The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, for work that “makes you laugh, then makes you think”, came and went this year, with a clutch of worthy winners. I must report, more in sorrow than in anger, that no Ig Nobel Prize in economics was awarded. This is a great shame. The Ig Nobel Prizes have occasionally been known to dabble in juvenile humour, but, at their best, they illuminate important ideas that the Nobel Prizes themselves cannot reach.
Since the position of economics Ig Nobel laureate 2024 is currently vacant, then, I would like to nominate a candidate: the economist and author Dan Davies. Davies is a wide-ranging thinker, but there is a common thread in his work: he is a connoisseur of fraud and failure. (He has already given readers of this column the unforgettable story of the time 440 luckless squirrels were hurled into an industrial shredder at Schiphol airport.)
In his book Lying for Money, Davies put forward a striking proposition, which is that the best glimpses of the economy’s hidden workings come when something has gone amiss. “Just as neurologists study the consequences of head injuries,” he wrote, “we can learn about the economy by looking at currency forgers and pyramid schemes.” And shredded squirrels, of course. Or, indeed, any situation when things don’t function as they should.