Nominations for the Dynamite Prize in Economics
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.
You may nominate up to three economists for the Dynamite Prize in Economics either by leaving a comment on this page.
Or if you fear that going public with your professional views on these matters could jeopardize your career or those of people associated with you, then you may make nominations anonymously by emailing them to pae_news@btinternet.com, preferably with the subject heading “Nominations and Evidence”.
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Leon Keyserling. Nothing in the remit for this prize said it couldn’t be posthumous. Keyserling virtually invented military Keynesianism with his advice to NSC-68 author, Paul Nitze and, later, advice to AFL-CIO honchos, George Meany and Walter Reuther. It’s been a long (60 years), strange trip but the GFC is Keyserling’s Cold War guns and butter chickens coming back home to get fried.
Sorry, but Keyserling does not satisfy the General Rules requirement: “Only economists may be nominated, and they must have been active during part of the last quarter century.”
Didn’t see the “last quarter century” part.
Who could go past:
Milton Friedman (another posthumous nomination) for misleading the economics profession with a naive methodology and an equally naive theory of money;
Alan Greenspan for perpetuating a financial bubble that should have burst in 1987; and
Ben Bernanke for believing the theories of Milton Friedman about what caused the Great Depression and thus leading us to the brink of the next one, and for supporting Greenspan’s delusional belief in the efficiency of financial markets.
I support Steve Keen’s (January 12, 2010 at 9:06 am | #4) nomination of Milton Friedman and Paul’s (January 12, 2010 at 4:34 pm | #13) nomination of Paul Samuelson.
Here I attempt to provide further strength to Steve Keen’s and Paul’s nominations, with the relevant evidence.
Friedman, with his influential 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics”, provided the “philosophical” grounds upon which the building of neo-classical economics was built. [1]
Said grounds included the “revolutionary” notion that the accuracy of the assumptions was irrelevant to the correctness of the conclusions, incidentally “proving” that a tradition of thousands of years of philosophy and logic was wrong.
But Friedman’s influence extends well beyond neo-classical economics. As argued in the Journal of Artificial Societies Social Simulations, “keeping a model simple and thus following the KISS approach [an approach directly derived from Friedman’s postulates] has its merits – even if there is no need to simplify simulation models for practical mathematical reasons”. [2]
Furthermore, always mindful of the practical application of theoretical developments, Friedman contributed to the “Chilean miracle”, providing helpful guidance to the Chilean President, General Augusto Pinochet.
But if Friedman created the “philosophical” grounds for the development of economics, Paul Samuelson, through his textbook ‘Economics: An Introductory Analysis’ (19 English language editions since 1948, translated into 40 languages), popularized neo-classical economics, contributing more than any other economist to its diffusion. [3]
Nevertheless, the ideological importance of Samuelson’s work is expressed best in his own words: “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws… If I can write its economics textbooks” (as quoted in [4]).
And Samuelson’s example has been inspiration for generations of neo-classical economists ever since, as evidenced by the following quote:
“(…) the goal of high school economics should be to produce not just smarter decision makers at a personal level but BETTER INFORMED VOTERS [on neo-classical economics] ON ELECTION DAY.” (My emphasis. From Greg Mankiw’s blog. Redefining High School Economics, 13/04/2009.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/04/defining-high-school-economics.html)
REFERENCES:
[1] Friedman, Milton (1953). ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ in Milton Friedman ‘Essays is Positive Economics’, Chicago University Press.
[2] Pyka, Andreas and Werker, Claudia (2009). ‘The Methodology of Simulation Models: Chances and Risks’. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 12(4)1 .
See also
Deichsel, Simon and Pyka, Andreas (2009). ‘A Pragmatic Reading of Friedman’s Methodological Essay and What It Tells Us for the Discussion of ABMs’. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 12(4)6 .
[3] Frost, Greg (2009). ‘Nobel-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson dies at age 94’. MIT News Office
[4] ‘The puzzling failure of economics’. The Economist, p. 13. 23/08/1997.
