Afternoon roundup

A few worthies from some accumulated closing of the browser tabs:

• The UK's drinking guidelines aren't particularly evidence-based. 
• Ann Brower's reflections on earthquakes, dangerous buildings, and policy at the Herald is very good. 
• John Kay's defence of Beveridge-style targeted social insurance over universal transfers covers the bases well. Maybe I just like it because it's about what I say on the same topic. 
• You might like my piece over at NBR on this year's economics Nobel. 
• Making sure schools are effective is important. But they aren't miracle workers. The arguments there tie into broader debate around meritocracy and heredity, the subject of a great BBC radio 4 programme earlier this year but that I only just caught. 
• Ex National Party comms guy Gwynn Compton is skeptical that Labour will be able to square its coalition promises and its election promises with fiscal realities. It'll be interesting. 

Bad predictions

The Econ Department Nobel Pool for 2012, organised by Seamus, failed abysmally. Each member of the Department was allowed to pick three prizes. None of us picked Roth. Here are the entries:

Me:

1. Tullock-Krueger;
2. Shiller (I expected with Fama, but didn't note);
3. Tirole

Other sets of guesses:

• Respondent K:
1. Fama-French
2. Tirole
3. Feldstein-Poterba
• Respondent J:
1. Plott
2. Gene Grossman
3. Ted Bergstrom
• Respondent R:
1. Tirole-Holmstrom
2. Romer-Barro
3. Baumol
• Respondent G., from the Finance section:
1. Fama
2. Fama
3. Fama
• Respondent S.
1. Weitzman
2. Deaton
3. Tirole
• Respondent P.
1. Hart
2. Posner
3. Krueger
• Respondent A.
1. Gene Grossman
2. John Cochrane
3. Michael Grossman
• Respondent M.
1. Tirole-Dixit
2. Berry-Pakes
• Update: I forgot Respondent SHi
1. Bhagwati
2. Easterly
3. Shiller

No wisdom of crowds here.

The Shapley-Roth Nobel

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won this year's Economics Nobel.

The prize was awarded "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design". The Swedish Academy has awarded a few prizes in game theory and mechanism design recently,* so this one came as a bit of a surprise to me. In the office pool, my three guesses were Shiller (likely in combination with Fama for financial markets); Tirole (industrial organisation); or, Gordon Tullock and Anne Krueger for rent-seeking. The last was mostly wishful thinking. 

Shapley is famous for the "Shapley Value"** - a solution for surplus-sharing among players in a cooperative game. The Shapley-Shubik power index occasionally shows up in applications in public choice. Shapley also is known for having developed matching algorithms with some rather desirable characteristics: the Gale-Shapley algorithm results in stable matches. A set of stable matches obtains when no pair, matched with other partners, would mutually wish to break their current matches for a new partnership. Roth extended the algorithm and applied it pretty ingeniously to help save lives. 

Here's Alex Tabarrok's roundup:

What Roth has done is extend the Gale-Shapley algorithm to more complicated matches and to actually design such algorithms to solve real problems. In the 1970s, for example, the medical residency algorithm began to run into trouble because of a new development, the dual career couple. How to match couples, both doctors, to hospitals in the same city? By the 1990s assortative matching in the marriage market was beginning to derail matching in the doctor-hospital market! Roth was called in to solve the problem and moved from being a theorist to a market designer. Roth and Peranson designed the matching algorithm that is now used by Orthodontists, Psychologists, Pharmacists, Radiologists, Pediatric surgeons and many other medical specialties in the United States.

Most famously, Roth has worked on improving kidney allocation. I first wrote about this in 2004 (see also these posts):

Your spouse is dying of kidney disease. You want to give her one of your kidneys but tests show that it is incompatible with her immune system. Utter anguish and frustration. Is there anything that you can do? Today the answer is yes. Transplant centers are now helping to arrange kidney swaps. You give to the spouse of another donor who gives to your spouse. Pareto would be proud. Even a few three-way swaps have been conducted.

