Want to talk about Sully Prudhomme?

Six years ago, I argued in my talk that academe that has been taken over by hyperspecialization, because of which we have failed to contribute to big and contemporary questions for which the public is eagerly looking for answers.

Hyperspecialization has its place, no doubt, even though it leads researchers to inventions and discoveries that are fraught with ethical concerns.  But, that level of hyperspecialization is required in the natural sciences, and not in the social sciences and the humanities.

I could re-run that argument practically every time the "Nobel" Prize in economics is announced.  But, who cares about what I think; let's hear from a real expert--Branko Milanovic.

I have blogged a lot quoting Milanovic.  A consummate scholar, with a phenomenal level of expertise in income and wealth inequality.   A decade ago, Milanovic crunched a whole lot of data and gave us this simple and clear bottom-line: "an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)"

Isn't that a perfect example of big and contemporary issues that the public wants to understand?  Especially here in America where we are told that you, too, can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become a wealthy individual, we need such a reality check.  You can certainly hang on to your bootstraps, but it will certainly help to be aware it is rigged game in which 80 percent is pre-determined.

Milanovic had a few thoughts after the economics "Nobel" was announced.  He writes (well, tweeted):

when we ignore this biggest issue of all, we are --as indeed we seem to be-- in the world of Nobel in literature. At the time when Tolstoy, Joyce and Proust were publishing, the Nobel prize went to… Sully Prudhomme. Yes, Sully Prudhomme (check it out).

Sully Prudhomme?  I have never even heard this name before. So, yes, I checked it out.  Strange!

In a threaded series of tweets, Milanovic writes:

The point I want to make is this: Economics is a social science. Its aim is to make us understand the world and make people’s lives (materially) richer. The work that should be singled out is the work that does that—in a big way.

Yep.