“I also find it a little absurd to see people suddenly talking like economics is on par with phrenology because most economists failed to predict the subprime meltdown. Complex systems are hard to make predictions about even when there really are (relatively) simple, rigid laws governing the constituent elements.”

Well, I haven’t noticed any humility on the part of the Chicago School before the meltdown, or even now.

As for predicting the meltdown, I’ll leave that as an excerise in your Google-fu. Along with warnings about the bad effects of repealing so many New Deal-era banking regulations (whocudanode that they were there for good reason?).

Because it doesn’t typically reward results, it’s not even as “real” as the Literature prize.

(Let alone Economics, which rewards real world-class economic research. As Julian mentions – while I despise Paul Krugman’s politics and what they’ve done to his domestic political analysis, my understanding is that his work on international trade, for which he was awarded the Prize, is genuinely top notch.)

Some of the Peace recipients have done great work for mankind (Norman Borlaug), and some were great men who did great things for some class of people or some nation, if not the whole world (Martin Luther King, Jr.), but on the whole?

When you give Yasser Arafat a prize for “peace”, you should just stop expecting people to take it seriously.

As for the status of the field, I don’t know that anyone imagines it’s a “hard science” in the same sense as physics. I also find it a little absurd to see people suddenly talking like economics is on par with phrenology because most economists failed to predict the subprime meltdown. Complex systems are hard to make predictions about even when there really are (relatively) simple, rigid laws governing the constituent elements.