Nobel In Economics Attributed For Rediscovering The Wheel, Trial & Error

Nobel committees are often moronic, or deliberately misattributing. For example they all too often insist upon the point that mostly only MIT and Harvard, two top plutocratic universities are capable of top thinking. 

As when the German Otto Hahn was given the Nobel for discovering nuclear fission, when it’s Irene Curie, a (French) woman who had already a Nobel prize, that one well deserved, who had discovered nuclear fission, at the latest in 1937… and wasted lots of efforts teaching this to Hahn)

So the Nobel in economics was attributed basically for discovering that, when you need to find out if a method work, you set up a controlled study. No doubt that is a great progress for economists. They apparently didn’t know, until it was pointed out to them a few years back, precisely by Ms Esther Duflo, a 46 year old French economist in a TED talk.  

Economic Theory has been, so far, a two dimensional theory biting its own tail, to better serve plutocracy. The idea of such a 2 dimensional one sided world originally came from the German mathematician Moebius.

Duflo, at age 46, is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize in economics and only the second woman.

The three researchers work on global poverty, studying interventions in a range of areas: combating teacher absenteeism, direct cash transfers to the extreme poor, policing drunk driving, and studying the effects of access to textbooks on students, among others.

They’ve also made what is described as extraordinary (extraordinary, for complete idiots with no scientific, or even common sense training, whatsoever) contributions to developing the methods used to study these subjects, with a focus on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In a randomized trial, interventions are implemented in different ways in some areas, for example villages, but not to a control area, enabling researchers to identify which effects are the result of the intervention. This completely obvious work has been enormously influential, pushing other researchers in the field to conduct higher-quality studies… so dumb “economics”, the dismal “science”, has long been. By dummies, for dummies, so that the wealthy and powerful would get wealthier and more powerful. 

In 2003, Duflo and Banerjee (who are married) co-founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), now a global network for antipoverty research around the world. They also wrote the book Poor Economics (2011) about the choices people make when they’re poor, why those choices make sense, and how we can adjust policy to help address poverty.

Of course, human beings always make sense, even if official economics doesn’t. Actually the sense conventional, official economics makes is to serve the elite world oligarchy and its fossil fuel organization, hell bent to destroy the planet, as hell is Pluto’s abode.

As The Economist puts it in “The world economy’s strange new rules”: How economies work has changed radically. So must economic policy. (Oct 10th 2019)

Rich-world economies consist of a billion consumers and millions of firms taking their own decisions. But they also feature mighty public institutions that try to steer the economy, including central banks, which set monetary policy, and governments, which decide how much to spend and borrow. For the past 30 years or more these institutions have run under established rules. The government wants a booming jobs market that wins votes but, if the economy overheats, it will cause inflation. And so independent central banks are needed to take away the punch bowl just as the party warms up, to borrow the familiar quip of William McChesney Martin, once head of the Federal Reserve. Think of it as a division of labour: politicians focus on the long-term size of the state and myriad other priorities. Technocrats have the tricky job of taming the business cycle.

This neat arrangement is collapsing. As our special report explains, the link between lower unemployment and higher inflation has gone missing. Most of the rich world is enjoying a jobs boom even as central banks undershoot inflation targets. America’s jobless rate, at 3.5%, is the lowest since 1969, but inflation is only 1.4%. Interest rates are so low that central banks have little room to cut should recession strike. Even now some are still trying to support demand with quantitative easing (qe), ie, buying bonds. This strange state of affairs once looked temporary, but it has become the new normal. As a result the rules of economic policy need redrafting—and, in particular, the division of labour between central banks and governments. That process is already fraught. It could yet become dangerous.”

It is indeed dangerous to be led by imbeciles, even if they have Nobel Prizes, and especially if they gave Nobel prizes. 

The world is engaged in a mass extinction. And this is the fault of the fig leaf conventional economics gave to plutocracy. Giving the Nobel to Pluto universities specialized in the most perverse economics may be progress, like giving the Peace Nobels to Nazis plotting against Hitler. 

But is it progress enough?

The Nobels for Duflo and Al. are indeed glorious for those who don’t know how to add. This is how low this world has sunk. Meanwhile, Trump is finally ordering to remove US nuclear weapons from Turkey, as the nukes were held hostage there, for the last 50 years… Many wars out there, and economics is one of them…

PA

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P/S: Want to found economics on a scientific basis? Want non trivial economics from Pluto universities? Then one should consider my own AWE (Absolute Worth Energy). AWE provides with a strict definition of Worth according to how much energy it takes to generate it. For example a hyper intellectual is worth more than a plutocrat butt wiper…

Tags: Duflo, Harvard, MIT, Nobel, Randomization