An interesting paper about the first 50 years of Nobel Prize winners in economics

The first Nobel Prize in economics was awarded in 1969, to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. The fiftieth prize was awarded in 2018, to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer. In total up to that point, there had been 91 Nobel laureates in economics. This 2019 article by Allen Sanderson (University of Chicago) and John Siegfried (Vanderbilt University), published in the journal The American Economist (ungated version here), reviews those first fifty awards. In addition to summarising the topics, Sanderson and Siegfried collate a lot of interesting factoids, starting with the origins of the award:

The 1895 will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel specified that his estate be used to create annual awards in five categories—physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace—to recognize individuals whose contributions have conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind.” Nobel Prizes in these five fields were first awarded in 1901...

In 1968, Sweden’s central bank, to celebrate its 300th anniversary and also to champion its independence from the Swedish government and tout the scientific nature of its work, made a donation to the Nobel Foundation to establish a sixth Prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel...

Sanderson and Siegfried summarise the backgrounds of the laureates, which are mostly unsurprising (a lot of top universities, and a lot of economics and mathematics), although:

Some notable surprises include Middle Tennessee State Teachers College... (James Buchanan) and South Dakota State University (T. W. Schultz).

And apparently, Eugene Fama's undergraduate degree was in romance languages! Sanderson and Siegfried also note that:

Economics joins literature and peace as the Nobel fields that have generated the most controversy. First, as a well-known quip has it, “economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying opposing things.” The 1972 Prizes awarded to Myrdal and Hayek spring to mind, as would the 2013 awards to Fama and Shiller...

I have often been tempted to create an assessment for my ECONS102 class to name and justify the best economist (living or dead, but eligible when living) never to have won a Nobel Prize. Sanderson and Siegfried provide their own list of economists who died before the economics Nobel Prize existed (but after Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901), which includes Leon Walras (who died in 1910), Vilfredo Pareto (1923), Alfred Marshall (1924), Thorstein Veblen (1929), John Bates Clark (1938), John Commons (1945), John Maynard Keynes (1946), Irving Fisher (1947), Joseph Schumpeter (1950), John von Neumann (1957), Arthur Pigou (1959), and Karl Polanyi (1964). That seems like a reasonable list to me.

Sanderson and Siegfried also provide a further list of economists who died after 1969 but never received a Nobel Prize, but could have done, which includes Frank Knight (died in 1972), Alvin Hansen (1975), Oskar Morgenstern (1977), Joan Robinson (1983), Piero Sraffa (1983), Fischer Black (1995), Amos Tversky (1996), Zvi Griliches (1999), Sherwin Rosen (2001), John Muth (2005), J.K. Galbraith (2006), Anna Schwartz (2012), and Martin Shubik (2018). Sanderson and Siegfried then add:

To this list, one could certainly add more of their contemporaries, for example (in alphabetical order), Anthony Atkinson (2017), William Baumol (2017), Harold Demsetz (2019), Evsey Domar (1997), Rudiger Dornbusch (2002), Henry Roy Forbes Harrod (1978), Harold Hotelling (1973), Nicholas Kaldor (1986), Jacob Mincer (2006), Hyman Minsky (1996), and Ludwig von Mises (1973), among many others.

I would agree with many of those from both lists, especially Robinson, Baumol, Demsetz, and Hotelling. It is worth noting that Fischer Black would almost certainly have shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Myron Scholes (and Robert Merton), while Amos Tversky would almost certainly have shared the 2002 Nobel Prize with Daniel Kahneman (and Vernon Smith). There have also been surprising near misses in each direction, one of which was William Vickrey, who died three days after the award was announced (and therefore some months before the award ceremony). The other notable near miss was where:

Polish macroeconomist Michal Kalecki was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1970 but died in April of that year...

Sanderson and Siegfried wisely steered clear of suggesting potential future winners (after 2018 when their sample ends). Nevertheless, the article is a great summary of the first 50 years of the Nobel Prize in economics, and well worth a read.