Samuelson also deserves mention for his intellectual dishonesty and growing self-delusion. His first textbook at least notes the existence of degrees of oligopoly and monopolistic competition. In fact, it states that although the text focuses on pure competition and pure monopoly, these oligopolistic states are likely the majority of situations. I don’t know when this acknowledgement was dropped, but his most recent edition contains not a word about this reality.
Further, after acknowledging the that the Cambridge, UK side of the ‘Cambridge Capital Controversies’ had proven the impossibility of the neoclassical theory of capital and declaring that neoclassicists must now deal with this massive flaw, he carried on as though the debate had never occurred. Who knows what might have become of economic theory if Samuelson had used his leadership position in the profession to promote intellectual honesty and actual address this massive flaw.
I do believe that nominations should be restricted to living authors and policy-makers, whose political influence and analysis, even if both sometimes derived from that of other dead writers, is the one currently afflicting the world.
Even if as a present holder of “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” he is already in the Top Ignoble List (sorry Mr. Sen), I would think Edward Prescott, whose flawed methodological innovations on cycle theory or econometrics; along with a ultraliberal policy strategy (of which he remains a tenet during the GFC) are guilty of ruining both the economy and most of the university courses in macroeconomical issues for two generations (I am young enough to know).
Ben Bernanke, for his poor understanding of financial crisis, which not only, as Mr. Keen points out, was oversimplistic, but who’s been rewarded with a political influence and control of economic policies that is keeping the economy away from recovery and job creation.
I agree with the names of Friedman,Bernanke and Greenspan but I think we must add in any case Black e Scholes(Nobel Prizes 1997)because of the selected area of economic research, or the calculation of the derivate price
My first nomination undoubtedly goes to Leon Walras. Although Walras was not THE founding father of neoclassical theory (Menger and Jevons made it before him to the press), he is today, perhaps, the most remembered of the three so it is in order to nominate him in representation of the 3 people who did most damage to the discipline. True, others followed suit with their failed physics-turned-economics pursuits, but the original 3 (akin to the not-so-good, the bad and the ugly) were Menger, Jevons and Walras
Milton Friedman would be my second nominee. Friedman, with his insane and fundamentally flawed musings on monetary theory (especially the assumption that doubling money in a system would result in a simple doubling of prices) led his neoclassical acolytes to believe in a chimera that has been disastrous in the first place and that promises to be even more disastrous now following the GFC.
Alan Greenspan would also have been a good candidate for nomination inasmuch as he was the one responsible for the buildup of the bubble that burst, but he cannot be accused as much as Bernanke inasmuch as the latter has seen the disaster but nevertheless fails to acknowledge that his theoretical underpinnings are wrong and persists in applying the same erroneous policies to a problem caused by those theories in the first place.
If I could nominate a fourth person, I think my nomination would go to Jeffrey Sachs, for his erratic theories of economic development, contaminated, as it is, by neoclassicism and widely discredited (without excuse and without apology) by the Chinese experience.
Sorry … missed the “last century part”.
As the earlier reference to Jeffrey Sachs hints at, academic economists and economic theory alone can’t be blamed for failures in economic policy. It’s only when their ideas are applied as policy that the potential danger arises. We can’t ignore the policy makers and the political imperatives they face and respond to. I would nominate Gordon Brown (UK politician), and his then economic adviser Ed Balls, for their disastrous deregulation of the banking and financial sectors in the UK.
We all know that this prize has to be given to the “Great” Timothy Geithner
I nominate Eugene Fama, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers
I don’t know maybe we should have a prize for ignoble ideas. Efficient markets and rational expectations were pretty much baked into the reform and conservative wings of the profession. To single out Fama or Friedman seems odd. What about Krugman? He has authored how many papers with rational expectations sitting TDC? Progressive liberal economists need to take some blame for having played and purged along to get along. Economists, for the majority, were a pretty cozzy lot before the GFC. I am glad that after the GFC (and for one a faux noble) that some decided to break ranks ATF, but they enabled the general ideological climate as much as any putatively right-wing protagonist of the profession.
Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke. There are too many number threes to choose from…
Paul Samuelson is the major economist responsible for aborting Keynes’s Revolutionary general theory argument that the cause of unemployment is nested in the operation of financial markets and the demand for liquidity on the part of savers.
Paul Davidson provides the empirical evidence using direct quotes from Samuelson to show “Why Keynes’s Ideas Were Never Taught in American Universities” , [ pp 162-178 of the book THE KEYNES SOLUTION: THE PATH TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROSPERITY (Palgrave/Macmillan, September 2009). Samuelson is quoted as stating that he found The General Theory “unpalatable” and not comprehensible. Samuelson then goes on to say “The way I finally convinced myself was to stop worrying about it [understanding Keynes’s analysis]. I asked myself why do I refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 till 1937… I was content to assume that there was enough rigidity in relative prices and wages to make the Keynesian alternative to Walras operative”. In 1986, Samuelson still held to this line when he stated “We [Keynesians] alweays assumed that the Keynesian underemployment equilibrium floated on a substructure of administered prices and imperfect competition”.
In other words, Samuelson propagated the view that Keynes’s analysis relied on the rigidity of wages and prices , even though Keynes, on page 257 of THE GENERAL THEORY wrote that the classical theory assumed that “the self adjusting character of the economic system [rested] on an assumed fluidity of money-wages, and when there is rigidity to lay on the rigidity the blame for maladjustment…..My difference from this theory is primarily a difference of analysis”.
Thus Samuelson, who proclaimed himself as the chief Keynesian after the war, promolgated a false basis for Keynes’s theory– and in ascribing rigidity of prices and wages as the cause of unemployment made his brand of ‘Keynesianism’ an easy target for peole like Milton Friedman. The result was Keynes’s policies were killed by Friedman et al and politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher were able to parade out Nobel Prize winning monetarists, etc as strong advocates for their free market philosophy.
My submission in support of Paul is the same as appears in support of Steve Keen (see above for additional reasons why Paul Samuelson deserves the award).
I would agree. And it goes to the point about self-understood reform liberal economists at the centre of the development of economics absolving themselves of responsibility for the evolution of the profession and its central policy paradigm. If there is one (super star) exception this may be Stiglitz.
I nominate, in order, Alan Greenspan,Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke. For obvious reasons.
Allan Greenspan who led the over expansion of money and credit that directly caused mal- investment. This resulted in over building and over indulgence in nearly all hard assets.
Ben Bernanke who led the continuation of this lunacy and continues to try monetary expansion to this day.
The FED should be abolished
George Stigler and Milton Friedman.
Bernanke is useless as an economist, he needs to call his office so that someone can tell him if it is day or night.
Timothy Geithner for the reverse Robin Hood, stealing from from poor (the taxpayer) and giving to the rich (banks).
Bernanke for being totally lost… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ79Pt2GNJo
I nominate: University of Chicago School of Economics
Where is Lucas on this list? Rational expectations stands as a monument to the efforts of certain economists to eliminate reality at all costs in their search for what they call rigor. I would also second the nomination of Prescott, possibly as a special mention in any ‘hubris’ award.
Number 1 Alan Greenspan, 2 Paul Krugman who advocated the real estate bubble created when he said the FED should jump start the economy by creating or facilitating a bubble (real-estate) in 2001/2. Too much Bernanke bashing for my liking “everyone seems to have a Masters in hindsight” and seem to think they are experts. Further more Lucas is a great economist whose critique changed monetary policy around the world. I dare say we enjoy reasonably and stable Inflation today in a large part thanks to him.
