The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/summary/

40•k2enemy•2h ago

Comments

GolfPopper•54m ago

"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."

https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...

nabla9•48m ago

HN discussions are predictable:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804

huhkerrf•44m ago

Oh, there's much more, even: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

stuaxo•39m ago

Sure, but if they keep awarding this non Nobel prize with a deliberately confusing name people will keep bringing it up.

The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.

lysace•38m ago

I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale.

They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.

tovej•17m ago

Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.

thrance•37m ago

The issue with this prize isn't that economics is not a real science. Nobel prizes are primarily vulgarization and communication tools, and as such are inhenrently political. The Sveriges Riksbank is piggy-backing off the popularity of Nobel Prizes to advocate for a certain vision (their vision) of economic orthodoxy. It is overwhelmingly awarded to white western men, who, more relevantly, all share an anglocentric neoliberalist vision of economics. This, I hope, we are allowed to take issue with.

EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.

AtlasBarfed•10m ago

Well you are on an anglo-centric neoliberalist imperialist site filled with people that are economic beneficiaries of that. Basic economic game theory that you'd be downvoted.

underlipton•9m ago

It's a, "They hate him because they told the truth," situation. Frankly, it applies to the Peace Prize as well, but this one has an even more naked agenda. It would be a disservice not to mention its history every time it's brought up, because it is ever-salient to any discussion of the merit of the winners.

b00ty4breakfast•32m ago

>This critique sets the stage for a more political debate.

oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.

em500•31m ago

I'll add the obligatory Dilbert take: https://verisoeconomica.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/the-2022-no...

Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.

notahacker•15m ago

Yeah, "this isn't even a real prize, it wasn't selected at a time when it wasn't considered a distinct academic field by a benefactor concerned primarily about what his obituary might say" is even more tedious than pointing out that the Turing Award wasn't actually conceived by Alan. Much better arguments about issues with things individual Economic Nobel winners argued for than that...

AtlasBarfed•13m ago

His descendants states that Nobel wouldn't have wanted a prize in his name. He didn't like economics because it is the science of greed.

"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.

neilwilson•10m ago

" it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation"

And those who pay the piper call the tune.

Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.

belter•24m ago

Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692

Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.

When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...

Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.

rtsil•9m ago

Neither are litterature and peace.

JCM9•46m ago

Obligatory post that, despite common parlance to the contrary, there is no “Nobel Prize in Economics.”

That said, this is still a super prestigious award.

jacquesm•35m ago

Such a post is definitely not obligatory.

Tor3•33m ago

And that's exactly why the title is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". Not that it's a "Nobel Prize".

btown•43m ago

More detail on accomplishments in press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre...

Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U

https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate

jacquesm•36m ago

That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?

thrance•33m ago

At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.

nathan_douglas•24m ago

This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation.

> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.

> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.

...

fnord77•19m ago

Stagnation is environmentally sustainable. Constant creation-destruction cycles will ultimately deplete the environment

lanfeust6•2m ago

The world/universe doesnt last forever either. That does not say much. Unless you have reason to believe technilogical innovation will end in a foreseeable future, growth will not be expected to end in that timeline

dkural•18m ago

There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.

huitzitziltzin•30m ago

Economist here…

An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.

What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.

Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.

As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.

dkural•16m ago

Agreed! I am a big fan of Robert Allen's books on the industrial revolution as a counterpoint to Mokyr. (The two are of course are friends with each other as well).

mallowdram•20m ago

Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.

There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.

Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/

l5870uoo9y•7m ago

What is the smallest fraction of a Nobel Prize that a winner can be awarded?

Tycho•3m ago

I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.

I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.

Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?

SSA: Learning to Reason Across Parallel Samples for LLM Reasoning

Radio Starlight – Your Generative Radio Station

Not By AI Badge

Making Unicode things fast in Go

Archestra's Dual LLM Pattern: Using "Guess Who?" Logic to Stop Prompt Injections

We open-sourced XAI's Macrohard, an autonomous computer-using agent

Indian-Americans Are Holding Their Home Country at Arm's Length

Fujitsu pumps £280M into UK arm to keep lights on after Horizon scandal

Geopolitics and Open Source: KYM (Know Your Maintainers)

I did a funny launch on Product Hunt, but nobody noticed anyway

The Eames Lounge Chair was always expensive

The only benchmark that matters is the one that emulates your real workload

When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow

Sandboxing on macOS

Multi-booting Windows From 1.01 to 11 on real hardware

Causal Profiling

Instantspaces: Remove/Minimize macOS Space Animations

Tauchgang

The Problem with “You”: How a Pronoun Complicates Our Relationship with AI

24 Years of NASA Satellite Data Suggest the World Is Getting Darker

Trio win Nobel economics prize for work on technology-driven growth

Show HN: CrossRun – An Open Standard to Make Software Run on Any Platform

Fentanyl overdoses among seniors surge 9k% – A hidden crisis few saw coming

AI Triples Stroke Recovery Rates

Show HN: Terminal-First Documentation Service

Ross Sorkin on similarities between Wall Street today and 1929's markets

Show HN: ch, a terminal tool to highlight specific words in your command output

Show HN: EMDR Bilateral Stimulation App

Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2M

The Resurrection of the Two-State Solution