I don’t know the answer to this question, I just throw it out for blog readers to ponder.
The competition for the Nobel prize in economics is a lot less fierce than most people think. Most of the winners graduate from a prestigious Ph.D. program (and this will be increasingly true in the future, I would guess). Each year, perhaps 200-300 students start Ph.D.s at these schools. Assuming things are in steady state, with roughly two Nobel prizes given in economics each year, if you can get into a top economics program there is roughly a one percent chance you will eventually win a Nobel prize.
There are four gold medals in luge handed out every four years (1 each for men and women in singles, 2 for men’s doubles — I don’t think there is a women’s doubles) . That is an average of one gold medal per year, which is less than the number of Nobels in economics. How many new folks per year set out to pursue a gold medal in luge? Maybe 100-200 is not an unrealistic number. In which case, the difficulty of winning the gold is about the same as winning the Nobel in economics.
18 Comments
How is chosen the Prize in Economics? That´s the first question and I believe it makes a big difference! Otherwise I guess you might be considering equal what is not! You put bounds on candidates: being from a prestigious PhD program. That makes it political! Very different from luge: wins the best no matter how prestigious he is!
— jbvActually there was an article on ladies figure skating in the NYT mag a month or two ago and it basically said that the odds of winning that gold are the worse of any sport relative to the commitment involved. Did you see that one? I thought of you a la Freakonomics.
Despite not being much of a numbers gal, I think I had pretty much figured out by the time I was thirteen that the chances of getting into an elite college were much better than winning a figure skating gold.
— Princess LeiaIsn’t comparing the odds contingent on being accepted to a top economics program equivalent to looking at the odds of winning a luge nobel prize contingent on qualifying for the Olympics? … I assume a lot of people with big dreams in economics can’t get into a top econ program and either give up the dream or try to pursue it by going to a worse program … At least it should be acknowledged that you probably have to be in the top 1 % iq distribution to get into a top econ program. Do you have to be in the top 1 % athletic (is that the skill in luge?) population to be a world-class luger? I’d guess probably not, which makes me think that the majority of people would have a higher shot of becoming a luge gold medalist. Of course, there are plenty of people who, contingent on their qualities, have a far better shot at a Nobel.
— seth sdThere’s a constraint involved in luge which is less constrained with the Nobel Prize. You have your whole life to win the Nobel Prize, but a gold medal in luge.. well there’s an age where it just isn’t feasible anymore.
From what I’ve heard, you’ve got to be about 80 to get a Nobel Prize.. only 60 years to go.
— abullockOne of my professors got his Ph.D from Berkeley, which is considered to be the best public university in the country. I found it very difficult to relate to him because when it came to economics, I never saw him make a mistake.
— econopeteI think that you have to consider the relatively short career of an elite athlete. The Olympics only comes every four years, so even an athlete with a long career can only expect to compete in two or three games at the most. Depending on their health and relative ability at the time, the chances of winning the competition are fairly small.
I am sure that being an economist is equally challenging, but there are far greater opportunities in the field. Assuming that you earn your phd prior to age 30, you can easily have a career that spans 35 years! Isn’t the Nobel Peace Prize in Economics awarded yearly? You could be a candidate for nearly four decades.
If an Olympic athlete competes in three games they will only have three opportunities to win gold medals.
Now what happens if an Olympic athlete also happens to be an economics student? If they receive their b.a. in their early 20s than they could still earn a phd after retiring from athletic competition. Quite possibly at or near the same age as other economists. Imagine a gold medalist that now has 30 years to win a Nobel Peace Prize!
— SeansWEconomics, by far.
The reason is simple: competition. Aside from the fact that the Nobel itself is worth a good bit of scratch, which a luge gold simply isn’t, an academic economics career has a high value, while a luge career is worth effectively zip.
C’mon, you kids wrote a book on incentives, and you “don’t know the answer?” Sheesh.
— wcwMaybe a better comparison, given the de facto age restrictions on Olympic athletes, would be the John Bates Clark medal. If you think about it hard enough, this actually leads to a pretty startling conclusion: the John Bates Clark medal should go to the best luge athlete under the age of 40, not the best economist.
— minderbenderIs there an assumption here that you have to be a graduate from a prestigous **US** PhD program to win a Nobel prize in Economics? I don’t know what the recent history is but surely its a little early to write off the rest of the world.
— NealeDon’t forget the fact that gold medals at luge olympics events have been always won by athletes from Germany, Austria and Italy. There’s only a gold medal won by a sovietic competitor. So at the same time I think you have more chances to get a nobel prize if you study in an American university.
— lorenzobonomiIt seems to me that this is an abuse of statistics as probability. Phrasing it as “if you can get into a top economics program there is roughly a one percent you will eventually win a Nobel prize” implies that if you somehow got to try this a hundred times, there’d be a good chance you’d win one, when that’s probably not the case: probably the same person would win it every time. Either you’re good enough to win it or you’re not, and you shouldn’t run off to an economics program for your 1% chance at fame since you probably don’t have 1%: it’s not a matter of chance.
In fact, that reminds me of my favorite unsolved (to me–maybe statisticians have addressed this) probability/statistics problem: you have a weatherman who predicts whether it will rain or not as an N% chance (N is multiples of 10 from 0 to 100). How do you evaluate his accuracy?
One approach would be to add up, say, the number of times it rained when he predicted 60% and see if that number is near 60%. But some other weatherman, knowing this evaluation strategy, might simply every day report whatever the annual average is; say it’s 10%. Then by the naive measurement, this second weatherman is near perfect. The problem comes from the idea that we are asking someone to predict probabilities of individual events, and there is no way to accurately judge those, since individual events either happen or not; they don’t really HAVE probabilities at all. If weathermen were forced to predict simply yay/nay, it would be easy to measure their accuracy.
— nothingsIt’s true that some nations produce better economists that other nations. Or at least the kind of economist that the Nobel Prize organization favours.
No matter how good you are you still need opportunity. You could be the best in the world at luge, but if you aren’t given opportunity than you don’t have a chance of winning. Countries have boycotted the Olympics for political reasons and deprived their athletes the opportunity to compete for the gold medal.
— SeansWMIT’s alumni magazine today has the story of an alumnus who competed in this year’s Olympics in skeleton after becoming interested in it during the Olympics four years ago. The story is here.
— JimPJust another thought… one individual may win the gold in the same luge event in multiple Olympics. This obviously reduces the opportunity for other individuals to do so. However, an individual is probably a whole lot less likely to win the Nobel Prize multiple times, increasing the number of opportunities for other people to win.
— jamieThat’s very true. In Canada we are very proud of our speed skaters that took home many medals. Cindy Klassen won five medals, including a gold. I don’t know how we did in luge.
What can I say? You win some, you luge some!
— SeansWIf you cut off the folks eligible for a Nobel at the top 10 PhD program admissions hurdle there should be something similarfor Luge competitors, like winning a club championship or at least a beginners race. I’ll bet that cuts the number of new lugers each year to a few dozen. The advanced novice luger has a better shot at Olymic gold than a new admittee to Harvard’s PhD program (even UC’s PhD program.
— hjasennothings,
Ever heard of Sanov’s Theorem, which tells you at what rate the difference between the empirical average and the true average goes to 0?
— mobiusmodxA very late comment as I read through the archives, but the original post presumes that all econ PhD students in these top programs are aiming for the Nobel in the first place.
— jonksbargains