But why stop at three? What about an n-way swap? Let’s add in the possibility of an exchange that raises your spouse on the queue for a cadaveric kidney. And let us also recognize that even if your kidney is compatible with your spouse’s there may be a better match. Is there an allocation system that makes all donors and spouses better off (or at least no worse off) and that maximizes the number of beneficial swaps? Inan important paper (Warning! Very technical. Requires NBER subscription.) Alvin Roth and co-authors describe just such a mechanism and show that it could save many lives. Who says efficiency is a pedestrian virtue?

Since that time we have seen many such swaps including this record of 60 people and 30 kidneys. Truly a noble match.

New Zealand is also looking to implement a version of this algorithm. 

Al Roth has been a bit on my mind lately as well. The University of Canterbury is considering mandating some kind of cultural competence requirements for students (maybe for faculty too, who knows); we're busily documenting how we're already incorporating cultural things into our courses.

In my Economics and Current Policy Issues course, we spend a week on the economics of organ transplantation. I there note the many ways we can improve upon the current system, ranging from presumed consent systems to compensation for cadaveric organ donation, then on to compensation for live organ donors (kidney, liver lobe), and, potentially, full but regulated markets in organs. And I touch on Al Roth's work on repugnance constraints. Even if we can prove that a well-designed, well-regulated market in organs would save thousands of lives, cultural constraints among voters make some of those those solutions impossible; Roth tries to design mechanisms that route around that inefficiency. I suppose I ought to add Roth's paper to the recommended readings for that week and tick the "cultural competence" box in a productive way.

Congrats to Shapley and Roth. And, hopefully next year, congratulations to Tullock and Krueger.***

* 2007 to Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson (mechanism design); 2005 to Aumann and Schelling (game theory); 2002 to Kahneman and Smith (the Smith half was for experimental economics).

** The calculation of which was something I desperately hoped would not show up on my micro prelims. Fortunately, it didn't.

*** Tullock is a year older than Shapley - he turned 90 this year. If Stockholm is just waiting out the clock so they can award the prize to Krueger alone, I hope Tullock's ghost haunts them forever, pestering them with insults, derisive comments about their intelligence, and tangential remarks about ancient China whenever they're trying to concentrate on anything. 

Nobel pricing

iPredict is running markets on the Economic Nobel prize announcement coming up on Monday.

Two things worth noting:

1. The contract on each contender pays $1 whether the candidate gets a sole or a joint prize
2. The set of contracts obviously does not span the space: it's entirely possible that none of the listed contenders wins the prize and it's instead awarded to something like Kitoyaki & Moore or three random econometricians not including Deaton.

What does rational pricing in this kind of market look like? If a set of contracts spans the space and has only one winner, then the prices have to sum to one. If the set of contracts doesn't span the space and has only one winner, then the prices ought to sum to one minus the probability of "something else". Let's say the probability of "something else" here is 10%. I don't think it crazy to think there's be a prize awarded that includes none of the contenders listed. I don't think the probability would be much higher than 10%, but neither do I think it would be much lower.

So the sum of prices ought be around $0.9. Except that we can have multiple winners. If Thaler wins with Shiller, then the sum of payouts is $2. A Thaler/Shiller/Fehr prize would have it at $3. A Hart & Moore prize would have it at $1 as Moore isn't listed, but a Hart & Tirole prize would have it at $2.

How can we think about rational prices in this world, in terms of looking for arbitrage opportunities if the sum of prices is out of whack?

The sum of prices ought to be equal to:

• The sum of the probability of each as a single winner times $1, plus
• The sum of the probability of each as a joint winner with someone else on the list times another dollar for each in such a set.

The sum of current market prices is $1.92. Is that too high or too low if you think the probability of "none of the above" is 10%? I think it's rather too high: it's basically priced in that there is very likely to be a joint prize to two of the people on the list.

Now, I don't know the probabilities of joint versus single prizes. But here's another way of looking at it. Suppose you think that Shiller might get the prize, but that he's really unlikely to get it without Thaler. There's a decent chance of a Thaler prize without Shiller, but it's hard to imagine a Shiller prize without Thaler. We can then figure that the probability of Shiller winning is some fraction of the probability of Thaler winning. Drop Shiller out of the set of prices entirely and think only about a Thaler-only prize. Same for Nordhaus: we can imagine a Weitzman prize without Nordhaus, but not Nordhaus without Weitzman, though a joint prize is there most likely. The Nordhaus price ought then be lower than Weitzman and ought be ignored.

