That said, this is still a super prestigious award.
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
> 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.
...
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
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.
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/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
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?
Not all value is quantifiable in USD.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
GolfPopper•2h ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
nabla9•2h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
huhkerrf•1h ago
stuaxo•1h ago
The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.
lysace•1h ago
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
tovej•1h ago
zwaps•1h ago
username332211•1h ago
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
lanfeust6•30m ago
thrance•1h ago
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
AtlasBarfed•1h ago
lanfeust6•21m ago
underlipton•1h ago
lanfeust6•18m ago
b00ty4breakfast•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•1h ago
AtlasBarfed•1h ago
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
neilwilson•1h ago
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
belter•1h ago
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•1h ago
belter•13m ago
atwrk•1h ago
IAmBroom•49m ago
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
belter•13m ago
lanfeust6•24m ago
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?