Excellent choices. More soon.
Nobel Prize: Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson
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Is it just me or did most economists have no idea who Elinor Ostrom was until about an hour ago?
“Is it just me or did most economists have no idea who Elinor Ostrom was until about an hour ago?”
Nope.
“Is it just me or did most economists have no idea who Elinor Ostrom was until about an hour ago?”
That’s kind of a funny question. I used to work in chemistry – at least, I did two postdocs in theory of chemistry in the late ’80s/early ’90s, so I’d been around the subject for ten years or so. Yet each year when the Nobel was announced there was about a 50% chance that I’d heard of the winner. When it was given in physical chemistry or inorganic chemistry I would definitely have heard of them, but when it was a biochemist (as it increasing was) I often had no idea. And it wasn’t me being narrow either – it was just too big a subject to even know the leading people in all aspects of it. The same would go for physics (I would know the theorists, but not people doing experimental work in low-temperature physics for example).
Is there something about economics, a narrower set of problems perhaps?, that means you would expect most economists to have heard of each winner?
Oh yes, and I’m not an economist but I have heard of Elinor Ostrom.
She is well known at GMU because she has been active in Public Choice for many years and was past president of the Public Choice society.
I should add that 4 is a reason because it intensifies 2. There are very few economists who received the prize under the age of 55.
@ M.G. in Progress
So what? The Chemistry prize has been utterly dominated by biologists for years now.
Public choice is a field common to both economics and polisci. I note that polisci tends to be much less unanimously enthusiastic about public choice as an approach, but it’s still a popular methodology.
Elinor Ostrom is outside the “inner corps,” both for being at
Indiana University rather than a more prominent place, as well
as for not being in an economics department. But she is fully
deserving.
Williamson is at a more prominent institution, Berkeley, and in
three departments, grad school of business, law, and economics.
I commented here that his rating on Ladbroke’s was underrated,
given that he is indeed the most cited economists of all time.
Some commenter here claimed he had no support. Duh.
Good posts here at MR about each of OW and EO. How about a post explaining why they shared the prize? What do they have in common?
wow… they got a SEK 10 million prize.. that’s some pretty nice money
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