Who is the cleverest of them all?

From the mirror on the wall to the princess and the pea, the stories we are told as children are not inclined to encourage women to be smart. Attractive and sensitive, sure, but the smart girl is always the one in specs who doesn't get the boyfriend. And in case you think this is rather personal, I didn't get my own specs until I was 24 and already had one child.

To make this discussion rather more academic I would like to share some of the findings of an interesting paper from Danny Dorling published in the journal Significance, one of the peer-reviewed outputs from the Royal Statistical Society. It is a statistical analysis of the gender distribution of the allocation of Nobel Prizes and its findings are rather disturbing.

Dorling demonstrates that, since 1901 when the first prizes were awarded, only 35 of them have been given to women. Five were awarded to women the following year, suggesting that somebody had become concerned this might be noticed - one of those was the very first prize to be given to a woman for economics (this is not actually a Nobel Prize at all, just an opportunity for the economics discipline to impersonate the hard sciences).

The author's most sarcastic remarks are reserved for economists, who Dorling claims are not judging the best in the field but, rather, rewarding those who are like them and who fit in. Since the economics profession is dominated by men this has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy:

'It is possible that only men are able to be good economists. . . It is possible that just a chosen few are able to glimpse economic truths and reveal them to the small minority of their fellows who can understand the maths, while we masses are permitted to applaud. It is possible, but it is quite unlikely. Alternatively, it is possible that we have here a group of men awarding each other prizes if they fit in. . . Orthodox economists produce “dictionaries” of their subject where all those listed are men, and almost 90% of the “great economists” listed are men from just eight United States Ivy League universities.'

The Association of Heterodox Economists, discussed in the article as an academic society challenging the groupthink of the neoclassicals have made The Economists of Tomorrow the theme for their conference this year. Papers from women are particularly welcome. Tweet

Not a Common Occurrence

I confess it doesn't quite reach the level of the election of the first black man as President of the United States, but in my world the award of the Bank of Sweden prize for economics to a woman is a pretty earth-shattering event. The prize is frequently, but wrongly, referred to as the Nobel Prize for Economics. Nobel wouldn't have dreamt of endowing a prize for economics when he set his awards up in 1895. It is a latecomer - arriving only in 1968 - and an imposter.

The prize was given to Elinor Ostrom, whose work was summarised thus:

'Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.'

So what did Elinor Ostrom do to achieve this level of esteem amongst the five men who make up the nominating committee? It is surely an indication of the lack of confidence amongst orthodox economists that they have chosen not only an academic whose work could be claimed to undermine the central tenets of a market philosophy, but one who has never actually resided in an economics department. (If she had, she would, of course, have found it very difficult to carry out this sort of work.)

Elinor Ostrom is, and always has been, a political scientist. This is entirely appropriate in a year when politics has dominated the choice of prize-winners - and perhaps it always does. So what can we ascertain from the choice of this year's award-winner? Well first it should be said that Professor Ostrom obviously could not be trusted to take this weight of responsibility alone. She has been forced to share the prize with a rank outsider, Oliver E. Williamson, who, I cynically surmise, was chosen alongside her because some of the committee couldn't stomach awarding the prize to her alone. As a student of Ronald Coase, his work is in a tradition that directly opposes that of Ostrom herself, arguing that the assignment of clear property rights is enough in itself to deal with most environmental problems.

If the committee is representative of the economics profession then there is some evidence here of the sackcloth and ashes that many feel its orthodox members deserve. Ostrom's work is also motivated by concern for the environment, and particularly the depletion of natural resources, hence her focus on fisheries and natural environments. We wait to see whether the obvious connection between market economics and environmental destruction is translated into the freedom for those of us who teach the subject to adopt a heterodox approach. Tweet