Comment on Barkley Rosser on ‘In The Face Of Total Turbulence, Go Totally Conventional For The Nobel Prize’
Barkley Rosser gives his assessment: “But this year's award was clearly in the works after Jean Tirole and Alvin Roth got theirs. The real question for this one was which of the ‘Gang of Four,’ David Kreps, Paul Milgrom, John Roberts, and Robert B. Wilson, who coauthored the super important game theory paper on reputation effects, allowing for cooperation over time in prisoner's dilemma and other games, would get it.”
Clearly, the EconNobel is something economists in U.S. academe feel entitled to. They feel betrayed and even hang themselves if things do not turn out as expected. This happened in 2019 with Martin Weitzman: “Marty Weitzman was the pre-eminent environmental economist of the modern era, which is to say of all times,” (Nordhaus) and he committed suicide ― “depressed at his not getting the Nobel Prize” (Rosser).
There is, obviously, a strong tendency of self-aggrandizement in academic economics. And it seems that the main purpose of the creation of the EconNobel has been to satisfy an urgent personal/national PR need.#1
There would be no problem at all if economics were some nutty sort of talk show and the Swedish monarch would annually proclaim a winner in a glitzy ceremony because he/she had collected more than 100,000 google scholar citations. The problem is that economics claims to be a science, but is NOT.
The lethal defect of economics is that the main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and ALL get the foundational economic concept of profit wrong.#2 Economics is a heap of proto-scientific garbage.
To put improvements of auction theory on the same level with achievements like quantum physics proves a serious lack of scientific sense. Note that economists are supposed to explain how the economy works and they come up with a proposal of how to improve the auction of radio frequency bands.
The EconNobel has always been a fake prize for fake scientists. It has nothing to do with science but is a reward for loyal services in the propagation of oligarchy-approved economics.#3
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
