I think part of what the OP is intimating at is that this prize is for something that had been well-established for some time in other ways. It's kind of like g

I think part of what the OP is intimating at is that this prize is for something that had been well-established for some time in other ways. It's kind of like giving a Nobel Prize to a physical chemist for demonstrating that subatomic particles exist, using chemistry paradigms, when physicists had been studying quarks and leptons and whatnot already for years. Showing how this plays out in economics is important; I don't want to downplay the significance of the work from that perspective. But it feels a little bit like giving a prize for discovering something that an entire field had known about for some time. I think it says as much, if not more, about the social dynamics of science as it does about the phenomena being studied. I agree completely that the micro and macro level phenomena are not the same, but in this case the chasm isn't that great.