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Comment by VHRanger | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but he was trying to delegitimize the highest honor in a field of study. The economics Nobel is functionally equivalent to the Fields medal or Turing award, regardless of Alfred Nobel's original intent.

The point is the poster above was trying to diminish the field of study's legitimacy. Reading between the lines of his post he was doing so because of his political leanings, not because he disagreed with any particular contribution of a economics Nobelist's contribution to human knowledge.

We should aspire to be above of such toxic ideologism.

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Why can't he, or I, diminishing the legitimacy of economics?

If someone had made up a fake Nobel prize in psychology I would diminishing the legitimacy of that too.

The field of economics is far, far less rigorous than any of the hard sciences for which Nobel prizes are awarded. The fake Nobel prize for economics is strongly disputed by much of the Nobel family, Keynes, and it makes economists act more blowhard, self-congratulatory and self-important than they already do.

I say this as someone spends a fair chunk of my time reading economics books and blogs.

> I say this as someone spends a fair chunk of my time reading economics books and blogs.

Them credentials!

:rolleyes:

ok Apoorv, if you want credentials, here's Hayek's speech agreeing with me.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...

OK, and what Nobelist you think carries to much political power because of his award? Paul Krugman? Joe Stiglitz?

Matter of fact turned out to be that politicians and laymen only listen to the economics they want to hear, Nobel or not.

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing that.

I read Nobel in Economics as 'Nobel in maths (largely statistical optimization) and behavioural psychology'. I personally believe the field adds significant value to society.

That said, I do think the award is rather liberally given away. We credit scientists only when their theories test out in practice with sufficient evidence whereas we are more willing to give economists a pass in the name of 'not enough data' or 'valid under certain conditions' . I think we should award only the fundamental time tested truths (statistical or otherwise) which are so entrenched in the way of the world that its discovery has little or no bearing on its exact function. This would award Nash/Selten but not Merton/Scholes. The basic option pricing ended up being just a bunch of really cool but limited equations which tend to be self fulfilling prophecies until when they don't.

Economics is a pretty hard science. Certainly more robust than "peace" or "literature". Less than Physics and Medicine, sure. Not sure how to compare it to all the fields under "medicine".

Sorry, the first "Medicine" should be "Chemistry".

Even if you were to completely deny any scientific nature of economics, it would not be reason to lessen the "memorial price", as there is no implication that "Nobel price" means science. 40% of the original five have nothing at all to do with science and even if you dismissed the peace price for being the odd one with all the norwegianness and questionable recipients, there would still be literature . Just think of the memorial price as "the Nobel for economic literature", you won't find a hair in that.

(Also I suspect that there might be some linguistic misunderstanding here, maybe some participants are used to think in a language where the most common translation of "science" does not include the subset of social sciences?),

By "books and blogs" I imagine you mean Steve Keen and evonomics rather than Economist's view and Marginal Revolution

shrugs

I think we should aspire to be above reading between the lines. When we do so, we tend to see that which we want to see, regardless of the author's intent.

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