Economics Nobel
9 October 2006 at 3:14 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments
| Peter Klein |
The Nobel Prize in Economics goes to macroeconomist Edmund Phelps. No award this year for organizational economics (Williamson, Hart, Holmström, Milgrom, Alchian, Demsetz) or the economics of entrepreneurship (Baumol, Kirzner).
Reaction from the econo-blogosphere is generally favorable, but subdued. “A safe pick” is the modal comment. Lynne Kiesling adds a little sizzle: “For my money, the value of his work is in dialing down the hubris of the government policymaker who thought that monetary and fiscal policy were dials that they could twiddle to control and manage the economy. Phelps’ work helped to introduce some humility to counter that control-oriented exuberance.” And here’s Tyler Cowen on What It All Means:
The big questions still matter. Unemployment, economic growth, labor markets, capital accumulation, fairness, discrimination, and justice across the generations are indeed worthy of economic attention. Phelps contributed to all of those areas. Normative questions matter. Relevance and breadth triumph over narrow technical skill.
Problems over puzzles, in other words. Three cheers for that.
Russ Roberts provies this list of dead economists who should have won the Prize: Peter Bauer, Frank Knight, Fritz Machlup, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern, Joan Robinson, and Julian Simon.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Management, Theory of the Firm.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Donald A. Coffin | 9 October 2006 at 4:22 pm
Much of the blogoshpere comment has been to the effect that Phelps’s work hasn’t really been central to the work of the posters (who are mostly younger). I remember how important and influential his work was for those of us in grad scholl in the early 1970s, though–a really important change in the way people saw the world.
I suspect that the major contributions of most economics nobelists occurred long enough ago that their work has been incorporated inoto the mainstream and no longer seems as radical as it seemed at the time.
2. genericface blog » Summary of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics | 11 October 2006 at 1:26 am
[…] Greg Mankiw, Arnold Kling, Brad DeLong, Peter Klein, and Phelp’s WSJ article. […]