Its good…. Its speciality of it.

Of course, I need to actually post it first – I’ll get onto that once I get into the office 🙂

We had a short argument on Twitter instead. This is the last tweet of the conversation:

https://twitter.com/JohnQuiggin/status/390771851095728129

Ah, the peace prize. Honoured in breach?

🙂

If he responds to your post – any chance you might repost his thoughts?

Yep, i thought it good for a chuckle – although I doubt the author intended it to be anything other than serious

I am still a little nervous of the premise they put it on – their ideas of “science” as a well defined block methodology are a bit antiquated! The purpose is more about giving research into social science a heads up as a discipline deserving of systematic analysis – rather than being subject to naive intuitionism.

An even bigger concern with the post is the purpose given for the prize. Pinning the Nobel’s purpose solely to science ignores the fact that the humanities also make a showing (I am unsure of the scientific qualities of literature, or peace) – calling it a prize regarding in subjects that aim to increase the wellbeing of man has always made more sense, and social science would been put if it had truly existed when he made the prize!

That is why the concern I find more valid is the fact other social sciences get pissed – why is it an economics prize, and not a general contribution to social science prize?

Regarding the post I’d also note Quiggin is attacking one area of the discipline. I wouldn’t call it a fully fair attack but even if it was there are far more ‘scientifically rigourous’ elements of economics than macro – namely the entire rest of the discipline (this is debatable depending on how we start to define science – but this is stretching the bow in comments :P). Since Becker has started stretching the bounds of the base economic method, it has been applied in across the social sciences.

The ‘rational man’ has provided an ideal type we can just to help understand deviations from, and interpret data transparently. This is a necessary condition for doing analysis, and as a result the economics prize made less sense until these applications came into being. Now some will criticise the rational man as ‘untrue’ but this misses the point of why it is used for, and what ideal forms are used for in scientific (and literary) analysis in the first place. It is a tractable and testable form which we can easily extend upon. Calling economics “prescientific” in the way Quiggin does is a pejorative term for economic thinkers he disagrees with – not a descriptive term 😉

I might copy this comment and put it on his post!

I was actually just about to post that second link, for a laugh. The idea that the prize was set up to promote free-market ideology doesn’t stack up when you read what many of the early winners had to say – there’s a fairly consistent theme that the big ‘advances’ in economics were towards making central planning more feasible.

Re: Your last thoughts – this link (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3547) suggests – a far way through, that it may actually diminish economics. While this link (http://www.alternet.org/economy/there-no-nobel-prize-economics?page=0%2C1&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark) is much more critical – indeed, don’t read this one if you are feeling sensitive as it says things such as the Swedish Central Bank Prize was just set up as a marketing ploy.