You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Nobel’ tag.
Is There Hope for Economics? Yes – At Last!
By Shlomo Maital
Kremer, Duflo, Banerjee
Almost eight years ago, in November 2011, I wrote a blog about, among others, two MIT economists named Duflo and Banerjee, who FINALLY were asking the right question (why are so many people in the world so poor, and what can be done about it?) and FINALLY answering it, by doing field-based experiments with real money and real people, instead of building mathematical models of Alice in Wonderland. *
Together with Harvard University Professor Mark Kremer, they have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics. Duflo is the youngest economist ever to win it (she’s 46) and only the 2nd woman. She and Banerjee are spouses. Banerjee is of Indian ancestry. Duflo is French. (President Trump: Still think all immigrants are drug dealers, murders and rapists?)
I am an economist. And I was born too soon (in 1942). If I had been born in, say, 1982, I would have caught the wave of behavioral economics, which applied psychology to understanding how people really behave, instead of using abstract math. (My wife, a psychologist, and I published papers on behavioral economics as early as 1972 – but at that time, nobody was listening). If I had been born in, say, 1997, I might have done meaningful research in the field that helped build evidence-based policy.
Here is an example of powerful field experiments that change millions of lives, that I wrote about in my 2011 blog (based on an NYT column by Nicholas Kristof):
“Prof. Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, helped pioneer randomized trials in antipoverty work. In the 1990s, Kremer began studying how to improve education in Kenya, Africa, trying different approaches in randomly selected batches of schools. One intervention he tried was deworming kids — and bingo! In much of the developing world, most kids have intestinal worms, leaving them sick, anemic and more likely to miss school. Deworming is very cheap (a pill costing a few pennies), and, in the experiment he did with Edward Miguel, it resulted in 25 percent less absenteeism. Even years later, the kids who had been randomly chosen to be dewormed were earning more money than other kids. Kremer estimates that the cost of keeping a kid in school for an additional year by building schools or by subsidizing school uniforms is more than $100, while by deworming kids, the cost drops to $3.50. (In a pinch, kids can usually go to “school” in a church or mosque without a uniform.)”
p.s. The Government of Kenya, impressed by Kremer’s study, supplied deworming medicine to nearly all Kenyan children, vastly improving their lives. It is incredible that in the West, we give deworming pills to our puppies and pet dogs regularly — but only Kremer thought to try giving it to African kids!
In the 1880’s the Economics profession made a terrible mistake. Two leading economists, Alfred Marshall and William Stanley Jevons, were rivals. Marshall had a practical, behavioral evidence-based approach. He defined economics as the “study of people as they work and live in the ordinary business of life.” Jevons? Well, he was a failed mathematician and physicist. He slapped together a few equations, to create an abstract model of economics – and economists loved it! They swallowed it! They dumped Marshall.
Why? Because the queen of science at the time was physics, and physics was highly mathematical. Maybe…economics could be as prestigious and ‘scientific’ as physics? Problem is – people are not electrons. You study them, not by quantum mechanics, but by observation and experiment. But it took economics 130 years to figure that out. And in the meantime, wrongheaded math-based pie-in-the-sky economics detached from reality did huge damage to the world – lately, in 2008, when we reaped what free-market greed-is-good economists had sowed..
Banerjee was born in Calcutta, India, to Nirmala Banerjee, a professor of economics and Dipak Banerjee, a professor and the head of the Department of Economics. Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris. She is the daughter of Michel Duflo, a mathematics professor, and his wife Violaine, a pediatrician. According to Wikipedia, “during Duflo’s childhood, her mother often participated in medical humanitarian project”.
In acknowledging her Nobel, Duflo noted that far too few women choose economics as a profession, and expressed the hope her Nobel would inspire more women to enter the field. What will you do with the money? journalists asked. She responded that when Marie Curie won her Nobel, she used the money to buy one gram of radium. Duflo said she too hoped to use the resources to further field research on poverty.
As Esther Duflo said herself, the importance of her Nobel, is that it will inspire other young economics students to follow in her footsteps, and ask real questions and find real field-based human answers on which effective policy can be built.
I wish I could start my career again. You have to know when to be born.
* Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs (2011). Their new book: Good Economics for Hard Times, will be published in November 2019.
At Last, A Nobel – At Age 97!
By Shlomo Maital
John Goodenough
This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists: John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize.
Goodenough is American, Whittingham is British and Yoshino is Japanese.
