edit before release. The article was conveyed the most ambitious possible take of my research agenda and had a rather forced narrative relating it to the department beer league softball team I played on for a single season at that point. I could have rewrote the whole thing but it wasn’t factually wrong and I had neither the time nor care to do so.
This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.
> and demonstrably antithetical to Nobel’s original intent
I'm curious as to your logic here. His intent was to award those who "better humanity". Why do you consider economics research not for the betterment of humanity?
What was his original intent, and how is it antithetical to offer a prize in economics?
I understand that perhaps he selected certain disciplines and didn’t include economics, but I’m not understanding how to get from not including economics to “antithetical”.
I mean, the impetus for the Nobel prize was Nobel seeing what his own obituary was going to be and realizing people didn't like him, and wanting to build up some good press. So unless the prize goes to someone who shows that the invention of dynamite was a bad thing I would say it is still honoring his original intent.
It has the same problem as other social sciences in that often the experiments are set up in ways that just so happen to prove the ideological biases of the researchers. It also happens that the researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
"often" is not a number, and Economics has improved it's reproducibility rate more than any other social science.
> researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
The most well-known Economists living, to the public, lean anywhere between left and far left. Stiglitz, Varoufakis, Piketty, Krugman. So that's horseshit. I also couldn't think of one who's "fanatic" of the prevailing order at all, they all have criticisms of the government; unless "prevailing order" for you translates to Liberal democracy.
Stiglitz I mostly agree he is "popular". Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray. Piketty often gets headpats from liberal press when he stirs, but is otherwise not really given the time of day because no one seems to have the energy to contend with his tomes. I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public.
We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, but again, both couch their analyses in metrics that pre-suppose the supremacy of, and justify, the ways "value" are considered and what constitutes "progress" in popular discourse.
> Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray
A Liberal and Keynesian. I'd say firmly on the left side of the spectrum, this is only contested by the more zealous Twitter leftists who'd frame the lot of them as right-wing/neo-liberals.
> I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public.
None of their ideas are well-known to the public, just their political affiliation. Granted Varoufakis, it having been years since the Greek crisis, is receiving less attention now.
> We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs,
I can already hear the collective "who?"
On the right I guess Sowell is still alive, over 90 years old.
Could you be specific and point to a highly cited study that set up such an experiment? What in the experimental design do you think mechanically reinforced ideological biases and how would you have designed the experiment instead?
> He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".
To be fair I would definitely consider Goldin’s work the kind of work that improves society and hence that Nobel would want awarded.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadNobel didn’t give us a prize? That’s just a problem to be solved with money and social engineering, like so many aspects of economics.
Not sure how you match those two but keep at it
Milton Friedman said "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions."
I have a pretty serious physics education, and in my older days I find Economics to be the most fascinating science. It makes much of society understandable in ays tha were not possible before.
That said, the sub field of Macro Economics is a very difficult field for several reasons, and it may be impossible to get very far on it. But that is only one branch on that tree.
Okay, a Swedish institute once a year awards less money than an average startup gets at a Series A. Is it really such a disgrace compared to what’s actually going on in academia every day?
My purpose was not to be dismissive of economics as a proper science. It was just a clarification the this prize is not part of the Alfred Nobel's will, it was instituted in 1968 by Sweden's central bank (in a way that you might call a bit shady).
Nowadays, Swedish media is quite good at making this distinction, but international media is still rather confused about this.
Seems fairly intuitive, no?
But fast forward on some decades, and housewives working strictly in the home doing domestic labor of rearing and feeding the family and managing the household doesn't count as economic labor because none of the results of that labor are actually being sold on the market. Yes, it's enabling the husband to be more economically productive by not having to worry about that stuff, but that's a second-order effect.
As those “side gigs” moved to factory production (for cloth production that happened very early), I wouldn’t be surprised if families stopped participating due to it not being economically feasible.
