Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Economics Nobel Has a Better Record Than 'Real' Ones

Alfred Nobel may not have included economics in his original list of prizes but that doesn't make it less "real" than the peace prize.

October 13, 2013 at 2:42 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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Tomorrow, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winner of the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel," which was established in 1969. Wags like to point out that this isn't nearly as impressive as an "actual" Nobel Prize because it wasn't included in Nobel's original list. (Also, at least one of Nobel's descendants thinks the prize is an insult to real scientists.)

This doesn't strike me as a particularly powerful critique. In fact, the intellectual contributions of the winners of the Economics Nobel have held up much better than the contributions of several past winners of the vaunted Peace Prize.