Art Laffer merits dishonourable mention here. Among the smoking gun items of evidence, we may submit the on-air CNBC appearances in 2006-07 in which Peter Schiff warns of an unsustainable debt and real estate bubble. Laffer ridicules Schiff and asserts that the economy has never been in a better condition for sutained growth.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Laffer sings a slightly different tune:
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/art-laffer-on-inefficient-market-theory.html
Thank you for the link to Peter Schiff being mocked by pundits, who would be really embarrassed if they had the capacity for shame. My guess is that most of them are still invited onto these ridiculous shows. I hope that those recommending Merrill Lynch went all-in.
What about Blythe Masters?
Ben Bernanke for being a follower with no forward vision, Alan Greenspan for being the idiot he followed, and Milton Friedman for his ridiculous assertion that the gamblers in the casino should be allowed to make up the house rules.
I nominate Ben “There is no housing market bubble” Bernanke, Robert “The end of business cyles” Lucas, and Eugene “Faith in Efficient Markets” Fama for the Ignoble Prize for Economics.
I nominate Dean Baker, Robert Shiller, and Nouriel Roubini for the Noble Prize for Economics.
Nomino a Domingo Cavallo, ex Ministro de Economía de la Argentina, quien con su políticas económicas neoliberales provocó el derrumbe económico argentino, que de alguna manera anticipó el colapso del neoclasisismo.
Pierre Cahuc and Andre Zylberberg, who wrote a book celebrating the dynamic “creative destruction” of the American labor market. Published in French in 2003, the English translation, “The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Destruction in a Growing Economy,” was just in time to witness the destruction of nine million or so more jobs than were being created.
The authors also slickly segued from the French 35-hour work week to the Holocaust in two slippery, slimy steps:
“The idea that any country’s economy, and a fortiori the world economy, contains a fixed number of jobs or hours of work that can be parceled out in different ways is false. When used to justify policies that reduce the length of the individual work week, it may lead to unintended consequences. It is, moreover, harmful when used to justify the withdrawal of mothers with children from the working population (thanks, for example, to parental education allowances). It can even be dangerous, as when it leads to the notion that getting rid of ‘superfluous’ manpower (the Jews of Nazi Germany in the past, immigrants from many countries in the present)…” (Page 25).
Arbeitslos Macht Frei?
One has to set down some reasonable criteria for selecting plausible candidates of the ignoble prize. The GFC was not caused by any one of the groups of economists, investment bankers or regulators. It was caused by all of them. So I would chose the most influential idea-leaders from those groups. They have to be influential, but also remained silent in tha face of overwhelming contrary evidence, indicating insincerity. My list is therefore: Milton Friedman, Eugene Fama and Ben Bernanke.
His 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” misled generations of economists, as it demonstrates an ignorance of epistomology and logic and a misunderstanding of the scientific method. His influence can be seen in many economic theories with unrealistic assumptions and a disdain for hard facts, as the “Chilean miracle” was by any objective measure a failure. His pervasive bad influence and his insincerity qualifies him as the foundation member of the ignoble club.
Eugene Fama is the next member of the ignoble club, since financial markets and the financial sector generally have been the dominant driver of economic growth and “innovation” for the past several decades. The efficient market theory was the intellectual foundation of much of that development.
The efficient market theory provided the moral umbrella for all sorts of greed and predatory behaviour, because the market is efficient by its definition. If you managed to get $100 million in fees or bonus by any ruse, then it must be justifable and rational because the market is efficient, for otherwise you could not have got away with it. Whatever happened in the real world, academic Eugene Fama might not have noticed. But he would have noticed that the majority of papers published in academic research journals are about “anomalies” or empirical contradictions to the efficient market paradigm. He did nothing (as far as I know) to repudiate his Chicagoan nonsense, which is part of the neoclassical dogma. He was obviously encouraged by the financial oligarchs who fund the universities and now rule America.