It makes sense in economics. You need time to be proven right. Physicists and chemists can produce a bunch of equations that we can plug in and get the results, or perform an experiment to demonstrate. Social science can only be proven retrospectively.
you can't award the nobel posthumously. in other words, once someone dies, they take their life's work with them to the grave without any further formal recognition. so older folks are prioritized because everyone knows that the younger folks still have long lives ahead of them, and their time to shine will come.
also, the reason why nobel laureates in economics tend to be older than the other sciences is because of the lag time of proving important contributions.
in the basic sciences, new discoveries can be overnight. of course, incremental progress takes decades as well, but the culmination --- the breaking point of a new discovery --- can be instantaneous.
in economics, which is better categorized as speculation of rational and irrational human decision-making, it may take decades to prove a theorem (especially in macro). there is no "overnight success". you can say the most absurd or correct claim such as "new neoclassical synthesis is the best monetary framework!" but even if it were true, it doesn't matter unless there is substantial evidence. and that usually takes decades because of long-term business cycles and novel, unprecedented crises.
the consequence of this lag time between when the seminal paper is published and when there is consensus in the field is massive.
example:
paul romer won the econ nobel in 2018. but the paper he wrote that earned him the nobel was actually his PhD thesis from all the way back in 1983, when he 29. he hypothesized that one of the most important contributions to long-term economic growth was ideas, and how it is free to distribute and re-use innovative ideas.
even if his hypothesis were true in 1983, it wouldn't matter unless there was substantial evidence of it. and you can be sure that the rapid growth many developing countries experienced post-1980s and onwards helped to support his claim.
(Not trying to start a political debate or flamewar here - I was raised with these narratives, so it's an interesting graph to me)
It doesn't make them Nobel prizes.
At least the ACM never attempted to hang on the coattails of the the Nobel Prize by naming the Turing award for Alfred Nobel.
Aren't they riding on the coattails of Turing instead?
Economics decided that kind of thing, say a "Smith award" wouldn't get them enough clout, so better to abuse a brand name for it's value. How classic.
[0] https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
What makes a science "real" and what makes it "fake"?
> The Kansas experiment refers to Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117, a bill signed into law in May 2012 by Kansas state Governor Sam Brownback, and its impact on Kansas.[1][2] It was one of the largest income tax cuts in the state's history.[3] The Kansas experiment has also been called the "Great Kansas Tax Cut Experiment",[4] the "Red-state experiment",[5] "the tax experiment in Kansas",[6] and "one of the cleanest experiments for how tax cuts affect economic growth in the U.S."[7] The cuts were based on model legislation published by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),[8][9][10][11] supported by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer,[12] and anti-tax leader Grover Norquist.[13] The law cut taxes by US$231 million in its first year, and cuts were projected to total US$934 million annually after six years,[14] by eliminating taxes on business income for the owners of almost 200,000 businesses and cutting individual income tax rates.[14]
> Brownback compared his tax policies with those of Ronald Reagan, and described them as "a real live experiment",[15] which would be a "shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy",[16] and predicted that by 2020 they would have created an additional 23,000 jobs.[3] By 2017, state revenues had fallen by hundreds of millions of dollars,[17] causing spending on roads, bridges, and education to be slashed.[18][19] With economic growth remaining consistently below average,[4] the Republican Legislature of Kansas voted to roll back the cuts; although Brownback vetoed the repeal, the legislature succeeded in overriding his veto.[20]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
When the Fed first announced 'quantitative easing' in 2010, it was an experiment on the economy and a whole bunch of folks made predictions on what would happen:
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-12460
A bunch of others said the above was non-sense: one group's models were right, and the other groups' were wrong (the folks who wrote the letter).
Even true on Wall Street, where Gross of PIMCO famously predicted things would go a certainly way and put up a lot of money… and his predictions were wrong (as certain economists said they were):
> But why was Gross betting so heavily against Treasuries? Brad DeLong tries to rationalize[1] Gross’s behavior in terms of a coherent story about an impending U.S. recovery, which would lift us out of the liquidity trap. But Gross wasn’t saying anything like that. Instead, he was claiming that the Fed’s asset purchases — QE2 — were holding rates down, and warned that the impending spike in rates when QE2 ended would derail recovery.
