Results for “prizes” 225 found
Prizes with no takers
In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal
Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars
reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory,
fictional or not, before the year 1800.The researchers offered
a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in
a healthy, lucid person. They posted the challenge in newspapers and on
30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed. None of the responses
were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is
a “culture-bound syndrome” and not a natural process of human memory.
Madame Tourvel, in Dangerous Liaisons, was the closest they found to an example, but the character did not come close enough. Here is the story.
You can submit your suggestions here, I should note I am not convinced by the lack of a winner. People can be oddly unable to recognize a pattern until they understand the pattern; just think how late in human history the first good explanation of supply and demand comes (North? Steuart? Smith? Bailey? Longfield?), and that is a fairly basic economic concept which can be taught to most high schoolers.
GMU and Prizes
GMU people study prizes, sponsor prizes and we win some also! Must be something in the water.
A George Mason University chemistry professor has won a $1 million
engineering prize for developing a simple and inexpensive means of
filtering arsenic from well water, an advance that is already
preventing serious health problems in hundreds of thousands of people
in his native Bangladesh and could help millions of others around the
world.The 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability,
administered by the National Academy of Engineering, will go to Abul
Hussam of Centreville, academy officials announced yesterday…His final creation — an easy-to-make, maintenance-free, two-tiered
system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a widely
available kind of cast iron — removes virtually every trace of arsenic
from well water. It wowed an independent panel of engineering academy
judges who, under the rules of the prize, were looking for an
affordable, reliable, socially acceptable and environmentally friendly
solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.Prize
rules also required that the product be proven in field conditions, not
just in a lab….The 2007 sustainability prize is the first in a series to be funded by
the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Ill., created in 1949 by an
electrical engineer.
Thanks to Nitpicker for the pointer.
The economics of prizes
Here is Dave Leonhardt on prizes, including the work of Robin Hanson. The pointer is from Chris Masse, don’t forget his blog www.midasoracle.org.
Here is Robin’s paper on prizes.
The Ig Nobel Prizes
Here is this year’s list. Example:
Ornithology – Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California, Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California, Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.
The funny thing is that just about all of these, even the hiccups one, represent real research. Seriously. Here is further background.
Stiglitz on Prizes
Stiglitz has a short piece in the New Scientist coming out in favor of prizes. There isn’t much to the article that you don’t already know and its actually more anti-patent than pro-prize still it’s an interesting sign that prizes are being taken seriously in top economic circles.
Data Prizes
I suspect greater payoffs will come from more data than from more technique.
So said Alan Greenspan and I think he is right. Think of how much important work, for example, has been based on the Summers-Heston, Penn World Tables. Yet, most of the time the collectors of data toil in the fields unrecognized and unrewarded. When original data is collected it’s often hoarded – better to mine it for yourself than open up the commons. Now, that is a tragedy.
We ought to increase rewards to data collection. As a salutary example, which might be emulated by the AEA and others, Mike Kellerman points to the Dataset Award given by the APSA Comparative Politics section for "a publicly
available data set that has made an important contribution to the field of
comparative politics."
Prizes for vaccines for the poor
One way to structure a vaccine comitment would be to guarantee a price of, say, $15-20 per person for the first 200-250 million people immunized, in exchange for a commitment from the developer to subsequently drop the price in the poorest countries to a modest markup over manufacturing cost. A commitment of this size would offer firms an opportunity for sales comparable to those available in commercial markets. It would be extremely cost-effective, saving more lives than virtually any imaginable health expenditure.
That is from Strong Medicine, by Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster. The authors have an excellent book and a noteworthy idea, but I have some worries.
Some poor countries, such as Ghana, have quasi-functional government. But other governments won’t allow this to proceed unhindered. Remember when some Nigerian states banned the polio vaccine for (supposedly) spreading sterility and AIDS? That is an extreme example, but how about this?
In Africa, for example, it is estimated that only between 2-15% of children slept under bed-nets in 2001-a simple, effective and proven method to prevent malaria.
If the cure for AIDS were a single glass of clean water, millions of the infected still would die.
This is why economic development is so hard and so resists formulaic treatment. Correcting any single screwed up incentive won’t bring as big a payoff as you might think, given how many other things are screwed up. We have to go one step at a time, but every step brings both short-term costs and political opposition, while not showing much in the way of immediate benefits.
Prizes work best when the prize-giver is aiming at a well-defined end, where success is easy to measure. This fits "inventing a malaria vaccine" better than "distributing a malaria vaccine." I would be willing to try this scheme, given the high upside returns. But it is quite possible we could go ten years or more without seeing much in the way of tangible results, even once something is invented.
The X,Y, and Z Prizes
The founders of the X Prize are going to offer new prizes “to meet the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.” But they have not yet settled on exactly what fields or what accomplishments and they are soliciting public input. I’ve already given my suggestion you can give yours here.
The sponsors offer some valuable thoughts on how to choose appropriate fields and prizes:
The X PRIZE competition focused on jumpstarting a private space industry has re-proven the principle – strongly proven in the early years of the 20th century for the aviation industry – that innovation can indeed be catalyzed. ….
