Paul Krugman Wins the Nobel Economics Prize (also at the NYT)
Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.
Good thing he didn’t win it on the merits of his assessment of the French helthcare system.
OUCH!
The Nobel Prize is never posthumous — it is only awarded to living persons. So some great minds such as John Maynard Keynes and Fischer Black never received the prize in Economics. All that has changed. With today’s award to Paul Krugman, the Nobel as gone to an economist who died a decade ago. The person alive to receive the award is merely a public intellectual, a person operating in the same domain as Oprah Winfrey. And even as a public intellectual, the prize is inappropriate, because never before has a scientist operating in the capacity of a public intellectual so abused and debased the science he purports to represent. Krugman’s New York Times column drawing on economics is the equivalent of 2006’s Nobelists in Physics, astromers Mather and Smoot, doing a column on astrology — and then, in that column, telling lies about astronomy.
But what’s done is done. The only question now is whether Krugman will pay taxes on the prize at the low rates enabled by the Bush tax cuts he has done so much to discredit, or if he will volunteer to pay taxes at higher rates he considers more fair.
$5 says, the Bush rates.
UPDATE
The Insufferability Poll! (h/t TigerHawk)
The Krugman Tax for Undeserved Prizes, since Nobel proceeds are tax-exempt.
I just commented over at Dr Sanity’s blog that a German news summary mentioned the award and commented that Krugman is known as a sharp critic of Bush. How many Nobels have been awarded for the same thing in recent years?
Keep in mind that the Peace Prize is awarded by socialist Norweigan politicians, and all other prizes are awarded by socialist Swedish politicians. So see, we have a diversity of views…
That’s just great. No telling what you’ll find in a box of cereal these days.
So now at least two Nobel Prize categories have had their valuation bubble burst. What’s next, the Nobel Prize in Physics to my 6-year-old for dropping Legos from the third floor window?
Just to be clear, I have no idea whether Krugman has done any significant work in economics. Perhaps he has done something more insightful than his analysis of French health care. I simply don’t know. My comment was intended to illustrate an initial perception in Germany, a perception that was most likely influenced by previous prizes.
To be fair Krugman’s thesis was simply that each country or even smaller units in that country such as states, counties or cities, can benefit from subsidies that target certain value added industries. Many have assumed he meant strictly subsidies from the central government but he pointed out that some of these hot spots grew in population and technological knowledge and production via a mix of private and public investments. His idea described Silicon Valley because of its proximity to Stanford, Berkeley and the Lawrence Labs, cheap land, accesible transportation, access to large concentrations of wealth from San Francisco(though today that source of investment capital is much smaller) and highly educated workers but 200 years earlier could just as easily described the advantages in concentrating wealth and population in Pittsburgh instead of Scranton because the former had access to the Atlantic and the Mississippi Valley, coal, hydropower and the raw materials neccessary to make all grades of steel while the latter only had the coal and eventually one ten-year old miner.
There indeed might have been some sympathy on the Nobel committee investigating the finalists but Krugman had to have a widely recognized idea to even become considered for the award. Having some of the pet projects of the winners, for example William Shockley and eugenics and race would definitely embarass the Nobel Committees but his research into faster and smaller transistors in the 50’s had to be recognized as brilliant. Linus Pauling won the Peace Prize for his antiwar activities but earlier had won in chemistry for work he had done during the war in advanced weaponry, mainly the atomic bomb. But he also became notable for pushing the use of massive doses of Vitamin C which later research showed to have toxic side effects.
But to assume that Krugman’s award was on the basis of his current political writings without any proof of such doesn’t really strike me as fair. What we can end up with is like the farce of Yukio Mishima, nominated three times for the Literature prize, who was passed over for the award because of his political beliefs rather than the quality of his writing. Do we really want a system of awarding the Nobels that meets certain political criteria of one side or the other?