Letter: Crisis and prize winners

Fri, 12/12/2008 10:37 AM  |  Reader's Forum

Every year a bunch of staid guys somewhere in the world drop some names into a hat and then pull out some names from the same hat declaring them as winners of the Nobel Prize for this or that field.

I am only concerned about the Nobel Prize for economics which these staid guys have been announcing every year without any regard to the relevance of the field of study of the so-called winners to the real world.

How come none of these Nobel Prize winners ever predicted a financial situation such as what the world is facing today? Perhaps they were so immersed in all the theories of economics that none of them had an idea of what was happening in the real world.

They were so concerned with the statistical part of economics that they forgot the good ol' saying -- there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies and statistics.

If I am not mistaken at least 40 U.S. citizens have been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in the past 30 to 40 years and there are more than 10 Nobel laureates in econometrics sitting on company boards, U.S. Treasury benches and in places such as Harvard and Stanford.

Shame on them. They should return the Nobel Prizes they were awarded and apologize for being such shortsighted and lame-brained theoretical economists.

YASH
Jakarta

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.