Monday, October 12, 2009

Ostrom/Williamson

Econ Nobel. Yippee! Lin is a WONDERFUL person. I have to admit that Bob Tollison actually predicted Lin winning as a possibility, on Saturday night, at Cowboy Ciao in Phoenix. Good one, Bob.

Congrats to Williamson, too. But on a personal level I am so happy for Lin.

Lagniappe: Read the idiots who are posting here. Several are proud that they have never heard of Ostrom or Williamson. Why in the world be proud of ignorance? Though, I guess we all want to do what we are best at. (I enjoyed reading the pain in this thread. Does that make me a bad person?) I did also enjoy the "Well, they had to give it to a woman." Geez. Lin is a fantastic scholar, and has builts a real intellectual powerhouse there at the Workshop at IU.

UPDATE: A person on the Econ thread posted this:

google scholar: citations for most cited work:
Arrow has 8300 citations Stiglitz gets 5958
Krugman gets 5005 phelps 1624
prescott 4129...... and ostrom: 7299

So you ("Who the fuck are these idiots? Never heard of them... ever. ") can argue about whether she should have got the Nobel prize but one thing that's unarguable is your ignorance.

(Here are Lin's cites, btw: Notice that the 7,299 refer to ONE BOOK, this one. What have YOU done today?)

(Full disclosure: I study transactions cost political economy, and have often used Lin's work in class. And, she is certainly a friend. I have been to her house, and had lots of dinners with her. So I may be biased in her favor. Still, the data above show that the bias is not entirely unjustified.)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is from Levitt's blog

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. She is a political scientist, both by training and her career — one of the most decorated political scientists around. So the fact I have never heard of her reflects badly on me, and it also highlights just how substantial the boundaries between social science disciplines remain.

Paul Gowder said...

All I really have to say is:

Oooh! Oooh! Score for polisci! Oooh! Oooh!

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

One has to go beyond google scholar to get it, but Williamson is the most cited economist of all time.

Ostrom is fully deserving of the prize.

Gary said...

I read the post and the most important thought that I had was... oooh! I much enjoy Cowboy Ciao!

Simon Spero said...

Nobel prizes for Social Sciences are like Star Trek movies: it's only every other prize that's any good.

I will refrain from commenting on the bibliometrics at the end of the post, but the sound you hear in the background is Eugene Garfield weeping :-P

Anonymous said...

Re: (I enjoyed reading the pain in this thread. Does that make me a bad person?)

Me too! More fun than watching professional wrestling!

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