Dober komentar Johna Cassidyja o kontradiktornosti podelitve najvišje nagrade v ekonomiji znanstvenikoma s popolnoma različnimi pogledi na isto zadevo.

In presenting a Nobel to Robert J. Shiller, of Yale, the prize-giving committee did the right thing, recognizing a contribution that challenged a piece of received wisdom—the idea that financial markets are efficient, in the sense that they accurately reflect all available information, and, apart from some short-lived aberrations, generally get prices right. During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Shiller (often working with his frequent co-author John Campbell, of Harvard) wrote the papers that the committee cited in its announcement, the efficient-markets hypothesis, the theory that embodied this sunny view of Wall Street, was sweeping all before it and being used to justify a hands-off approach to financial regulation that eventually led to disaster. Shiller, in showing that the stock market bounced up and down a lot more than could be justified on the basis of economic fundamentals such as earnings and dividends, kept alive the more skeptical and realistic view of finance that Keynes had embodied in his “beauty contest” theory of investing.

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Still, his fame and his Nobel are well-deserved. In addition to querying the efficient-markets idea at a time when doing so was tantamount to heresy, and carried significant career risk, he was a rare economist who recognized the importance of psychological factors. In his work on stock prices, rather than relying solely on economic theory and statistics, he surveyed actual investors to find out what they were thinking. Later on, together with George Akerlof, who shared the Nobel in 2001, he served as a role model and mentor to many younger economists, who carried on and expanded his work under the banner of “behavioral finance.”

Vir: Johna Cassidy, New Yorker