Earlier today, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for their work on the role of institutions. Congratulations to both of them!
When I was a graduate student at MIT back in the early 1990′s, there was a Nobel Prize betting pool every year. Three years in a row, Oliver Williamson was my choice. At the time, his research was viewed as a hip, iconoclastic contribution to economics — something that was talked about by economists, but that students were not actually trying to emulate (and probably would have been actively discouraged from had they tried to do so). What’s interesting is that in the ensuing 15 years, it seems to me that economists have talked less and less about Williamson’s research, at least in the circles in which I run. I suspect most assistant professors of economics have barely heard of him. Yet I suspect the older generation of economists will applaud this choice.
The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. She is a political scientist, both by training and her career — one of the most decorated political scientists around. So the fact I have never heard of her reflects badly on me, and it also highlights just how substantial the boundaries between social science disciplines remain.
So the short answer is that the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama. Economists want this to be an economists’ prize (after all, economists are self-interested). This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.
I don’t mean to imply this is necessarily a bad thing — economists certainly do not have a monopoly on talent within the social sciences — just that it will be unpopular among my peers.
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Well, that ‘s a start. True- Economists may not seem to like it–It might appear as if Physicists (except one) will like it even less and Mathematicians, Astronomers, Chemists, and Biologists. Perhaps there are some who will and until 2010 most who won’t. Need I say more.
Yes, as far as I know, Psychologists and other so-called softee scientists may not love me, but they will love it– and Women–Met a bio-chemist at the flee market yesterday. She formally got out of our kitchen. As it seems, she couldn’t take the heat. Is making and selling organic soaps. I bought the one in the shape of a pig. Despite their reputation for scavengery, they are so cute and this one smells real natural like oat meal. So who said, “health is wealth!” Now you know.
Robyn Ann Goldstein, 2003
I suspect that many economists will also hate the award because Ostrom dares to recognize the notion of a strong commons which may need to be governed as such instead of relying on privatization and profit motive to guarantee optimal outcomes. I’m no economist myself, but from what I’ve been able to observe of economists that has been an extremely unfashionable view until this year.
I’m curious what was the reaction to Kahneman’s win was like.
Her work is much more in the realm of economics than I believe you give her credit for, regardless of whether economists have heard of her. She did work in the allocation of resources and how economic institutions and situations are formed. Her work is incredibly important in understanding that. The majority of economists just postulate the existence of economic institutions and the matters of economic decision making and then study the behavior – without ever questioning where the institutions and units that permitted that behavior ever came from. Her work is helpful in explaining that because she gets away solely from the economic perspective and looks at it from what circumstances and how we as humans function allows us to set up those institutions.
It’s a failure of economists to not recognize some of the implications for her work; not the failure of the Nobel committee for honoring her insights into “New Institutional Economics.”
Also, take a look at yourself. You’ve won a Clark medal and most of your work could easily be classified as sociology. If you had a degree in sociology and did the same work, you could make the same case that the Clark medal is becoming a prize for “social sciences”; but because your degree is in economics it’s without notice.
I’m curious though, were economists upset by the prize being awarded to Thomas Schelling who’s most impressive work is arguably just political science with insights from economics and game theory? Or because he’s an economist by training and manner that his prize is still considered an “economics prize”?
Perhaps the award will act as a wake up call to economists – just because it’s not called “economics” doesn’t mean it’s not applicable to your field. The natural sciences figured this out decades ago when the fields started to converge upon one another (see: the line between areas like physical chemistry and physics) – perhaps economist needs to start looking at the advantageous of political science research when it is clearly applicable to their area of study, rather than just ignoring it. One of the reasons the natural sciences have seen an explosion in information and advancement in the 20th century is because of the breaking down of barriers between fields and using insights of other areas in a synthesis – economics should do the same where applicable in fields of political science, sociology, and psychology.
No facts – just plain old prejudice and guesswork…
Looks to me like it was cool to pick a woman; for such a nobel intent, what is a few bent boundaries?
If you can tell me where economics end and sociology (or poly sci) begins, then YOU will probably win the Nobel Prize. This, as you point out, is simply confirmation that these disciplines lie on the same spectrum. One might even add cultural anthropology to the mix!
Actually Jeff, my interpretation of Ostrom’s work is the polar opposite of yours. The Tragedy of the Commons is essentially a tale that private motives do not always provide optimal outcomes: deterioration of the land, etc. Ostrom’s work suggests that this is not necessarily the case.
Although I agree with you that many economists may be nervy about her award. But for the opposite reason that you might think: it goes against the entire grain of public economics, a large (the largest?) sub-field of micro.
Political ‘science’ … social ‘science’ … even economics? Just because a field occasionally cites statistics, use regression analysis or linear programming, doesn’t make it science. You can’t predict anything, you can’t conduct an experiment subject to boundary conditions, you can’t control you variables, and you can’t explain nature. I’m sorry to be iconoclastic, but stuff like this gives me the vapors.