The Economics of Economics Awards

From a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a panel discussion on economics blogs at the American Economic Association meetings that were held last week in Chicago:

|Peter Boettke|Yesterday I discussed the much deserved winning of the Clark Medal for Esther Duflo of MIT.  There will no doubt be debates over who wins these recognitions and there is of course the broader debate over what is most effective the funding of the process of scientific discovery, or the prospect of big rewards for the actual discovery of a scientific contribution.  I am an advocate of scientific contests and the awarding of prizes for contributions.

Ryan Avent: Economics: The ivory fortress: ONE of the more interesting responses to this week's Reinhart-Rogoff debate was this, from the economics blog Cheap Talk. "I Move That The AEA Stop Publishing Papers and Proceedings", the post title reads. Then:  Non-peer reviewed, inaccessible data, and punditry that can’t tell the difference between P&P and a regular AER article can’t be good for the reputation of the journal, the AEA, or the profession.

Steve Levitt and Greg Mankiw will join the Obama team.  Here is a key paragraph from the blog that broke this important story:

Chris Coyne The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics is pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the 2010 Foundation for Economic Education Prizes for the best book and the best article recently published in Austrian economics.

As an economist who is married to an economist, I firmly believe that the wise Deans should invest more in academic economics.  But, this is an age of scarcity and there is an opportunity cost associated with investing in Economics Departments.   Given that we can't run a randomized field experiment where the Deans choose a department at random and give it $10 million dollars and then judge value added ten years later, how do we evaluate what is the rate of return on investments in Economics?  

We have long argued that when it comes to the deplorable and insolvent state of modern "developed" societies, the fault lies as much at the bottom, as at the top: the bottom, in this case, being the economic establishment in both academia and 'practice' that peddles a voodoo pseudoscience as a legitimate explanation for