2023 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Claudia Goldin (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

There seems to be good reasons for not separating an extremely young child from their mother.

you can't award the nobel posthumously. in other words, once someone dies, they take their life's work with them to the grave without any further formal recognition. so older folks are prioritized because everyone knows that the younger folks still have long lives ahead of them, and their time to shine will come.

also, the reason why nobel laureates in economics tend to be older than the other sciences is because of the lag time of proving important contributions.

in the basic sciences, new discoveries can be overnight. of course, incremental progress takes decades as well, but the culmination --- the breaking point of a new discovery --- can be instantaneous.

in economics, which is better categorized as speculation of rational and irrational human decision-making, it may take decades to prove a theorem (especially in macro). there is no "overnight success". you can say the most absurd or correct claim such as "new neoclassical synthesis is the best monetary framework!" but even if it were true, it doesn't matter unless there is substantial evidence. and that usually takes decades because of long-term business cycles and novel, unprecedented crises.

the consequence of this lag time between when the seminal paper is published and when there is consensus in the field is massive.

example:

paul romer won the econ nobel in 2018. but the paper he wrote that earned him the nobel was actually his PhD thesis from all the way back in 1983, when he 29. he hypothesized that one of the most important contributions to long-term economic growth was ideas, and how it is free to distribute and re-use innovative ideas.

even if his hypothesis were true in 1983, it wouldn't matter unless there was substantial evidence of it. and you can be sure that the rapid growth many developing countries experienced post-1980s and onwards helped to support his claim.

It makes sense in economics. You need time to be proven right. Physicists and chemists can produce a bunch of equations that we can plug in and get the results, or perform an experiment to demonstrate. Social science can only be proven retrospectively.