Get the set of all "most likely" guys for single prizes, or the part of pairs that is most likely. The prices of those singles ought to sum to one, or one minus "something else".

The sum of Thaler (drop Shiller and Fehr), Weitzman (drop Nordhaus), Hart (drop Tirole), Deaton, Posner (drop Peltzman, Tullock), Grossman, Dixit, Barro and Fama should then not be greater than one unless you can imagine a joint Thaler/Weitzman prize, or a Hart/Deaton prize, or a Thaler/Dixit prize. The odds of those odd combos is sufficiently low to be ignored.

If we take the sum above, we get $1.16 where it ought to be around $0.9 if we think that none of the guys whose prices we've kept are going to win in combination with other guys whose names we've kept. Of course, this biases things in favour of the sum of prices being low - Peltzman and Tullock are low probability chances, but I'm certainly not convinced that they couldn't get it without Posner. And there's a really good shot of Tirole getting a solo prize rather than joint with Hart. But I want to make it hard to show that the sum of prices is too high because I don't want to make a mistake in shorting a set of contracts that seems overpriced.

The best shot at an oddball combo? Fama/Shiller for finance. It would give Fama his due but take the sting off of "efficient markets" stuff by throwing Shiller in. Like the Hayek prize that was joint with Myrdal, except that Shiller is more deserving than Myrdal was. If that's a serious risk, then the sum of prices on the contracts still oughtn't be much affected as Fama is in there and Shiller's already dropped; I'd just previously been wrong in thinking Fama had zero chance. He has a chance, with Shiller.

If the sum of prices is $1.16 and ought to be around 0.9, then I ought to short the set of (Thaler, Weitzman, hart, Deaton, Posner, Grossman, Dixit, Barro, Fama) considerably, then short Shiller to keep his price relative to Thaler in line with the prices ex ante, Tirole relative to Hart, Nordhaus relative to Weitzman, and so on. The whole thing resolves Monday night, so capital isn't tied up all that long. Hmm.

Nobel pools

I've been accumulating Departmental guesses about this year's Econ Nobel. My guesses, registered Monday, were:

• Weitzman / Nordhaus for Environmental / carbon pricing
• Fehr / Thaler for behavioural
• Tirole for Industrial Organization.

I reckoned the Committee would pick something orthogonal to the financial crisis (IO), orthogonal but with mildly trendy connotations (environmental), or something to poke the mainstream in the eye (behavioural).

Folks in the department were invited to submit their most three most likely picks. Names revealed where permission's been granted:

• Gene Grossman (Trade);
  Weitzman/Nordhaus (Environmental) - says Andrea
• Tirole (IO);
  Nordhaus / Weitzman (Environmental);
  Kiyotaki and Moore (Macro/Finance).
• Weitzman (environmental, prices and quantities in particular);
  Deaton (panel econometrics / development);
  Would have gone Tirole but then too much overlap with Crampton, so Tullock
  [EC curses Stockholm for its neglect of Tullock, but thinks health issues will keep them from awarding it to him now].
• Thaler/Shiller (empirical behavioral finance) [EC: Can I switch to this one too? Much better fit for my guess at how Stockholm decides.];
  Posner/Tullock (rent seeking, law & economics);
  Phillies over Yankees in 6 games[???].
• Baumol;
  Shiller;
  Krueger [EC: If they give it to Krueger for rent-seeking, and Tullock's left off, Stockholm's off my Festivus card list permanently].
• Fama;
  Fama;
  Fama (with wild emphatic claims from this predictor about the consequences if Stockholm continues to neglect Fama).
• Shiller;
  Weitzman;
  Thaler.
• Weitzman/Nordhaus;
  Bhagwati;
  Easterly.
• Posner (law & econ);
  Hart/Moore (contract theory);
  "Richard Thaler behavioral claptrap" [you won't need three guesses to figure who sent this one].
• Paul Romer [EC: would be awesome];
  Avinash Dixit;
  Robert Barro.
• Thaler & Shiller;
  Fama;
  Nordhaus & Weitzman.

