Not a lot for historians to glow over. But the climate-crisis book Generation Dread gets a look. So does the Canadian-born, New York-based wunderkind Rebecca Donner for All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, a biography of an American woman executed by the Nazis for her resistance work in wartime Germany -- which indeed sounds interesting, and, you know, litr'y -- which is what these award are for.
The crisis in producing and publishing what we were calling researched nonfiction the other day -- that's another story.
Meanwhile the announcement of the Nobel Prize in economics reminds us of how economics, for all its quantification, is still very much a historical discipline. Ben Bernanke's Nobel is mostly based on conclusions he drew from modelling historical data on the Great Depression of the 1930s to prove that banking really does impact the larger economy.
Adam Tooze, who is a historian but can cope with the economic quantificators, thinks Bernanke's Nobel is not for his originality but for his success in being taken seriously by the Ruling Consensus of economics, putting into play ideas that had been around for a long time and should have been obvious to anyone not in thrall to Chicago-school monetarism.
What this year’s economics “Nobel” prize does is the opposite [of what it should do]. It has the effrontery actually to celebrate one of the weakest dimensions of modern macroeconomic thinking - its extraordinarily limited ability to grasp the macrofinancial instability of modern capitalism. Rather than criticizing or correcting, it takes for granted the dogged refusal of the “mainstream” to take seriously thinkers who actually go further in grasping and analyzing the essential important of finance and its dangers for the modern world.
[Adam Tooze from Chartbook #160: adamtooze@substack.com]
But even so, didn't Bernanke kinda save the world economy in 2008 by being in a position to make the right choices and then making them. That's worth something.