The three won the prize for their work in developing lithium-ion batteries, which are ubiquitous in our lives, including in all our cell phones.
Goodenough has the best story. According to the Wall Street Journal,
“At age 97, Dr. Goodenough of the University of Texas in Austin, who was born in Germany of American parents, is the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize.
“I’m extremely happy that the lithium-ion battery has been able to help communications through the world,” Dr. Goodenough said during a call with reporters from London, where he is receiving the 2019 Copley Medal for his contribution to materials technology. While there, he learned he had also won this year’s chemistry Nobel.
“It’s been a very eventful day,” he added .”
The three have been touted for a Nobel for over a decade. Thank goodness, Goodenough lived long enough to win it (Nobel’s are never awarded posthumously).
Don’t you love his wonderful understatement, about an “eventful day”?
A member of the Nobel Chemistry committee noted: “Lithium-ion batteries can be combined with energy sources that fluctuate over time, such as solar power, to provide a seamless power supply. The batteries have also enabled a switch from fossil-fuel transportation to electric transportation.”
p.s. Some weeks ago, I wrote a magazine column about “Snow-Capped Idea Volcanoes” — senior citizens who have creative ideas and implement them. In it I mentioned Goodenough: “John Goodenough and his team at University of Texas (Austin) “has just set the tech industry abuzz with his blazing creativity”, wrote Pagan Kennedy, in the New York Times, in April 2017. “He and his team filed a patent application on a new kind of battery that, if it works, as promised, would be so cheap, lightweight and safe that it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.”
Why Economists (Don’t) Tell (True) Stories
by Shlomo Maital
After decades of researching and teaching economics, I became increasingly troubled by my discipline. I did not find truth in the math and numbers economists love. Instead, in teaching managers and future entrepreneurs, I found truth in what economists largely despire – N ≤ 1, that is, stories about real people. Often, when I tried to make my seminar talks interesting and meaningful with narratives, I got the devastating criticism: Stories! A word worse than Nazi, Fascist, or pedophile, for economists.
This is why I was so delighted to read the article by Carmine Gallo in Forbes, published way back in January. Gallo reported a speech by Nobel Economics Laureate Robert Shiller at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. Shiller is a behavioral economist who writes wonderful insightful books about how people behave. Here is an excerpt of what he said in Davos, according to Gallo. Warning – it’s rather long, but I think worth the time.
“This week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Shiller banged the drum on a topic that’s near to my heart — the power of narrative to drive human behavior. Shiller didn’t mince words. “Most people think in narratives, but economists are terrible with narrative,” he said. In a follow-up interview on CNBC, Shiller said, “Last year I chastised the [economics] profession for neglecting what you media people know. Narratives drive human behavior.” To study narrative is to examine ourselves. We think in story, process our world through the lens of story, and use storytelling to communicate ideas. One prominent economist believes that stories are the heart of human behavior. He says to understand the power of narrative is to understand financial booms and busts — and to prevent crises from getting worse.
Robert Shiller is a Nobel prize-winning economist at Yale. He’s written books and papers warning of bubbles in the stock and housing markets before they happened. “The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing,” Shiller said in his speech. “Narratives ‘go viral’ and spread far, even worldwide, with economic impact.” Shiller says that the same epidemic models that trace how disease or viruses spread can be used to describe the word-of-mouth transmission of an idea. Stories spread ideas like a contagion—infecting one person and another, and another. Some ideas, of course, are great ones and should catch on. But some stories—once they go viral—can have a damaging impact on world economies.
Stories continue to impact our economies today. Shiller says the financial crisis of 2007-2009 also followed “a narrative-based chronology.” Financial busts are “driven by a cadence of stories.” Stock market and housing bubbles are formed when people hear stories of easy money being made. Panics make declines worse as stories of losses go viral.”
Another narrative that Shiller and several other economists brought up in their panel at Davos is today’s prevailing storyline that humans will be replaced by machines. “
For decades, we have heard, every 15 years or so, the story of how very soon machines will replace humans. They never have, and never will. Economists preached the story how unbridled uncontrolled greed would make human society happy healthy and wise. It didn’t. So – economists DO use stories, they weave stories based on numbers – and very often, distressingly often, get it wrong. But no matter—people believe the stories, and economists continue to build false ones.
