Prize Watch: A Historian Receives the Nobel Prize

There is no Nobel Prize in History, but one of this year's winners of the prize in Economics is actually a historian:  Joel Mokyr, a professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University in Chicago, has been writing deeply historical works on the economics of development for many decades.  

His Nobel Prize comes directly from decades of work in economic history and publications that include The Enlightened Economy:  An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850,  "The Industrial Revolution and the Netherlands: Why It Did Not Happen," and Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850.

I confess I once tried to read Why Ireland Starved and was deterred by the profusion of equations and statistics -- he's not kidding about the "quantitative: part of his subtitle.  Still, I'm impressed by the Nobel committee's understanding that much of economics still values and indeed relies on historical studies.  Ben Bernanke, credited with saving the US economic after the 2008 crash, drew heavily on his own studies of the errors that made the 1929 crash so severe and so long lasting