Alt title: 3 Old White Men Discover Colonialsm Bad

  • Michael H. Jenkins
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    6 hours ago

    My dude, generations historians, economists, and social critics from India and across sub-Saharan Africa have discussed these issues at length. There are libraries full of diverse works on the subject. The erasure of all that is on-brand for the Nobel Prize in Economics (which even Hayek said shouldn’t exist in his own acceptance speech) and frankly on-brand for the Western academy as a whole.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      The prize is for research in economics, not history or social science. They may be interested in the same topics, but economists usually take longer to reach a conclusion because their work is usually more data-driven.

      Hence their conclusions appear to be “not news” to historians and social scientists who already believed the same things without the benefit of economic data.

      • Michael H. Jenkins
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        6 hours ago

        If you’ll recall I did mention that postcolonial economists have been discussing this issue.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          You did. Is there one economist in particular who you think contributed more to this field than the actual winners?

          • Michael H. Jenkins
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            5 hours ago

            We really need to avoid this thinking–again, one of Hayak’s concern about this particular prize–that any of it comes down to “one person” or one set of research.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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              3 hours ago

              I don’t think any field of any research comes down to one person. Nevertheless, academics recognize that some people make greater contributions than others.

              This is baked into academia in the form of citation. At the moment you wrote your first bibliography you distinguished those who made significant contributions to your own work. It would have been unacceptable to write an academic bibliography consisting of a single line: “All those who came before”.

              And even though research is always a collaborative effort, like soccer and filmmaking, it is natural for humans to recognize those who made the greatest contributions. That’s why we award MVPs to athletes, Oscars to actors, and Nobels to economists.