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2023 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Claudia Goldin
- littlestymaar 3y ago[flagged]
- vodou 3y ago[flagged]
- morita2342 3y ago[flagged]
- grotorea 3y agoA bit too far for me but it is unfair that economics gets one but the other fields neglected by Nobel don't.
- pavlov 3y agoIt’s a practical example of how economics is unique among sciences in that it’s a marketing discipline as well. Nobel didn’t give us a prize? That’s just a problem to be solved with money and social engineering, like so many aspects of economics.
- RandomLensman 3y agoNothing unique there. Physics does a lot of marketing, too (including claiming economics as part of physics at times).
- itishappy 3y agoString Theory has revolutionary results coming any decade now, just you wait!
- VHRanger 3y agoRight, a pseudoscience and here we have someone who won doing exclusively empirical work. Not sure how you match those two but keep at it
- boxed 3y agoPlenty of people do empirical work in pseudoscience...
- glimshe 3y agoThere has been substantial amount of empirical work on remote seeing and telepathy, including some that "prove" them to be true.
- neaden 3y agoDoing a legitimate experiment on remote seeing for instance is by definition science, just like doing experiments trying to prove luminiferous ether were science back in the 19th century. Science is a methodology, not facts and something doesn't become science just because your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.
- SantalBlush 3y agoRight, the question is whether the hypothesis or theory is falsifiable, regardless of the subject matter. Economic theories are falisifable; we can see pretty clearly how much the theoretical models deviate from observation.
- brightball 3y agoSo many claims I see published across many fields fall apart with even minor scrutiny. What makes economics special?
- BiasRegularizer 3y agoWhat aspects of the economic studies makes it a pseudoscience? Highly empirical, sure, but so does modern machine learning.
- mempko 3y agoeconomists proudly ignore real world data. They care about their models, even when they are obviously wrong. Milton Friedman said "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions."
- slothtrop 3y agoThis is a projection. Economics has done better to improve reproducibility of research over several decades than any other social science.
- BurningFrog 3y agoTo me the "economics is not real science" people is much like the "evolution is just a theory" crowd. When you don't like the results, it is comforting to find a way to not believe it. I have a pretty serious physics education, and in my older days I find Economics to be the most fascinating science. It makes much of society understandable in ays tha were not possible before. That said, the sub field of Macro Economics is a very difficult field for several reasons, and it may be impossible to get very far on it. But that is only one branch on that tree.
- jononomo 3y agoI confess to being one of those people who doesn't believe Darwinian evolution explains the origin of species (let alone the origin of life). Of course, I see myself as taking an entirely empirical and scientific perspective, but I do understand that those who approach the question with a blind faith in a materialist worldview (and buy into a "materialism of the gaps" perspective) will not be able to accept any empirical evidence or scientific argument that contradicts their presuppositions.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoMost of econ is still by far more scientific than sociology, psychology, other various humanities and maybe even climate science. Okay, a Swedish institute once a year awards less money than an average startup gets at a Series A. Is it really such a disgrace compared to what’s actually going on in academia every day?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vodou 3y agoI now regret making this remark. My purpose was not to be dismissive of economics as a proper science. It was just a clarification the this prize is not part of the Alfred Nobel's will, it was instituted in 1968 by Sweden's central bank (in a way that you might call a bit shady). Nowadays, Swedish media is quite good at making this distinction, but international media is still rather confused about this.
- maxverse 3y agoI didn't see your initial remark, but I wanted to commend you for saying this; it's so rare to see any kind of regret or change in opinion in an online discourse. Thank you for following up.
- jncfhnb 3y ago> Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family. Seems fairly intuitive, no?
- baq 3y agoPlenty of unintuitive results in science. Economics is especially prone to fallacies, so proof and data is welcome.
- blululu 3y ago[flagged]
- jncfhnb 3y agoHmm yeah that last sentence resonates.
- countafactual 3y ago
- artninja1988 3y ago[flagged]
- em500 3y ago[flagged]
- morita2342 3y ago[flagged]
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- ckastner 3y agoGranted, the merit of some of the awards is questionable, but I think e.g.: Nash's work on game theory or Kahneman/Tvservky's on the pyschology of judgment definitely fall under the umbrella of "science".
- oldgradstudent 3y agoThere are plenty of awards granted for great work in computer science, electrical engineering, or any number of other fields. It doesn't make them Nobel prizes. At least the ACM never attempted to hang on the coattails of the the Nobel Prize by naming the Turing award for Alfred Nobel.
- Hamuko 3y ago>At least the ACM never attempted to hang on the coattails of the the Nobel Prize by naming the Turing award for Alfred Nobel. Aren't they riding on the coattails of Turing instead?
- oldgradstudent 3y agoTuring wasn't nearly as well known as he is now. The cryptoanalysis of the Enigma remained classified until the early 1970s, long after the Turing award was established (the first award was given in 1966).
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- lvl102 3y agoAnother Nobel for BxSci. They gotta have the record (nine) for high schools right?
- maxverse 3y agoshakes fist in Brooklyn Tech
- artninja1988 3y ago[flagged]
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- roenxi 3y ago> During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men. > However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between [sic] and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child. Interesting situation developing if the main effort is in educating women who then leave the workforce. I assume one of these is going to have to give - presumably who takes primary caregiver responsbilities.
