I mean, i hear people call the Turing prize the "nobel" of computer science, and the fields medal the nobel of math. Sports that arent in the olympics usually have some competition people refer to as the "olympics" of that sport.

Who really cares, its the top prize in the field, that is all that matters.

I stand by my statement.

I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.

Really we don’t care.

I think OP meant that economists do consider the prize highly despite the distinction between its particular situation vs. the "core Nobels"

> It seems to me they care very much

I’d actually argue that the only people who love this piece of trivia are economists, financiers and a particular vein of Reddit.

What the other poster meant was that economists don’t care that it is not an original Nobel prize.

Source: also an economist

Sure…

Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.

An extremely crude selection rule:

Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.

There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!

Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.

Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”

Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.

Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!

Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”

They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)

Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”

Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.

A somewhat unfair characterization of the historical norm. Before the Italian Renaissance, history was marked by periods of growth interleaved with periods of decline, in many cases because a societal crisis caused a destructive regime to take hold. For example, the Mongol conquests installed an extractive regime that was soon replaced by the ultraconservative Ming dynasty, which resulted in China's progress stalling for some four centuries.

> From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity.

Energy is a critical quantity in multiple subfields of economy including environmental economy where it's a core issue.

That's why I'm convinced Jean Baptiste Say is a much more insightful early economist than Riccardo.

> To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology.

And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.

The west didn't get rich from colonizing the world.

It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.

This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.

May be progress is as simple as making energy very cheap, ensuring a diverse manufacturing capability with most efficient methods while making sure 1 or 2 inputs do not bottleneck you.

Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP

This is in line with Pommeranz (a western economic historian) and most of the whole "Great divergence" litterature.

> Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.

This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.

Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.

There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.

Nothing about "sustained" implies "forever". Sustained notes at the symphony don't continue after the audience leaves.

This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation.

> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.

> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.

...

The world/universe doesnt last forever either. That does not say much. Unless you have reason to believe technilogical innovation will end in a foreseeable future, growth will not be expected to end in that timeline

This is terribly confused.

Economics is the study of scarcity. Scarcity comes in many forms: land, attention, materials, time. (It is not the study of money, which is a common belief of those who have not thought about what money is. Money is merely a fungible token claim on resources, not the resource itself.)

You could also believe that the study of physics is just the study of business, because businessmen operate in a world governed by physics.

Is this a real question? Businessmen are in the business of management. It's why businessmen tend to get MBAs. Whilest economists get degrees in economics.

this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.

Tycho didn't claim it was. In fact, they explicitly asked if such a heuristic existed.

Oh, there's much more, even: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'll add the obligatory Dilbert take: https://verisoeconomica.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/the-2022-no...

Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.

The issue with this prize isn't that economics is not a real science. Nobel prizes are primarily vulgarization and communication tools, and as such are inhenrently political. The Sveriges Riksbank is piggy-backing off the popularity of Nobel Prizes to advocate for a certain vision (their vision) of economic orthodoxy. It is overwhelmingly awarded to white western men, who, more relevantly, all share an anglocentric neoliberalist vision of economics. This, I hope, we are allowed to take issue with.

EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.

Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692

Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.

When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...

Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.

I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale.

They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.

>This critique sets the stage for a more political debate.

oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.

Sure, but if they keep awarding this non Nobel prize with a deliberately confusing name people will keep bringing it up.

The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.

Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.

“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald

That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).

Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.

We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.

A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).

By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.

On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.

There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.

As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).

Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.