The geographical distribution of the award both creates and reflects power hierarchies in the discipline. The economics prize has been awarded 40 times to 62 recipients, 42 of whom have been from the US, while more than 50 were working in the US at the time of the award. The University of Chicago has 11 laureates, leading to the joke about “the Stockholm-Chicago Express.” This does not reflect the actual state of economic knowledge so much as the biases and blindness of the jury.
Only two persons from developing countries have received it (Arthur Lewis and Amartya Sen) and both worked in the US and England. Only three economists with an interest in the economics of developing countries — which is the economic reality for around three-quarters of the world’s population — have received the award.
In recent years, the prize has been focused on financial market behavior. In 1997, the award went to two economists — Robert Merton and Myron Scholes — who were supposed to have discovered a method of valuing derivatives that could reduce or eliminate risk in financial investment. When the hedge fund that they ran (Long Term Capital Management) went bust within the year and had to be rescued by the US Federal Reserve, there was some embarrassment. Perhaps to right this wrong, a few years later the prize was given to economists George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, who had pointed to the imperfect functioning of financial markets. The award last year to Paul Krugman may also have indicated some bowing to changing times.
So far, no woman has got the economics Nobel. Apart from obvious exclusions such as Joan Robinson, this also reflects power hierarchies within the subject, because women economists, even in the US and the UK, tend to be concentrated in the lower reaches of the academics profession as researchers and lecturers rather than professors.
These imbalances will not be rectified easily. But the Nobel Prize in economics may now be as much in need of wider legitimacy as the economics profession itself. It will be interesting to see if this is reflected in the current year’s award.
Jayati Ghosh is professor of economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.
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