Name change: ‘Dynamite Prize in Economics’

In some ears our “Ignoble Prize for Economics” sounds too much like the unrelated Ig Nobel Prizes, which are offered annually as humorous awards for dubious and outrageous accomplishments in many fields, economics included.  Confusion between the two would be regrettable, not least because our prize is offered without humor and the people deciding the winner are expected in the main to be subscribers to the Real-World Economics Review.  So henceforth the “Ignoble Prize for Economics” will be called the “Dynamite Prize in Economics”.

Why “dynamite”?  Two reasons.  One, it retains the allusion to “Nobel”, as Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prizes, made his fortune through the invention of dynamite.  Two, as initially announced, the prize is “to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse”, or more figuratively, to the three economists who contributed most to blowing up the global economy.