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The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

129 points by k2enemy

by huitzitziltzin

7 subcomments

Economist here…
An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.

by btown

0 subcomment

More detail on accomplishments in press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre...
Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U
https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate

by jacquesm

5 subcomments

That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?

by hearsathought

2 subcomments

Why not just Economics. Why do they have to play games with everyone by adding "science" to everything? Economic "Sciences" is just as absurd as Creation "Science".

by Tycho

3 subcomments

I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?

by jcattle

1 subcomments

I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?

by xbar

0 subcomment

Fantastic selection. As ever, it is worthwhile to be familiar with the winners' works, particularly this audience and this year.

by ahmedfromtunis

0 subcomment

by l5870uoo9y

2 subcomments

by melvinchus

1 subcomments

by JCM9

3 subcomments

by mallowdram

4 subcomments

Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."

by GolfPopper

3 subcomments

"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...

by ricksunny

0 subcomment

Thank you for not repeating the usual mistaken, and misleading, name for the prize "Nobel Prize in Economics" in the title.
EDIT: Recognizing @huitzitziltzin 's comment, this factoid was originally imparted to me IRL 8 years ago by an economist, one Jackie Mallett of the Threadneedle banking simulation project (and who probably wouldn't mind my invoking her by name on this topic).