There is hope. Modern economics is dominated, among the young, by the effort to understand and research human behavior. And this work, pioneered by, for instance, Dan Ariely, is based on great narratives built on real people and real dilemmas. One day, mainstream economics will be as behavioral as anthropology or psychology.
Alas. I was born too soon.
The Creativity of Nature:
How One Creative Scientist Harnessed It
By Shlomo Maital
Prof. Frances Arnold, Caltech
Frances Arnold is a professor of chemical engineering at California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, CA. She won the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry, along with two others. She is only the fifth woman in history to win the Chemistry Nobel.
Prof. Arnold has had numerous personal tragedies. She has overcome all the grief – and not a small amount of gender discrimination. UK border police interrogated her for over two hours, when she told them she was “coming to meet the Queen” (she was – but a lot of nutty people say that, apparently).
Prof. Arnold won the Nobel for finding a creative way to leverage the powerful creative force of evolution. Instead of designing new chemicals from scratch, to fight crop-eating pests, remove laundry stains or clean up oil spills, Arnold figured out how to get Nature to do it.
“You start with a protein that already has some features you’re interested in”, she said, “ and use standard lab techniques to randomly mutate the gene that encodes the protein. Then you look for slight improvement in the resulting protein, in the direction you seek. You mutate the improved version again and again and screen the output. You do this with a bacterial workhorse, like E. coli….. you encourage the microbes to rise to the challenge, adapt, survive.”
In Dr. Arnold’s lab, organisms have been ‘mutated’ to stitch together carbon and silicon, or carbon and boron. “We’re discovering that nature can do chemistry, in the lab, we never dreamed was possible”, Dr. Arnold said. Arnold has invented the new field of evolutionary chemistry – using Nature’s incredibly creative system known as evolution and ‘survival of the fittest’, to create random mutations, select the ones that work, perfect them – and change the world. Nature is creative, in much the same way that humans are – try things, fail, try again, find something that does work and run with it. That is how we humans were created – and according to Darwin, all the millions of species on earth.
Arnold has launched a number of startups, including one that synthesizes insect pheromones and fends off agricultural pests by simply driving them crazy and confusing them.
Much of Dr. Arnold’s pioneering research was done while she fought breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. She underwent surgery, radiation and chemo, all while raising three young boys and working day and night in her lab. And in 2010 her husband Andrew Lange killed himself; her middle son William, 20, died in an accident in 2016.
“Why would I give up?” said Arnold. “First you learn you have no control. Then you straighten up, fetch your invitation and go to meet the Queen.”
[This is based on an excellent New York Times article, by Natalie Angier, who writes for the Science Times].
Economics Nobel to Thaler:
Fairness, Rationality, Self-Control
By Shlomo Maital
Univ. of Chicago Professor Richard Thaler has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics. Thaler is a behavioral economist, and has according to the Nobel committee “incorporated psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making. He has shown how the following three traits affect individual decision-making, as well as market outcomes:
Limited rationality: Thaler developed the theory of mental accounting, explaining how people simplify financial decision-making by creating separate accounts in their minds, focusing on the narrow impact of each individual decision rather than its overall effect. He also showed how aversion to losses can explain why people value the same item more highly when they own it than when they don’t, a phenomenon called the endowment effect. Thaler was one of the founders of the field of behavioural finance, which studies how cognitive limitations influence financial markets.
Social preferences: Thaler’s theoretical and experimental research on fairness has been influential. He showed how consumers’ fairness concerns may stop firms from raising prices in periods of high demand, but not in times of rising costs. Thaler and his colleagues devised the dictator game, an experimental tool that has been used in numerous studies to measure attitudes to fairness in different groups of people around the world.
Lack of self-control: Thaler has also shed new light on the old observation that New Year’s resolutions can be hard to keep. He showed how to analyse self-control problems using a planner-doer model, which is similar to the frameworks psychologists and neuroscientists now use to describe the internal tension between long-term planning and short-term doing. Succumbing to shortterm temptation is an important reason why our plans to save for old age, or make healthier lifestyle choices, often fail. In his applied work, Thaler demonstrated how nudging – a term he coined – may help people exercise better self-control when saving for a pension, as well in other contexts.”
Thaler’s book on Nudge (designing behavioral ways to nudge behavior and decisions in a desired direction) has been put into practice, especially in Britain, where a unique Nudge team was assembled to advise the British treasury.
Nobel for Physiology: How We Rise and Shine!
