It’s a little hard to imagine a Nobel Prize in physics being shared by (1) a guy famous for advancing a particular hypothesis and (2) a guy famous for relentlessly attacking that hypothesis. This of course is what the Nobel committee has done with this year’s economics award, with the added Hegelian twist of giving another third of the prize to a guy who came out somewhere in between. Thesis (Gene Fama)! Antithesis (Bob Shiller)! Synthesis (Lars Peter Hansen)!
This is, to a certain extent, further evidence that economics isn’t a science like physics is a science (and yeah, yeah, the economics Nobel isn’t a real Nobel prize). But that’s not because economists are all frauds — it’s at least partly because economics is harder than physics. And the interaction over the decades between the differing ideas of Fama and Shiller, while maybe not exactly scientific, has certainly been enlightening, and had a huge impact on the world.
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