The Nobel Prize in Economics does not exist. UChicago should stop pretending otherwise—hinging our university’s reputation on an outright fraud is

The Nobel Prize in Economics is Fake

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2024-10-02 01:00:03

The Nobel Prize in Economics does not exist. UChicago should stop pretending otherwise—hinging our university’s reputation on an outright fraud is not a good look. And UChicago Booth students and staff should be more skeptical of our economics faculty, whose work relies heavily on arbitrary neoliberal assumptions and overly technical methods that cannot be explained in plain English.

When Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he established five Nobel Prizes in his will: physics, chemistry, “physiology and medicine," literature, and peace. Not economics. The Nobel family’s descendants have protested the economics prize, with one of them calling it a “PR coup by economists to improve their reputation” and a “cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest.”

The award most people today call the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is more properly called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was established in 1968 by the economists running Sweden’s central bank, partly to shield the bank from democratic accountability and support their push to make it “independent.” To do this, those economists needed to market their discipline to the world as a “science” with technical, correct answers that only experts could fully understand and that lowly voters did not get to question.