Although the idea of using the X PRIZE concept work in other areas is at first glance a simple and attractive one, a great deal of up-front thought needs to go into what challenges/opportunities would be selected. One could argue that there were certain qualities about the challenges and opportunities in both the aviation field and the space field that lent themselves extremely well to a private sector competition of the sorts which have occurred. Variables to be looked at might include:
The maturity (or lack thereof) of the technology around which the competition would be based?
The maturity (or lack thereof) of the related industries from which a new industry would be born
The number of potential “competitors” potentially able to meet the challenge or at least the depth of the pool from which potential competitors could be drawn
The level of the specificity of the challenge
The financial resources potentially available to finance the potential competitors
The financial resources potentially available to finance the Prize itself
How potentially compelling and exciting is the field around which the challenge would be based
The amenability of the target area to a threshold change in public expectation
The replicability of the challenge to other areas?
The level of the presumed long-term benefit to business and society
The list of questions above is by no means exhaustive, but does give a sense of how the selection of a new challenge is not as first as simple as it may seem. It is absolutely key that the right challenges are selected – sufficiently exciting to compel hearts and minds, sufficiently ambitious to reach beyond what is already likely going to occur soon and to have a truly substantial impact, and sufficiently focused to have a good chance of succeeding within a reasonable timescale.
The politics of Nobel Prizes
Jorge Luis Borges was one of the greatest writers never to win a Nobel Prize (try the early short fiction if you don’t already know his work). Now I know why:
The visit to [Pinochet’s] Chile finished off Borges’s chances of ever winning the Nobel Prize. That year, and for the remaining years of his life, his candidacy was opposed by a veteran member of the Nobel Prize committee, the socialist writer Arthur Lundkvist, a long-standing friend of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1971. Lundkvist would subsequently explain to Volodia Teitelboim, one of Borges’s biographers and a onetime chairman of the Chilean Communist Party, that he would never forgive Borges his public endorsement of General Pinochet’s regime.
Borges, it should be noted, did believe in democracy but thought Pinochet the best of the available options at the time. For purposes of contrast, consider the following (slightly overstated) description of Laureate Pablo Neruda:
On the eve of his [Neruda’s] death, in 1973, he could still describe Stalin as “that wise, tranquil Georgian”. His feelings were similarly soft for Mao’s China, where he loved to see everyone in those vast landscapes and streetscapes dressed in regulation blue.
The former quotation is from p.426 of Edwin Williamson’s excellent Borges: A Life.
Sponsoring Prizes
Wouldn’t it be fun to endow a prize like the X-Prize or the space elevator prize I discussed yesterday? I’m surprised that more rich people don’t do this. Of course, we have the Nobel and similar prizes but these are awarded for general achievement in the past and as such are unlikely to exert a significant incentive effect. Foundations can last a long time but there is a history of foundations, for example the Ford and Carnegie Foundation, spending money in ways that their founders would not approve. If you fund a prize, however, you can specify the conditions for success reasonably precisely and for that reason the money is more likely to be allocated in a way close to what you would have wished. Furthermore, if you set the prize up so that the seed money is invested in the market until it is won you can almost be guaranteed that one day the prize will be won and you will be thanked for your contribution to humanity.
As noted, I like the space elevator idea but I think that if I had a few million to spare I’d endow a cryonics prize. This is the sort of research which seems doable, has a big payoff but for which there is virtually no serious funding. I’d endow the prize with a series of staggered awards, so much for succesfully reviving a rat after 1 week, so much for a rabbit after 2 months, so much for a pig after 5 years. The Grand Prize? That would be for reviving me.
Who should get prizes?
Leszek Kolakowski just won a new prize, the Kluge Prize, which is worth $1 million.
This is the nature of the prize:
The prize…is meant to highlight fields of study as varied as anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology and religion for which there is no major international award. It was conceived by the librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, and financed by the philanthropist John W. Kluge, who had no say in selecting the winner, library officials said.
In other words, it is intended to supplement the Nobel Prize. Kolakowski, a brilliant author, polymath, and critic of Marxism, is more than deserving. See also Jacob Levy’s excellent post on the matter, rebutting the charge that the award was politically motivated by “right-wing” considerations. After all, Kolakowski teaches at Oxford, hardly a hotbed of radical right sentiment.
In general we would expect that new prizes are awarded to the relatively old; Kolakowski is 76. Remember Cato’s Milton Friedman Prize of last year? It was awarded to the 85-year-old Lord Bauer, who died right before the award ceremony.
Presumably a new prize is seeking to build up its reputation, so its first few awards should be sterling in quality, not very controversial, and designed to generate maximum publicity. Once a prize is more established, the prize givers can take more chances, or use the prize to certify the quality of younger achievers, or use the prize to spur greater achievement.
