“The Economics Prize has been handed out almost always on the basis of solid scientific work (Arthur Lewis was the only glaring exception I can remember)”
Although Arthur Lewis was a Social Democrat, he did very solid work in economic development for which he was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize (IMO).
>> Although Arthur Lewis was a Social Democrat, he did very solid work in economic development for which he was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize (IMO). <<
I must respectfully disagree. I was truly appalled when the Nobel Committee split the 1979 economics prize between Ted Schultz and Sir Arthur, and my opinion has never since wavered. The two men’s basic outlooks on economic development were virtually 180° out of phase with one another, and I viewed it as an insult to Schultz that the Committee paired him with Lewis.
To make a long story short, by 1979 Schultz’s analytical framework on the productivity of peasant agriculture had been verified time and again by empirical work, while Sir Arthur’s belief in a “zero marginal product” in agriculture had already failed the empirical test and was being rejected by one competent development economist after another. Today, Lewis’ theory is all but forgotten, while Schultz’s contributions live on — not only his work on the economics of agriculture, but even more importantly on the economics of human capital.
If I wanted to be kind to Lewis, I guess I’d say that he was perhaps the first economist in the post-WW2 era to articulate a logically coherent, systematic and “holistic” theory of economic development for third-world countries. Hurrah! But the trouble is, his beautiful theory simply didn’t measure up to facts on the ground, and it led to bad policies in many countries.
Schultz, on the other hand, changed the way most development economists view peasant agriculture and pioneered the kind of thinking that supported the Green Revolution. And more or less at the same time, he and his acolytes (both colleagues and students) at the University of Chicago created a new discipline, the economics of human capital.