Alan Greenspan was a regulator who aided and abetted much of the neoclassical, free-market development for two decades. But he did own up during the GFC to having made some mistakes in the past, much to his credit. But Ben Bernanke did not accept any responsibility before, during or after the GFC (in the unlikely event that it is over). He was in a position to influence housing finance, monetary policy and supervision before and during the GFC. He did little. The fact that he was unable to recognise the GFC before and during its development, should have caused him to pause to think about his own understanding of economics. But he has shown few signs of having learnt anything from the GFC. He remains unrepentent in the face of overwhelming evidence.
So my list is: Friedman, Fama and Bernanke.
1. Milton Friedman: for assuming a priori clear falsehoods, for creating the Chicago School of Economics and forcing it down so many people’s throats, and for the unforgivable combination of arrogance, willful ignorance (of economic reality), and clothing unfalsifiable nonsense in the robes of objective science.
2. Collectively, the editorial boards of all of the major economic journals; anyone who dared to question theoretically or (gasp!) actually produce data calling into question the prevailing neo-classical economic theory’s assumptions also dared to be completely shut out from publication. Hubris may be defined as surety of rectitude coupled with blindness to counterexample; it is generally held that hubris is destructive and anti-, not pro-social.
3. Alan Greenspan, for being such a willing cheerleader for all of the excess that threw the whole business out of balance; for being astonished at the predictable disaster that resulted; and lastly, for the same overweening arrogance which characterizes my other two nominees.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, for an academic formula which completely excluded liquidity as an input but was used to price everything dependent upon liquidity.
Assar Lindbeck is a Swedish neoliberal, right-wing economist, relatively unknown internationally. He is however the head schemer behind the so called Nobel prize in economics. The Nobel prize in economics is one of the main factors behind the almost total conversion of the economics profession (and in fact of world public opinion) to market fundamentalism. Assar Lindbeck therefore deserves a place beside better known economists such as Lawrence Summers and Robert Lucas.
Pseudonymous signature: A. Nobel
I would submit :
Harry Markowitz, father of efficient portfolio theory, that relies on the existence of an oxymoronic “risk-less investment” : ANY postponement of wealth consumption in the future incorporates a degree of risk that such wealth will not be delivered then.
Modigliani-Miller, that provided a strong theoretic argument to the “balance-sheet doesn’t matter” mantra, an enabler to the excessive leverage that created the GFC.
Steve,
I will agree with you on Greenspan and Bernanke, but my third candidate would be Krugman. There is no way you can actually put up Milton Friedman in my opinion. These other two were not using Friedmans theories , but instead adaptations of them to which they added their own political leanings. What has happened would not have happened in a system run like Friedman ( a conservative) proposed. Remember the very basis of Friedman was a controlled growth in the money supply ( basically the money supply is to grow at a rate to match the GDP). That does not fit in any way with the ZIRP used by Greenspan, Bernanke, and all of the european bankers. Most of what has happened has been due to unintended consequences from liberal political policies in the major countries. These were abetted whenever economic difficulties were encountered by the ZIRP of the central bankers which was like pouring gasoline on a fire. Friedman believed in the power of the free market, but what the socialists have given us for the last 40 years has been a highly regulated market, loaded with policies intended to take care of their core constituencies. Those policies included keeping interest rates below the real market rate in order to allow people who could not really afford it to buy a home. Now many of those homes are being foreclosed on because the owners can’t make the payments. Steve give Anna Schwartz a call and talk it over with her. I have his book and have read it. Lumping him with Greenspan and Berrnanke now would be like someone lumping you with them 20 years from now. It does not make sense; you and Milton are conservatives while Greenspan and Bernake are liberals in their policies. Milton belongs in the same camp as Don Beaudreaux ( cafehayek.com), Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell all of whom I have read for years, and they hold the same economic beliefs as you.
Who deserves the Ignoble Prize for economics this year is clearly the entire economic profession.
The main reasons would be
1)for continuing to focus entirely on ways to grow the economy to shrink its physical impacts on
a)resource depletion,
b)ecological disruption
c)climate change,
d)technology upheaval and
e)ever further overhanging debt
2)not even discussing the rather clear physical causes of instability in financial systems for economies that are prevented from growing by the failure of growth efforts
3)ignoring the conflicts between critical environmental, business and cultural interests that naturally result making them all undermine each others efforts.