By Shlomo Maital
The Nobel Prize season is upon us! The first prize, for physiology or medicine, was awarded to three researchers who discovered how living things tell the difference between night and day (the 24-hour body clock):
According to the Nobel committee’s citation, Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young were recognised for their discoveries explaining “how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronised with the Earth’s revolutions.” The team identified a gene within fruit flies that controls the creatures’ daily rhythm, known as the “period” gene. This gene encodes a protein within the cell during the night which then degrades during the day.
According to Paul Nurse, at the British Crick Institute:
“Every living organism on this planet responds to the sun …. All plant and animal behaviour is determined by the light-dark cycle. We on this planet are slaves to the sun. The circadian clock is embedded in our mechanisms of working, our metabolism, it’s embedded everywhere, it’s a real core feature for understanding life.”
This Nobel Prize highlights the competitive nature of science:
“While all three laboured to isolate the period gene, publishing was something of a race. While Hall and Rosbash collaborated, Young was working on the puzzle independently. Both teams reported their findings in 1984.”
Experts tell us that it is wise to rise and retire at the same time each day, to regulate our biological clock. I like to rise at 5 a.m. Now I know that somewhere, a gene is turning on a protein that gets me going. The experts say, “Our [internal] timer is constantly struggling to reset to what environment people are exposed to. If you shift your clock every week by six hours or three hours, that puts an enormous pressure on your body.”
What kind of personality does it take to win a Nobel? Well – crazy, eccentric, nose-to-the-grindwheel, obsessive-compulsive, super-nice? Yes, all of the above.
Bambos Kyriacou, professor of behavioural genetics at the University of Leicester, who is friends with all three winners and a former colleague of two, said the trio were very different people. “Jeff [Hall] is eccentric … brilliant but eccentric,” he said. “Michael [Rosbash], there is no stopping him – he is just going 100%, he will die with his boots on in the lab, and Michael Young is the most charming, nicest one of them because he is polite and pleasant, whereas the other two aren’t like that, they are just crazy,” Kyriacou added.
Remember the Name! Tu YouYou, Nobel 2015!
By Shlomo Maital
Chinese scientist Tu Youyou has won China’s first Nobel Prize for Science – other ethnic Chinese have won Nobels, but Dr. Tu is the first to win one for work done entirely within China – and under really touch circumstances.
Tu is 84 years old. She did her work under Chairman Mao. During the cultural revolution, engineers and scientists were suspect. Her husband, an engineer, was sent to the country to work on a farm. Tu was allowed to do her research, only because Mao wanted to find a remedy for malaria, which was afflicting North Vietnam soldiers during the Vietnam War.
Tu sought a remedy in traditional Chinese medicine, found promising candidates, then did proper scientific trials on them, until she narrowed the field down to what is today known as “artimesinin”, a key element in anti-malaria medicine today. Her discovery, part of Mao’s “Project 523”, has saved countless lives. There must be a great many more wonderful rememdies hidden in traditional Chinese medicine, waiting for proper clinical trials.
Congratulations, Tu Youyou. Your work was done “to you”, “for you”, for the millions who die of malaria, especially children. Well done! Many more Chinese Nobel prizes will follow, I’m sure.
Conquering Ebola: How They Did It
By Shlomo Maital
As usual, the deaths and suffering from Ebola got far more media attention than the team of brave and creative people who have conquered it. (Global New York Times, Aug. 1-2, 2015, p. 6)
It started in Canada. Researchers at the Public Health Agency of Canada created an experimental vaccine (yup – that’s right, a government agency!). They took a piece of the virus’s covering and combined it with an animal virus (vesicular stomatitis virus), to set off an immune reaction against Ebola. I can only imagine the risks involved in working with such a virulent and often-fatal virus, in a lab.
A private biopharm company, NewLink Genetics, based in Ames Iowa, licensed the breakthrough vaccine, and last November, Merck, Big Pharma, did too.
The clinical trial was crucial. It was led by the WHO, Guinean Health Ministry, Doctors Without Borders, Epicentre Research and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Among the clinical trial innovations: a beer-keg-shaped storage device, the Arkteck, that kept the vaccines at minus 80 degrees without electricity, so that they could be transported. The keg was invented by Global Good, a collaboration between an investment company Intellectual Ventures and Bill & Melinda Gates’ Foundation.
