Oct 19 2012
Economist Richard Wolff Critiques Nobel Prize Selection
On October 15th, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for 2012 was handed to US economists Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley for their work titled, “Stable Allocations and the Practice of Market Design.” Roth has been widely lauded in the media recently for his work on kidney donation swaps, which has increased the likelihood of recipients getting lifesaving transplants.
Roth and Shapley’s award winning area of research attempts to apply market solutions where allocation cannot easily be worked out by price. Their research seeks an economic ideal by creating stable outcomes in typically unpredictable real world occurrences. Their specialized methodology has found applications in areas such as helping students get placed in schools, or matching patients with compatible organ donors.
Marxist economist Richard Wolff in a recent column critiques the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize to Roth and Shapley, saying it implies that their research was “the most important [the committee] could imagine or find in the entire realm of economics during 2012.” Wolff added, “[w]e are in the fifth year of a global capitalist crisis. Markets – like the economists who think that markets are the object of economic science – failed to anticipate, understand, prevent, or overcome the crisis,” and that the prize reflects the “modern economics profession’s necrophilic obsession with markets and their minute details.”
The Economics prize was announced just days after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union – a decision that also left many scratching their heads and wondering about the Nobel Committee’s denial of economic and social issues in their backyard. One Greek lawyer told the New York Times, “The leader of the E.U. is Germany which is in an economic war with Southern Europe. I consider this war equal to a real war. They don’t help peace.”
GUEST: Richard Wolff is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He has also taught at Yale and the University of Paris, and is host of Economic Update on WBAI, 99.5 FM, our sister station in New York. Richard Wolff has also written a number of books, his latest is Democracy at Work
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