I do love the fanfare:
Claudia Goldin has won the 2023 Nobel prize in economics. She is only the third woman in the history of the prize to win it, and she’s the first to win it in her own right, not sharing it with a man. Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, was recognised for her work looking at the gender pay gap and advancing our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.
On the back of a pandemic that sparked a so-called she-cession, thereby reinvigorating the conversation around gender equality, the fragile foundations of most women’s working lives, and the profound economic insecurity that flows from that, the Nobel committee’s decision to award the top economics prize to Goldin was, indeed, timely.
It was also an acknowledgement of how our understanding of economics — what constitutes “the productive economy” and what we value (and what we don’t… Hint: women’s unpaid and low-paid labour) — has been transformed by pioneering women economists such as Goldin and by recent events, which have certainly focused our collective minds on these issues in a way not seen for generations.
The problem is, there is no Nobel prize in economics, not even for women.
There is only the fake Nobel prize, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
The economics prize was installed like cuckoo in the nest in 1968, nearly a century after Alfred Nobel created his awards.
There is nothing a good bit of marketing can’t do these days.
So, congratulations to Claudia Goldin, winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