- Condition1952 3y agoCaring for a baby is seen as an economic catastrophe, unless the baby is not yours
- sandworm101 3y agoI wonder how much, if any, this is balanced on the male side. How many young men re-enter or double down on work once their first child appears? Women may drop out to become primary caregivers but how many men drop into jobs that they previously would not have taken? Go to any military recruitment center and you will find young men with same story: "My girlfriend is pregnant; I need a real job." I'm reminded of that classic Simpsons story where Homer has to abandon his dream job at the bowling alley to take a soul-crushing but higher-paying job at the nuclear plant. Is decreased workforce participation by Marge offset by increased productivity from Homer? A corollary to this is that Homer's choice of job was dictated by the needs of his family. For many today, the big raise must appear before any decision to have kids. Work now dictates family.
- nineplay 3y agoA more egalitarian solution would be longer paid parental leave and earlier free childcare. Are women leaving jobs due to a genuine desire to be a full-time parent, or are women leaving jobs because the alternative is putting a three-month-old in prohibitively expensive daycare?
- AussieWog93 3y agoAnecdata, but most women I've spoken to prefer to delay childcare until the kid is around a year old. There seems to be good reasons for not separating an extremely young child from their mother.
- nabla9 3y ago[flagged]
- truthwhisperer 3y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 3y ago[flagged]
- bedhead 3y ago[flagged]
- nequo 3y agoA reminder that nobody except the Nobel memorial prize calls economics “economic science.” Economists just call it economics. And you will most likely never meet an “Associate Professor of Economic Science” either.
- morita2342 3y agoMh.. neuroscience has won a few medicine nobel prizes for what I would call quite groundbreaking fundamental research.
- frakt0x90 3y ago[flagged]
- subtypefiddler 3y agoShe wrote a paper on blind auditions, this gained a lot of media attention, but as a lot of her work it was quite exaggerated see e.g [0] [0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
- ace32229 3y agoPerhaps worthwhile to point out in this context, her work was exaggerated by others, not by herself.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThe quotes from her article suggest otherwise. Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse: > Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras. > … > The weight of the evidence, however, is what we find most persuasive and what we have emphasized. The point estimates, moreover, are almost all economically significant. Andrew Gelman: > This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions. And the bit about the point estimates being “economically significant”—that doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s just what you get when you have a small sample and noisy data, you get noisy estimates so you can get big numbers.
- slibhb 3y agoTo be fair, Gelman is pretty clear throughout that, in 2000, everyone was doing this.
- tnecniv 3y agoThis is incredibly common due to multiple levels of media hype. I got interviewed by someone from university PR for a series on what different grad students were working on during my PhD. We had a 30 minute phone call and the result a week later was an article that I was allowed to edit before release. The article was conveyed the most ambitious possible take of my research agenda and had a rather forced narrative relating it to the department beer league softball team I played on for a single season at that point. I could have rewrote the whole thing but it wasn’t factually wrong and I had neither the time nor care to do so. This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.
- elhosots 3y ago[flagged]
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- jedberg 3y ago> and demonstrably antithetical to Nobel’s original intent I'm curious as to your logic here. His intent was to award those who "better humanity". Why do you consider economics research not for the betterment of humanity?
- gnicholas 3y agoWhat was his original intent, and how is it antithetical to offer a prize in economics? I understand that perhaps he selected certain disciplines and didn’t include economics, but I’m not understanding how to get from not including economics to “antithetical”.
- neaden 3y agoI mean, the impetus for the Nobel prize was Nobel seeing what his own obituary was going to be and realizing people didn't like him, and wanting to build up some good press. So unless the prize goes to someone who shows that the invention of dynamite was a bad thing I would say it is still honoring his original intent.
- sampa 3y agofriendly reminder, that economics is not a science
- lanfeust6 3y agoIt's a Social Science and no one says otherwise. This is always harped on by commies because research doesn't swing in their favor.
- uoaei 3y agoIt has the same problem as other social sciences in that often the experiments are set up in ways that just so happen to prove the ideological biases of the researchers. It also happens that the researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
- slothtrop 3y ago"often" is not a number, and Economics has improved it's reproducibility rate more than any other social science. > researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order. The most well-known Economists living, to the public, lean anywhere between left and far left. Stiglitz, Varoufakis, Piketty, Krugman. So that's horseshit. I also couldn't think of one who's "fanatic" of the prevailing order at all, they all have criticisms of the government; unless "prevailing order" for you translates to Liberal democracy.
- uoaei 3y agoStiglitz I mostly agree he is "popular". Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray. Piketty often gets headpats from liberal press when he stirs, but is otherwise not really given the time of day because no one seems to have the energy to contend with his tomes. I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public. We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, but again, both couch their analyses in metrics that pre-suppose the supremacy of, and justify, the ways "value" are considered and what constitutes "progress" in popular discourse.
- bythreads 3y agoI'm pumped! She's cool - congrats to her!
- falcor84 3y ago> the bulk of this earnings difference is now between and women in the same occupation Ironic/refreshing/funny to see that "men" are literally absent from the narrative here. How do I make a PR to correct a mistake in their copy?
- alecco 3y agoMandatory "not a real Nobel Prize" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Controversies_and_criticisms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
- cloudier 3y ago> He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation". To be fair I would definitely consider Goldin’s work the kind of work that improves society and hence that Nobel would want awarded.