Robin Hanson wonders why we don’t use more prizes today, in lieu of grants, to encourage science. In the eighteenth century, prizes not grants were the dominant means of encouraging science. One drawback of prizes is that they tend to be awarded in the interests of the prizegiver, and not necessarily to stimulate maximum scientific output. Arguably prizes should be awarded when people are younger, not older, if only for incentive reasons. Still, prizes make the most sense when you cannot predict where new innovation is coming from, and thus you do not know who should get the grants. As our world becomes more complex, less hierarchical, and more decentralized, I predict a greater reliance on prizes to stimulate science.
History of economic thought paper ideas
These topics seem underexplored to me:
Montesquieu
Economics in the Talmud
Rise of econometrics in the 19th century
The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield
The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered
Works in any foreign language you might read
Chinese economic thought
Economic thought in India
The funding of economics, and economists, through the ages (very underdone)
The institutionalization of economics
History of women in economics, especially recently
History of prizes and awards in economics
Economic ideas and fascism, in various eras
Economic thoughts on the arts, starting with Hume
History of finance and financial economics, considerably understudied
Economics and demographic thought, throughout the ages, for instance the 1920s
The very early history of law and economics
Economic thought in various religions
Economics and 19th century psychology
History of experimental economics
History of RCTs
History of economics and education, as a topic
History of what has been taught in economics classes, over the generations
History of textbooks
History of economists in government
History of economists in multi-lateral institutions
History of economists working in central banks
History of how various economic databases have been built
History of economists doing journalism (both Menger and Walras were first journalists)
Early history of “environmental economics”
Early history of economics/water supply issues
Earlier writings on the economics of slavery
History of economists holding public office, J.S. Mill, Einaudi, many others, or as central bankers
The Henry Geoge movement over the generations
Economic “dissidents” of various kinds
History of economists working with the military and national security
A congestion theory of unemployment fluctuations
Yusuf Mercan, Benjamin Schoefer, and Petr Sedláček, newly published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. I best liked this excerpt from p.2, noting that “DMP” refers to the Nobel-winning Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment:
This congestion mechanism improves the business cycle performance of the DMP model considerably. It raises the volatility of labor market tightness tenfold, to empirically realistic levels. It produces a realistic Beveridge curve despite countercyclical separations. On its own, it accounts for around 30–40 percent of US unemployment fluctuations and much of its persistence. In addition, the model accounts for a range of other business cycle patterns linked to unemployment: the excess procyclicality of wages of newly hired workers compared to average wages, the countercyclical labor wedge, large countercyclical earnings losses from displacement and from labor market entry, and the long-run insensitivity of unemployment to policies such as unemployment insurance.
And by their congestion mechanism the authors mean this:
…a constant returns to scale aggregate production function that exhibits diminishing returns to new hires, a feature we call congestion in hiring.
I find that assumption plausible. It remains the case that the DMP model is grossly underrepresented in on-line writings on economics, on Twitter, and in the blogosphere. It won three Nobel Prizes, yet it also suggests that the “simple” manipulation of spending or nominal values does not automatically restore higher levels of employment.
Here are less gated versions of the paper.
Why Do Poor People Commit More Crime?
It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.
A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.
The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.
Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.
A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.
In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:
Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.
The disinflation as American triumph
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, score one for the Quantity Theory as well, here is one excerpt:
Enter the notion of “credibility.” A long-standing tradition in macroeconomics, sometimes called rational expectations, suggests that a truly credible central bank can lower inflation rates without a recession. If the central bank announces a lower inflation target, and most people believe the central bank, wages and prices adjust in rough sync with demand. All nominal variables move upward at a slower pace, markets continue to clear, and the economy keeps chugging along. Because individuals in markets believe the disinflation process is for real, they are willing to act in accordance with it in their pricing and wage-demand decisions.
Although rational expectations theory has undergirded several Nobel Prizes (see Robert E. Lucas and Thomas Sargent, for example), most mainstream economists these days do not believe in it as a general approach. The critics might be behavioral economists who scorn the notion that individuals are rational in their market decisions, or they might believe that full credibility is rarely if ever present. After all, do we not live in an age of low trust and mixed quality governance? Over the last year, for instance, I have been party to numerous conversations suggesting the Fed will be afraid to pursue disinflation out of fear of inducing a recession and indirectly electing Donald Trump as president.
And yet it seems the credibility has been there, and so we can give plaudits to various parts of the federal government, including President Biden, for supporting Powell and the Fed. At no point did the president intervene to bash the central bank or send a mixed message, and so the disinflation had implicit stamps of approval from majorities in both parties. It is often the job of Congress to complain, but there were no serious moves made against the independence of the Fed, even if Elizabeth Warren and a few others squawked.
As for the commentariat, a diverse array of economists ranging from the Keynesian Paul Krugman to many conservative economists recognized that rate increases and disinflation were necessary and had to be done with promptness and fortitude. And so credibility reigned.
Granted, the rational expectations view is not always correct — and a recession somewhere down the road isn’t out of the question — but at least in this instance America pulled together and did the job. This sequence of events, which is continuing, should serve as a lesson to those predicting either the decline of America or the creeping polarization and paralysis of our politics. The disinflation can serve as Exhibit A for American optimism and a demonstration that we are still capable of making our own future.
Can the UK and EU pull off the same?