Revere Award Voting

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Edward Full­brook, the edi­tor of the Real World Eco­nom­ics Review that cre­at­ed the Dyna­mite Prize in Eco­nom­ics and the Revere Award, has just sent out the mes­sage repro­duced below.

Vot­ing for the Revere Award for Eco­nom­ics for the three econ­o­mists who first and most clear­ly antic­i­pat­ed and gave pub­lic warn­ing of the Glob­al Finan­cial Col­lapse and whose work is most like­ly to pre­vent anoth­er GFC in the future, will close in a few days.  Please vote. So far the num­ber of peo­ple vot­ing has been dis­ap­point­ing.  To stim­u­late inter­est, the poll has now been set to reveal to you the cur­rent results once you have cast your votes.  You can vote for three. To view a time­line and to vote now, click here .  It takes only sec­onds.  By vot­ing you reward the deserv­ing.

The Dyna­mite Prize attract­ed over 7,500 voters–a sub­stan­tial cohort. I have no idea how many votes have been cast for the Revere Award–and I can’t check since I’m one of the nominees–but obvi­ous­ly it’s a lot less than that. This isn’t surprising–after some­thing as dev­as­tat­ing as the GFC, the desire to throw stones at the guilty is pal­pa­ble; there’s less pas­sion in reward­ing those who did see it com­ing.

The objec­tive of both prizes was to point out how bad­ly eco­nom­ics has gone off course, when the­o­ries that active­ly con­tributed to a cat­a­stro­phe like the GFC can win their devel­op­ers a “Nobel Prize”. This intel­lec­tu­al trav­es­ty occurred while neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists could bask in the false glo­ry of a boom­ing econ­o­my that was in real­i­ty a Ponzi Scheme in its boom phase. Iron­i­cal­ly, now that gov­ern­ment res­cues have “end­ed” the GFC, neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists are sink­ing back into their old com­pla­cen­cy again–even though their the­o­ries that failed to pre­dict the GFC also pre­dict­ed that gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy could not affect the econ­o­my in any ben­e­fi­cial way.

Shake them up again, even if only a bit. Cast a vote for any­one in the Revere Award.

Postscript

I’m back from the Walk from Kosciuszko, and have to attend to some per­son­al responsibilities–specifically, fil­ing my tax return for 2009–before I can become active again on the blog. Once that’s out of the way (and the dead­line is Fri­day April 30th) I’ll post a ret­ro­spec­tive on The Walk.

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