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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I personally believe we are entering into a paradigm change…this is going to be hard to accept for the ‘status-quo’ who still believe that we live in a world segmented and fragmented.
Wake up boyz, the world is becoming more and more understandable as holistic – connected – global. We need to connect the dots (between disciplines) otherwise we will not move forward…
I salute the prize…
same with the chemistry prize — it’s turning into a biology prize rather than strictly chemistry. This year’s prize is essentially the chemistry of biology
This is a total rip off! Everyone knows that Obama should have won the Nobel in Economic Science. Obviously the Nobel committee did not realize that Obama should win in every category. He has been just as successful in economics as he has in peace…I wonder is racism is involved?
http://www.4insure.net
She is not the first pol sci practitioner to get a nobel prize. Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality also won a nobel. Economists risk losing more than just nobel prizes if they continue to be so orthodox in their views of human nature
NEWS ALERT! The Nobel Committee has announced that the economics award was given prematurely but rather should be given to President Obama because of:
1) His promises to “do good” for the economy
2) The fact that he can figure out the change you owe him when he gives you a dollar at the 99 cent store and
3) He is able to read these three reasons in their correct numerical order.
The people who feel the need to comment on Obama here should be ashamed: This is an amazing day for two highly original, fascinating scientists. Why can’t you talk about their work or shut up? (And the Obama nobel jokes were old on Saturday, already).
I actually don’t think that economists are going to hate this quite as much as Levitt thinks. I think Krugman is right that this is a price for institutional economics and I think many people can relate to that, especially as it’s also timely – institutional economics is very good in addressing regulation – be it of CO2 emissions or of the financial system.
Certainly no begrudging from Alex Tabarok at MR, Krugman on his Blog and Michael Spence at Forbes (via Mankiw).
Too bad you don’t say a little more of their work. Readers who want to learn something should go to MR, which has two fantastic short posts.
Economists might be self-interested, but that would not explain why they would care if the prize went to a political scientist. Sure, the economists who were under consideration, or whose work might be worthy of consideration, for the Nobel Prize might care, but why it make a difference to those who have zero chance of getting that prize?
Elinor Ostrom’s work is superb and legendary. She deserved to win the Nobel Prize period. Ask development economists and environmental economists, they will tell you that her work revolutionalized the field.