Dani Rodrik
Foreign Affairs
June 11, 2019
Since the first annual award was given in 1969, 49 Nobel Prizes in Economics have been awarded to 81 individuals. (Up to three awards may be given each year. The prizes for 2019 have not yet been announced.) The official name of the prize is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
The Nobel Prize for economics is not one of the Nobel Prizes endowed in Alfred Nobel’s will. It was established in 1968 by a donation from Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, to the Nobel Foundation to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary. Therefore, not being one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895, it is not a Nobel Prize in the sense of those given in the natural sciences. In establishing the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Nobel Committee was not claiming that economics had attained the same level of explanation, prediction and techno-economic application that the natural sciences have.
Nevertheless, the nomination process, selection process and awards presentation are similar to those of the Nobel Prizes. Economic Nobel laureates receive the same monetary award as Nobel Prize winners, $864,240. Economic Laureates are announced with the natural science Nobel Prize laureates and receive the award at the same annual ceremony. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the prize “in accordance with the rules governing the award of the Nobel Prizes instituted through Alfred Nobel’s will.” That is, the prize is awarded annually to “those who … shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Source: (Wikipedia)
Economists' Greatest Benefit to Humankind
Economics has gained stature in the latter half of the 20th Century as a science akin to the natural sciences based in large part on its connection to the Nobel Prize. However, the status of economics as a science, even among the social sciences, cannot be established based on economics having achieved the same explanatory and predictive power of the natural sciences. If it had risen to such power, and the amount of human energy and resources the world’s public and private sectors have devoted to the natural sciences and their spinoffs in health care and technology had been spent on national and international economic development, “economic science” would have made the world of work far more productive, efficient, wealthier, and more equal in terms of wealth distribution.
Or would it? As is the case with the natural sciences, it is the wealthy and politically powerful of the world that control the fruits of science, including economic science. Regrettably, the dismal science of economics, of all the social sciences, reigns supreme in the minds of the powerful and counting rooms of the wealthy. More about this below.
