An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
Agreed! I am a big fan of Robert Allen's books on the industrial revolution as a counterpoint to Mokyr. (The two are of course are friends with each other as well).
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?
From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently)
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.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
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
> 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.
> 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
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
> Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land.
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
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
Why not just Economics. Why do they have to play games with everyone by adding "science" to everything? Economic "Sciences" is just as absurd as Creation "Science".
"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."
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.
Yeah, "this isn't even a real prize, it wasn't selected at a time when it wasn't considered a distinct academic field by a benefactor concerned primarily about what his obituary might say" is even more tedious than pointing out that the Turing Award wasn't actually conceived by Alan. Much better arguments about issues with things individual Economic Nobel winners argued for than that...
Well, the thing is Economics is a very unique discipline. It's not quite a science but also not merely philosophy. Its object of study is affected by the study itself. It's very strange. That's why mutually exclusive economic theories have won the Nobel prize!
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 ...
Not always/limited in some areas (astrophysics come to mind where we, e.g., cannot (yet) create a star under controlled conditions). Testing hypotheses or predictions vs observations is also a valid method.
Argentina managed to save itself from hyperinflation by drastically cutting spending. By your logic, this could not be in the least bit predictable and inflation as a phenomenon doesn't even matter.
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
Argentina didn't manage shit, else they wouldn't have to be bailed out by the Trump admin. This should come as a surprise to no one, "General AnCap" may have artifically and temporarily given the impression of good numbers by destroying his country's public infrastructure, but this is at the direct cost of the future. Now they're starting to pay the price.
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
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.
It's a, "They hate him because they told the truth," situation. Frankly, it applies to the Peace Prize as well, but this one has an even more naked agenda. It would be a disservice not to mention its history every time it's brought up, because it is ever-salient to any discussion of the merit of the winners.
White western men are no more represented in Economics than other hard sciences, and concensus in Economics is no different in East Asia and the rest of the world excepting the authoritarian Socialist experiments.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to? Unless you believe that 90% of economists come from the US (and the remaining 10% from the UK), you should take issue with this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
Well you are on an anglo-centric neoliberalist imperialist site filled with people that are economic beneficiaries of that. Basic economic game theory that you'd be downvoted.
Extreme poverty rates have been plummeting precisely because East Asian countries became economic beneficiaries. The rest of the world operates on the same principles.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
>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.
I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from
it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.
I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
1/4. The max number of recipients of any prize is 3, but it can be split into a half, and then one of those halves into two further halves, for a 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 split. (It can also be split equally into 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3).
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
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.
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
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.
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
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.
The US has among the richest citizens in the world, with a high quality of life. You could do worse for modeling, like perhaps your socialist darlings.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
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.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing.
The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
Economist here…
An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
Agreed! I am a big fan of Robert Allen's books on the industrial revolution as a counterpoint to Mokyr. (The two are of course are friends with each other as well).
[flagged]
More detail on accomplishments in press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre...
Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U
https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?
From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
All healthcare beyond the village witch doctor was technological progress at one time.
This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently)
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.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
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.
At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.
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.
...
> 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
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
Stagnation is environmentally sustainable. Constant creation-destruction cycles will ultimately deplete the environment
Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. Population growth is stagnating and will peak in less than 100 years.
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
> Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land.
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
There was more likely a series of 2K-4K golden ages diffused across areas globally 5-1K BCE where stagnation wasn't the rule.
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
Nothing about "sustained" implies "forever". Sustained notes at the symphony don't continue after the audience leaves.
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
Why not just Economics. Why do they have to play games with everyone by adding "science" to everything? Economic "Sciences" is just as absurd as Creation "Science".
"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
HN discussions are predictable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
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.
Yeah, "this isn't even a real prize, it wasn't selected at a time when it wasn't considered a distinct academic field by a benefactor concerned primarily about what his obituary might say" is even more tedious than pointing out that the Turing Award wasn't actually conceived by Alan. Much better arguments about issues with things individual Economic Nobel winners argued for than that...
