All that remains is the relatively large problem that, when it comes to his big ideas, he’s pretty much been wrong.

It’s perhaps what I happen to read now but I don’t get much sense that those Cambridge controversies matter much nowadays and growth accounting – which flows from Solow’s model of neo-classical growth – is widely applied. But then I don’t get an impression that neo-classical growth theory is of much use in enlightening us about economic growth in Japan during the 1990s or in Africa during the last 40 years. But I digress from games theory again.

I don’t believe the 30-year controversy about capital theory is the reason why Joan Robinson deserved a Nobel award: the case depends far more on her path-breaking contributions to the development of Keynesian macroeconomics back in the 1930s and 1940s. However, by the time the Nobel prize for economics was established in 1968, there was already a daunting backlog of prospective award winners, hence the number of joint awards in the early years such as Frisch and Tinbergen, Arrow and Hicks, and von Hayek and Myrdal. The last was certainly a recognition that political theory and analysis of institutions mattered in the context of economic policy.

On the capital theory controversy, one telling item in the conversation I had, almost exactly 40 years ago, was about how Robert Solow had then recently spent a sabbatical year in Cambridge, England, without ever meeting Joan Robinson, who lived there, when Cambridge really isn’t a very large town.

But hell, why discuss a Nobel award for Joan Robinson when we should be properly celebrating the award to Aumann and Schelling for their outstanding contributions to games theory?

I believe that it is officially, at least, nothing. That is, the prize—at least those in the sciences—-is for a discovery or invention or improvement: for a single event or piece of work, not a lifetime of solid work.

In practice, I guess the distinction is sometimes difficult to make.

Well, maybe it’s time we reconsider her argument.

I don’t think that all the variables are being balanced all the time, just that when someone wins for being really well known for x, it seems to get balanced out later (or the same year). So Kahneman is known for experimental work on the failings of the rat choice model, but Smith for experimental work on its successes. Merton and Scholes are big-time financial markets people, Sen is all about welfare, and so on.

This was hardly a unique personal insight imparted to me for she made little secret of this view as far as I could gather. There is probably little doubt that she would have refused the prize had it been awarded to her and very likely the prize awarding institution were aware of her views on the subject and perhaps wanted to avoid mutual embarrassment.

I don’t know how much contribution alone dictates the prize. Joan Robinson’s failure to win one doesn’t appear to have been a result of lacking fundamental contributions—hell, the capital controvesy lasted 30 years!

The prize has been oscillating on that dimension, too: for the past two years we’ve had mainstream economists (Kydland and Prescott last year; Engle and Granger before that), and then before them two years of more maverick types (Kahneman & Smith, Akerlof, Spence & Stiglitz).