For “not being real” in addressing these issues a media and political environment consumed with dissension on all these conflicting matters is allowed to develop.
p.s. In case it’s not clear, I’m nominating the entire economics profession this year, not an individual. Individuals are not the real cause of the problem, but a mass myopia we have been struggling with for some time and remains unclear how to break. It rather trivializes the circumstance we are in to blame it on an individual.
Phil: Is not the project here at real economics an attempt to marshall the exact thoughts – among others – that you indicate are missing. If so, do you exempt the folks here? If not, are you just saying economics in its present form is a failed enterprise and should be abandoned?
Steve Hanke has written an article “The Great 18-year real estate cycle” in the Feb. 2010 GlobeAsia. Every peak in the real estate cycle has been followed by a recession or depression. The previous real-estate-based recession was in 1990, so the Depression of 2008 was predicted by those who understand the cycle. The cites in the article include: Fred E. Foldvary. “The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian
Synthesis.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology Vol.
56, No. 4, 1997: 521-41. That paper forecast the next depression at 2008.
Isn’t it sad that we have so many worthy nominations? It seems to me the entire project is being cast aside. Have we left anyone out?
I nominate:
Ala Greenspan
Eugene Fama
Michael Jensen
I nominate Dr. Dan McLaughlin, Mr. Austin Hughes and hundreds of other obscure ‘leading’, ‘industry expert’, or just plain vested interest economists who have sold their souls and their good judgements for spinning a line of economic benefit to their employers.
The ‘fundamentals are sound’, ‘the rate of decline in the second derivative is abating’, ‘a soft landing is expected’, ‘housing has never been more affordable’, ‘there has never been a better time to buy [some product or service from my employer]’. That these economists get massive air time is depressing. That they have open access to government policy circles is downright criminal.
More than the ‘big idiot’ thinkers, these ‘small idiot’ thinkers are the ones who have had the influece to shout down dissenting voices during the boom (in whatever asset you look at), so they are my nomination…
Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, for the Modigliani-Miller theorem that it doesn’t matter whether a company finances itself through debt or through equity.
WTF???
They started the whole CAPM nonsense.
Also, the editors of the American Economic Review who published the initial article in 1958 should get an honorable (dis?) mention.
Didn’t someone have the simple common sense to tell these guys they were off their rocker?
This provided the mathematical underpinning to the entire wacky world of neoclassical economics.
Think about it: since 1958, the idea that debt doesn’t matter (!!!) has been promoted by the most influential group of finance economists around, and underpins the entire model of capital finance now taught to undergrads.
Benton
The mathematisation goes back further than that. Read Philip Mirowski’s ‘Machine Dreams’: Modigliani was a Cowles alumni.
So what does matter that the mathematics abstracts away? Who the debt is to: the community which supplies the goods or the financier who makes the easy promises? Who should we trust: the community which has already shared its goods with us or usurious if not dishonest bankers and financial speculators?
I would like to nominate Martin Feldstein, who has been overlooked by the media as a major player in the crisis.
The evidence begins with his conversion of the NBER to a strictly neoclassical outfit, undoing its Institutionalist
origins. It continues with his establishment of Chicago-style macroeconomics at Harvard, to the extent it has
driven out its Keynesian heritage. But most importantly, Feldstein was not only on the board of AIG up to its
failure, but he was the chair of its ‘risk management’ committee. I cannot believe he is continually invited on
various programs as an expert down to the present.
I am surprised and deeply disappointed that Ayn Rand didn’t make the list. That Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and economist wannabe has convinced millions that selfishness isn’t a vice, but a virtue. And among her victims is none other than one of this year’s nominees, Alan Greenspan. The fact that she has managed to convince millions of her nutty views, including “serious economists” such as Alan Greenspan, suggests to me that she is the obvious choice for this first ever Ignoble in Economics.