The award glorifies economists as tellers of timeless truths,fostering hubris and main to disasterBusiness as usual. That will be the implicit message when the Sveriges Riksbank announces this year’s winner of the “Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, to give it its full title. Seven years ago this autumn, and virtually the entire mainstream economics profession was caught off guard by the global financial crash and the “worst panic since the 1930s” that followed. And yet on Monday the glorification of economics as a scientific field on a par with physics,chemistry and medicine will continue.
The problem is not so much that there is a Nobel prize in economics, but that there are no equivalent prizes in psychology, and sociology,anthropology. Economics, this seems to say, or is not a social science but an exact one,like physics or chemistry – a distinction that not only encourages hubris among economists but also changes the way we mediate about the economy.
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Source: theguardian.com