" it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation"
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
Well, the thing is Economics is a very unique discipline. It's not quite a science but also not merely philosophy. Its object of study is affected by the study itself. It's very strange. That's why mutually exclusive economic theories have won the Nobel prize!
His descendants states that Nobel wouldn't have wanted a prize in his name. He didn't like economics because it is the science of greed.
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
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.
Neither are litterature and peace.
They are not pretending to be sciences.
> When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions...
Not always/limited in some areas (astrophysics come to mind where we, e.g., cannot (yet) create a star under controlled conditions). Testing hypotheses or predictions vs observations is also a valid method.
Argentina managed to save itself from hyperinflation by drastically cutting spending. By your logic, this could not be in the least bit predictable and inflation as a phenomenon doesn't even matter.
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
Argentina didn't manage shit, else they wouldn't have to be bailed out by the Trump admin. This should come as a surprise to no one, "General AnCap" may have artifically and temporarily given the impression of good numbers by destroying his country's public infrastructure, but this is at the direct cost of the future. Now they're starting to pay the price.
> Argentina didn't manage shit
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
Do you think Poppers demarcation criterion is falsifiable?
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.
It's a, "They hate him because they told the truth," situation. Frankly, it applies to the Peace Prize as well, but this one has an even more naked agenda. It would be a disservice not to mention its history every time it's brought up, because it is ever-salient to any discussion of the merit of the winners.
White western men are no more represented in Economics than other hard sciences, and concensus in Economics is no different in East Asia and the rest of the world excepting the authoritarian Socialist experiments.
There's no "consensus" in economics, let alone.
That's nonsensical. There is overwhelming consensus over many things, e.g. tariffs.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to? Unless you believe that 90% of economists come from the US (and the remaining 10% from the UK), you should take issue with this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
Well you are on an anglo-centric neoliberalist imperialist site filled with people that are economic beneficiaries of that. Basic economic game theory that you'd be downvoted.
Extreme poverty rates have been plummeting precisely because East Asian countries became economic beneficiaries. The rest of the world operates on the same principles.
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.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
Define neoclassical economics beyond its use in the blogossphere
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
This is completely false. The opposite is true. Economics had drastically improved reproduction over decades.
Please provide some proof that neoclassical economics has done this.
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.
>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.
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I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
A park will generate less revenue than an apartment building, a sports complex, or a cafe.
Not all value is quantifiable in USD.
Tycho didn't claim it was. In fact, they explicitly asked if such a heuristic existed.
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.
Fantastic selection. As ever, it is worthwhile to be familiar with the winners' works, particularly this audience and this year.
I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
You can start with a used copy of an older edition of mankiw’s text which is a standard undergrad reference.
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
This seems like a continuation on the theme of last year's award. Very nice!
What is the smallest fraction of a Nobel Prize that a winner can be awarded?
1/4. The max number of recipients of any prize is 3, but it can be split into a half, and then one of those halves into two further halves, for a 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 split. (It can also be split equally into 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3).
⅓
Obligatory post that, despite common parlance to the contrary, there is no “Nobel Prize in Economics.”
That said, this is still a super prestigious award.
And that's exactly why the title is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". Not that it's a "Nobel Prize".
Such a post is definitely not obligatory.
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This isn't a Nobel pick even though the name contains the word Nobel.
Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot.
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
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.
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.
On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.
Look up reforestation work. It is a light in dark times.
We're inside the first animal created mass desertification project. Reforestation is nonsense.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.
And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?
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.
> Downvoting only proves the point
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
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.
The US has among the richest citizens in the world, with a high quality of life. You could do worse for modeling, like perhaps your socialist darlings.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
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.
> As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense)
That tells me nothing about your perspective. Your ideology is as identifiable as anyone else's and you have to do politics like anyone else.
> economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping
It's not up to you. Economics has a definition.
> richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Wealth.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate