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2023 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Claudia Goldin
- sampa 3y agofriendly reminder, that economics is not a science
- lanfeust6 3y agoIt's a Social Science and no one says otherwise. This is always harped on by commies because research doesn't swing in their favor.
- uoaei 3y agoIt has the same problem as other social sciences in that often the experiments are set up in ways that just so happen to prove the ideological biases of the researchers. It also happens that the researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order.
- slothtrop 3y ago"often" is not a number, and Economics has improved it's reproducibility rate more than any other social science. > researchers who are awarded the most prestige and airtime are sympathetic if not outright fanatics of the prevailing order. The most well-known Economists living, to the public, lean anywhere between left and far left. Stiglitz, Varoufakis, Piketty, Krugman. So that's horseshit. I also couldn't think of one who's "fanatic" of the prevailing order at all, they all have criticisms of the government; unless "prevailing order" for you translates to Liberal democracy.
- uoaei 3y agoStiglitz I mostly agree he is "popular". Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray. Piketty often gets headpats from liberal press when he stirs, but is otherwise not really given the time of day because no one seems to have the energy to contend with his tomes. I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public. We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, but again, both couch their analyses in metrics that pre-suppose the supremacy of, and justify, the ways "value" are considered and what constitutes "progress" in popular discourse.
- lanfeust6 3y ago> Krugman is free-market-if-only-but-we-need-regulation so not really as left as you portray A Liberal and Keynesian. I'd say firmly on the left side of the spectrum, this is only contested by the more zealous Twitter leftists who'd frame the lot of them as right-wing/neo-liberals. > I think you live in a bubble if you think Varoufakis and his ideas are well-known to the public. None of their ideas are well-known to the public, just their political affiliation. Granted Varoufakis, it having been years since the Greek crisis, is receiving less attention now. > We could also talk about Banerjee and Sachs, I can already hear the collective "who?" On the right I guess Sowell is still alive, over 90 years old.
- nequo 3y agoCould you be specific and point to a highly cited study that set up such an experiment? What in the experimental design do you think mechanically reinforced ideological biases and how would you have designed the experiment instead?
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- grotorea 3y agoA bit too far for me but it is unfair that economics gets one but the other fields neglected by Nobel don't.
- pavlov 3y agoIt’s a practical example of how economics is unique among sciences in that it’s a marketing discipline as well. Nobel didn’t give us a prize? That’s just a problem to be solved with money and social engineering, like so many aspects of economics.
- RandomLensman 3y agoNothing unique there. Physics does a lot of marketing, too (including claiming economics as part of physics at times).
- itishappy 3y agoString Theory has revolutionary results coming any decade now, just you wait!
- VHRanger 3y agoRight, a pseudoscience and here we have someone who won doing exclusively empirical work. Not sure how you match those two but keep at it
- jncfhnb 3y ago> Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family. Seems fairly intuitive, no?
- baq 3y agoPlenty of unintuitive results in science. Economics is especially prone to fallacies, so proof and data is welcome.
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- jncfhnb 3y agoHmm yeah that last sentence resonates.
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- oldgradstudent 3y agoIf the ACM, instead of founding the Turing award, had attempted to pay to get a Nobel memorial prize in Computer Science, we would have easily recognized it for what it was - a pathetic play for respectability.
- ghaff 3y agoOr an acceptance of the fact that many orders of magnitude more people would recognize that a Nobel Prize in Computer Science represented a notable achievement than would have any idea what the Turing award is and why they should care. (Obviously they didn't and there are many important awards in their respective fields that don't have Nobel in their titles but it's hard to dispute that the Nobel prizes carry a lot of brand recognition.)
- blululu 3y agoThe name Computer Science itself is a marketing ploy to convince people that it is a real science (and not just another branch of engineering). Seems to be working for CS, and I can easily imagine people on this forum would be happy to defend the legitimacy of the Swedish Institute of Sciences Nobel Memorial Prize in Computational Science. I think the issue is not an objection to marketing but an objection to the inherently political nature of economics. The people who don't like the phrase Noble Prize in Economics generally don't agree with the political aspirations of neoliberal economists to shape and control global policy. There is something very troubling about the amount of power that central bankers and academics wield given how flimsy their methods are.
- ghaff 3y agoHistorically Computer Science was often more associated with mathematics in academia than it was with electrical engineering--depending upon the school. Today, most people would probably agree that it's mostly an engineering discipline, albeit perhaps lacking some of the formal methods and practices that other branches of engineering tend to have. But it was presumably less clear when the term was coined in the early 1960s.
- lvl102 3y agoAnother Nobel for BxSci. They gotta have the record (nine) for high schools right?
