Stop Press: No One Wins Nobel Economics Prize

Yet again, press reports that someone has won the Nobel prize for economics are misguided. There is no such prize. There is a prize given by a bunch of bankers which, in typically dishonest banking style, they named after Nobel despite it having no connection with the fund that he set up to reward actual scientific progress.

This prize is handed out every year to which ever political economist (to give the field it's full name) has managed to publish work which most defends the status quo of the banking world. This is generally done by choosing a political stance and then finding a mathematical model which, by dint of ignoring everything that doesn't neatly fit, seems to give a "scientific" reason for why the real economy must actually work that way, thereby giving support to unelected advisers to dim-witted politicians who want the world to be run that way (and by a sheer coincidence, line their own pockets).

This years arsehole is a bloke called Angus Deaton who has been lauded for saying what the rich always like to hear: success is down to hard work and you don't want to stop people from working hard, now do you?

Of course, success is largely down to luck. The world is full of people working so hard that it kills them and who die in poverty. Birth (starting with the big one: country of birth) is by far the biggest element in success, followed by the ability to eject all morality as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Unlimited greed helps too. Basically, everything the Tory party (whether as part of the Conservatives or Labour) stands for. Angus acknowledges that he himself was lucky (more specifically, that his father was) but is careful not to say that this luck is more important than his presumably amazingly hard work sitting at a desk and thinking about stuff that he will never have to prove or even really defend in any serious (ie, job-threatening) way.

Angus has never been poor in his entire life but he's happy to tell us why other people are poor and how we can fix that - mainly by making money for ourselves and sharing the crumbs. No wonder the banks thought he should get a prize.