If you discover a new element or invent time travel, as you do, everyone agrees that’s an amazing advance. But if you come up with some new economic model, your colleagues will spend the next century debating whether you’re even right, let alone whether you “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” When Friedrich Hayek won in 1974, he said he opposed the whole award. His “Austrian business cycle theory” was just a theory—a theory he believed, sure, but he knew others disagreed, and it did no one good for him to receive false validation labeling his idea as best.
As for economics stuff everyone agrees about, that can sound hilariously basic compared to the other breakthroughs honored with Nobels. Even economics professors joke about this. “This man stated that when you don’t have much money,” one professor will tell his students, “you don’t spend much money. Then when you get more money, you spend more money. And for that,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye, “he won the Nobel Prize.”
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Top image: Hoover Institution, Jonathunder/Wiki Commons
Related: The 6 Most Baffling Nobel Prizes Ever Awarded
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Source: Pinoy Daily News
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