> So why did he believe all that? It all comes down, I’d argue, to liquidity trap denial.
> Since 2008 the basic logic of the economic situation has been that the private sector is trying to run a huge surplus, and the public sector isn’t willing to run a corresponding deficit. The result is an economy awash in desired savings with nowhere to go. This in turn means that budget deficits aren’t competing with private borrowing, and therefore need not drive up interest rates. This isn’t hindsight; it’s what I and others hav...
What was the control in Eddington?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
Einstein's models made a prediction, people tested/measured that prediction, it turned out true/accurate. General theory has made other predictions, and empirical observations have found them to be accurate as well.
A phenomena was going to happen (e.g., tax law changes): some economic models predicted X would happen, and some predicted Y would. We can see which were more accurate.
Plenty of "real" science is/was done outside of controlled experiments.
Also if you branched off of social sciences some time ago and you never bothered to implement reproducibility reforms.
That's not to say all papers of such a science are garbage, just most will be, since not only is the bar for acceptance lower, those sciences also attract people who are unable to meet the standards of other fields.
But you are starting at "real science" here without defining it and saying the 'branches' are lower than said 'real' science.
With that first sentence I was mostly taking aim at whatever newly made up junk degrees we have right now.
Add the word “mad” to the beginning. If it sounds scary it’s a real science, if it sounds silly and makes you laugh it’s not.
“Mad chemist” sounds scary, what if they make sarin gas or something?
“Mad economist” sounds like someone left in a huff at a federal reserve board meeting.
You couldn't parody this if you tried.
But the further away we move from an isolated system and include increasingly unpredictable or difficult to account for inputs or context, the less we can claim to have predictable output. Some nutrition advices for example are questionable, because they aim to give simplistic recommendations based on isolated observations of a phenomenon, that must eventually work as part of a sophisticated synergistic system. Many disciplines currently considered (or disputed) to be science allege to map inputs to output in similarly complex systems. Economy must account for human behaviour, culture, environment, leadership, just to name a few volatile factors (plus a crystal ball for things like COVID-19, remote work, Russia vs Ukraine).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
Einstein's models made a prediction, people 'tested' that prediction in Nature, and it turned out accurate. General theory has made other predictions, and empirical observations have found them to be accurate as well.
Plenty of "real" science is/was done outside of controlled experiments in a lab.
A phenomena was going to happen (e.g., tax law changes): some economic models predicted X would happen, and some predicted Y would. We can see which were more accurate and which were falsified:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
Rotterdam is running an experiment right now with regards to real estate markets and regulation:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers
* https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/06/buy-to-let-ban-is-good-for-...
Every time the Federal Reserve makes a policy change there are people running their models on what will happen, and if their models are right they make a lot of money, and if they're wrong they lose a lot of money:
> But why was Gross betting so heavily against Treasuries? Brad DeLong tries to rationalize[1] Gross’s behavior in terms of a coherent story about an impending U.S. recovery, which would lift us out of the liquidity trap. But Gross wasn’t saying anything like that. Instead, he was claiming that the Fed’s asset purchases — QE2 — were holding rates down, and warned that the impending spike in rates when QE2 ended would derail recovery.
> So why did he believe all that? It all comes down, I’d argue, to liquidity trap denial.
> Since 2008 the basic logic of the economic situation has been that the private sector is trying to run a huge surplus, and the public sector isn’t willing to run a corresponding deficit. The result is an economy awash in desired savings with nowhere to go. This in turn means that budget deficits aren’t competing with private borrowing, and therefore need not drive up interest rates. This isn’t hindsight; it’s what I and others have been saying since the very beginning[2].
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
If people don't want to bother accepting the results of these experiments and continue following models for reason other than accuracy, that's hardly the fault of the field of study. See the movie Behind the Curve on folks doing perfectly valid experiments and completely ignoring the results:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Curve
Clip (ensure unmuted):
* https://old.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/sjeoqd/flatearthe...