None of those vaccinated in the trial, about 4,000 people, contracted the disease, even when exposed to it. The main use will be to vaccinate medical workers exposed to Ebola, rather than huge populations.
What do we learn from this? Simple. To tackle a really hard problem, you need to put together global collaborations – governments, NGO’s, companies big and small, volunteers, African governments, and they need to work together seamlessly, each contributing his or her own creativity and energy. In the end, courageous lab workers did the job, but it took the whole ‘village’ to save a child, or many many of them.
The whole ebola virus vaccine eco-system deserves a Nobel.
How Teachers Ruin Inquiring Minds – And Why They Must Stop
By Shlomo Maital
Illustration by Avi Katz
Thanks to my outstanding colleagues at Technion’s Center for Improvement of Teaching and Learning, our MOOC (massive open online course), Cracking the Creativity Code: Part One – Discovering Ideas, launched on the Coursera website on May 18, and has over 6,000 students enrolled, worldwide, from Qatar, India, China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, among others. The course is based in part on the book by the same name by Ruttenberg & Maital.
Part of the course involves “chat” forums, organized as ‘forums’ on topics the students themselves initiate.
Lizzie writes: “My 7th grade teacher’s response to many a question was ‘don’t show your ignorance by asking that’. Which didn’t reduce my ignorance but did get me to stop asking questions and start hating school instead of loving it.” Malgorzata responds: “Oh yes. I have suffered high school phobia because of it. Constant bullying by teachers was unbearable.”
How many teachers encourage questions? How many shut them off, destroying the spirit of inquiry and love of learning? Are teacher training schools helping teachers encourage students’ questions, rather than shutting them off?
Javier writes about how his teacher, in Barcelona, requires the students to copy verbatim a short story. He tried an experiment – writing with his eyes closed, to see if he could write straight lines without looking. The teacher ridiculed him before the class. End of experiment. Could the teacher have responded: Class! Javier is trying to write with his eyes closed. Let’s all try it. Let’s see what happens. Javier, thank you for this interesting idea.!
There are millions of superb, dedicated teachers all over the world, educating the next generation, overworked, underpaid, underappreciated. But there are still too many to believe they should be teaching the laws of algebra, rather than (in addition) why mathematics is interesting and fun to explore.
The Nobel Laureate in Physics Isidore Rabi tells this story: When he came home from school, his mother never asked him, what did you learn today in school? Instead she asked, Isador, did you ask good questions in class today? He attributes his success as a scientist to his mother and to her question. How many Nobel Prizes are we destroying, by shutting off kids’ questions?
Nobel Prize for Economics: Jean Tirole Takes on the Giants!
By Shlomo Maital
Jean Tirole
The Nobel Committee that selects winners for the Economics Prize has sent a message. This year (today, actually) they announced the winner is Jean Tirole, a French economist, who teaches at Toulouse, and who studied at MIT. He is honored for the following (according to the London Guardian):
“This year’s prize in economic sciences is about taming powerful firms,” Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he named Tirole the winner of the 8m kroner (£700,000) prize.
Tirole, 61, began his work on regulation and oligopolies in the 1980s and published an influential book in 1993 with the late Jean-Jacques Laffont on regulation. The judges said Tirole is “one of the most influential economists of our time”.
They added: “He has made important theoretical research contributions in a number of areas, but most of all he has clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms.”
The panel said Tirole had shown the “deep and essential differences” between regulating companies in different sectors, such as telecom companies or banks. Imposing caps on prices could reduce the influence of monopolies in some sectors, but not in others, the judges said, pointing to Tirole’s use of game theory and contract theory.
“In a paper last year, Tirole scrutinised, with Roland Bénabou, the pay and motivation structure in industries such as banking. They write about a “bonus culture that takes over the workplace, generating distorted decisions and significant efficiency losses, particularly in the long run”.
Tirole did not share the prize but won it alone. It is the first time since 1999 that an American has not at least shared the Economics Prize.
Will policymakers and politicians listen to Tirole? Yesterday I spoke with a family friend, a lawyer, who is leading a class action suit against a Detroit mortgage bank. He affirmed that the U.S. Justice Dept. has never prosecuted a single criminal case against Wall St. offenders, who nearly destroyed the world. They’re just too powerful, he said. Some groups spend $400,000 A DAY on lobbyists in Washington. Apparently, it’s a good investment. I am fantasizing a court case, criminal case, in which Jean Tirole is called as a witness for the prosecution.
TIMnovate 