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- maxverse 3y agoshakes fist in Brooklyn Tech
- roenxi 3y ago> During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men. > However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between [sic] and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child. Interesting situation developing if the main effort is in educating women who then leave the workforce. I assume one of these is going to have to give - presumably who takes primary caregiver responsbilities.
- Condition1952 3y agoCaring for a baby is seen as an economic catastrophe, unless the baby is not yours
- sandworm101 3y agoI wonder how much, if any, this is balanced on the male side. How many young men re-enter or double down on work once their first child appears? Women may drop out to become primary caregivers but how many men drop into jobs that they previously would not have taken? Go to any military recruitment center and you will find young men with same story: "My girlfriend is pregnant; I need a real job." I'm reminded of that classic Simpsons story where Homer has to abandon his dream job at the bowling alley to take a soul-crushing but higher-paying job at the nuclear plant. Is decreased workforce participation by Marge offset by increased productivity from Homer? A corollary to this is that Homer's choice of job was dictated by the needs of his family. For many today, the big raise must appear before any decision to have kids. Work now dictates family.
- nineplay 3y agoA more egalitarian solution would be longer paid parental leave and earlier free childcare. Are women leaving jobs due to a genuine desire to be a full-time parent, or are women leaving jobs because the alternative is putting a three-month-old in prohibitively expensive daycare?
- AussieWog93 3y agoAnecdata, but most women I've spoken to prefer to delay childcare until the kid is around a year old. There seems to be good reasons for not separating an extremely young child from their mother.
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- nequo 3y agoA reminder that nobody except the Nobel memorial prize calls economics “economic science.” Economists just call it economics. And you will most likely never meet an “Associate Professor of Economic Science” either.
- morita2342 3y agoMh.. neuroscience has won a few medicine nobel prizes for what I would call quite groundbreaking fundamental research.
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- subtypefiddler 3y agoShe wrote a paper on blind auditions, this gained a lot of media attention, but as a lot of her work it was quite exaggerated see e.g [0] [0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
- ace32229 3y agoPerhaps worthwhile to point out in this context, her work was exaggerated by others, not by herself.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThe quotes from her article suggest otherwise. Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse: > Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras. > … > The weight of the evidence, however, is what we find most persuasive and what we have emphasized. The point estimates, moreover, are almost all economically significant. Andrew Gelman: > This is not very impressive at all. Some fine words but the punchline seems to be that the data are too noisy to form any strong conclusions. And the bit about the point estimates being “economically significant”—that doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s just what you get when you have a small sample and noisy data, you get noisy estimates so you can get big numbers.
- slibhb 3y agoTo be fair, Gelman is pretty clear throughout that, in 2000, everyone was doing this.
- tnecniv 3y agoThis is incredibly common due to multiple levels of media hype. I got interviewed by someone from university PR for a series on what different grad students were working on during my PhD. We had a 30 minute phone call and the result a week later was an article that I was allowed to edit before release. The article was conveyed the most ambitious possible take of my research agenda and had a rather forced narrative relating it to the department beer league softball team I played on for a single season at that point. I could have rewrote the whole thing but it wasn’t factually wrong and I had neither the time nor care to do so. This didn’t happen to me, but these university press releases then get picked up by science journalists who, maybe with an additional interview, build off it for their own article and hype up the work and narrative even more. It’s like a game of hype telephone.
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- jedberg 3y ago> and demonstrably antithetical to Nobel’s original intent I'm curious as to your logic here. His intent was to award those who "better humanity". Why do you consider economics research not for the betterment of humanity?
- gnicholas 3y agoWhat was his original intent, and how is it antithetical to offer a prize in economics? I understand that perhaps he selected certain disciplines and didn’t include economics, but I’m not understanding how to get from not including economics to “antithetical”.
- neaden 3y agoI mean, the impetus for the Nobel prize was Nobel seeing what his own obituary was going to be and realizing people didn't like him, and wanting to build up some good press. So unless the prize goes to someone who shows that the invention of dynamite was a bad thing I would say it is still honoring his original intent.
- bythreads 3y agoI'm pumped! She's cool - congrats to her!
- falcor84 3y ago> the bulk of this earnings difference is now between and women in the same occupation Ironic/refreshing/funny to see that "men" are literally absent from the narrative here. How do I make a PR to correct a mistake in their copy?
- alecco 3y agoMandatory "not a real Nobel Prize" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Controversies_and_criticisms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
- cloudier 3y ago> He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation". To be fair I would definitely consider Goldin’s work the kind of work that improves society and hence that Nobel would want awarded.