* https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1559907302483935237
(Obviously they didn't and there are many important awards in their respective fields that don't have Nobel in their titles but it's hard to dispute that the Nobel prizes carry a lot of brand recognition.)
I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.
I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").
But compare usage of formal methods and practices in software engineers in a startup (or even well-established company) with engineers designing a bridge, for example.
I'm not an engineer. I am a subject matter expert employed as a generalist.
> I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.
Hmm, good point, I wonder if it's that or just good old internet "ackhuallyyy".
So maybe not a marketing ploy.
Does that make it a science? I think nobody in this thread is using the same definition of science.
Math is not science - regardless of whether it’s masquerading as computer science or certain branches of theoretical physics.
This makes me sound down on mathematics which I’m certainly not. It’s both useful and can be profoundly beautiful. And it can be an integral tool in science — or studied on its own merits. But it’s not science.
Little to no opinion on what it should be called, personally. The asterisk associated with the name is just what comes to mind first.
So by now, I think that the Sveriges riksbanks pris might have "better pedigree" and that Alfred Nobel is honored by the dedication, especially given the stellar research that it is often recognizing
The way that the Nobel prize gets referred to in American media sometimes makes me feel like it is an almost religious invocation (except that they do not actually say the words "hallowed" or "blessed") -- if a Nobel laureate has said X is the case, who are you to say X is not the case, etc.
> However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between [sic] and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.
Interesting situation developing if the main effort is in educating women who then leave the workforce. I assume one of these is going to have to give - presumably who takes primary caregiver responsbilities.
A corollary to this is that Homer's choice of job was dictated by the needs of his family. For many today, the big raise must appear before any decision to have kids. Work now dictates family.
There seems to be good reasons for not separating an extremely young child from their mother.
"the impact on earnings for the birth mother is [almost identical in both family types](https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2016/wp2016-08-does-...). Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones"
This heavily incentivises mothers to return to the workforce, and couples to plan around this. It is also generous enough to be a real boon to young parents.
Economists just call it economics. And you will most likely never meet an “Associate Professor of Economic Science” either.
[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse:
> Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.
> …
> The weight of the evidence, however, is what we find most persuasive and what we have emphasized. The point estimates, moreover, are almost all economically significant.
Andrew Gelman:
> This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions. And the bit about the point estimates being “economically significant”—that doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s just what you get when you have a small sample and noisy data, you get noisy estimates so you can get big numbers.
This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.
I'm curious as to your logic here. His intent was to award those who "better humanity". Why do you consider economics research not for the betterment of humanity?
I understand that perhaps he selected certain disciplines and didn’t include economics, but I’m not understanding how to get from not including economics to “antithetical”.
> researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
The most well-known Economists living, to the public, lean anywhere between left and far left. Stiglitz, Varoufakis, Piketty, Krugman. So that's horseshit. I also couldn't think of one who's "fanatic" of the prevailing order at all, they all have criticisms of the government; unless "prevailing order" for you translates to Liberal democracy.
We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, but again, both couch their analyses in metrics that pre-suppose the supremacy of, and justify, the ways "value" are considered and what constitutes "progress" in popular discourse.
A Liberal and Keynesian. I'd say firmly on the left side of the spectrum, this is only contested by the more zealous Twitter leftists who'd frame the lot of them as right-wing/neo-liberals.
> I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public.
None of their ideas are well-known to the public, just their political affiliation. Granted Varoufakis, it having been years since the Greek crisis, is receiving less attention now.
> We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs,
I can already hear the collective "who?"
On the right I guess Sowell is still alive, over 90 years old.
Ironic/refreshing/funny to see that "men" are literally absent from the narrative here. How do I make a PR to correct a mistake in their copy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
To be fair I would definitely consider Goldin’s work the kind of work that improves society and hence that Nobel would want awarded.