That's all of the nominations received as of close of business Wednesday. Lots of folks seem to have a background model that Stockholm's planning on sticking a thumb in the eye of conventional macro / efficient markets finance.

Tyler posts on who he sees as prime candidates, with lots of overlap with our Departmental pool - this year's must be particularly obvious:

1. Thaler joint with Shiller
2. Weitzman/Nordhaus
3. "Three prominent econometricians of your choice, bundled"
4. Tirole, possibly bundled with Hart

Tyler's list continues on, but he reckons the first two most likely.

A brave Stockholm would go with Fama to give it the opportunity to explain exactly what is meant by the efficient markets hypothesis: not that crashes won't happen but rather that we can't know when they will happen, or with Krueger/Tullock for rent-seeking, along with a likely Tullock address on rent seeking in stimulus packages. That's not going to happen.

Matt has opened markets on some of the most likely candidates at iPredict.

Condliffe Lecture

For those local folks who don't also read AntiDismal, a reminder of Canterbury's upcoming Condliffe Memorial Lecture.

2010 Condliffe Memorial Lecture

by Professor Charles Plott

Tuesday, 13 April, 5:30 - 6:30pm

Coppertop, Commerce Building, University of Canterbury.

The lecture outlines the development and use of laboratory methods, including the key discoveries and applications. The early science focused on the basic laws of supply and demand and how they operate to create a process of price discovery.The science evolved to include how information is transmitted through prices and the possibility of bubbles and market instability. More recent evolution finds the research focused on the design of competitive institutions to solve complex resource and environmental problems. The lecture focuses on the nature of the discoveries and how they are known through the application of laboratory experimental methods.

RSVP: Please RSVP, by Friday 9th April, for this event by contacting: Glenda.Lorimer@canterbury.ac.nz.

I saw Plott's address to the Virginia Political Economy meetings back around 1999 where he gave a nice demonstration of the frequency of asset bubbles in lab auction markets. Note that in a just world, Plott would have shared the Nobel for experimental economics with Vernon Smith in 2002; instead, the committee pulled another 1974 trick, partnering someone who deserved the prize but was politically problematic with a complementary partner.

Nobels that aren't, but someday could be

Willem Buiter in the Financial Times reports on Kornai's soft budget constraint as it applies to bailouts and the financial crisis

In a post a few days ago, (After subverting bank insolvency, our leaders are now about to make a mess of liquidity) , I argued that hard budget constraints were the defining characteristic of a well-functioning market economy. Many/most of the advanced industrial countries were weakening or even undermining the capacity of their financial sectors to intermediate efficiently by permitting a softening of the budget constraints of banks and other financial institutions that were deemed systemically important and/or were too politically connected to fail. I noted that the concept of the soft budget constraint (SBC) came from professor János Kornai, a great economist and a Nobel prize winner (the overlap is by no means perfect - there are type I and type II errors).

I'm rather sure that Kornai has not received a Nobel. I love his work on the soft budget constraint and I would love a world in which his kind of work (like Ostrom's), rather than the latest refinements of statistical techniques, gets Nobels in Economics. Hopefully we're moving to such a world. But we're not there yet.

Kornai gives some rather nice cautionary notes about bailouts.

One strong concern expressed more than once in discussions on the present financial crisis has been this: the interventions by the state are smuggling a bit of socialism into the capitalist economy. This is the side of the debate to which I would like to contribute, as a research economist who has spent several decades examining the socialist system from inside. My subject here is not the post-socialist region, but the rest of the world-though I look upon it with the eyes of one who has himself experienced socialism at first hand.

Back in 1968, when attempts began in my native Hungary to implant “market socialism” into the socialist economic system, the heads of state-owned enterprises were urged to increase their profits. Managers were to do well if their enterprises made money, as they would receive a share of the profits. But there was little cause for concern if the enterprise made a loss and fell into debt: in almost every such case, some kind of rescue operation was mounted. For instance, there might be a bailout funded out of the state budget, or the state-owned bank might extend extra credit, without much hope of the loan being repaid. Losses and debts were unpleasant, of course, but they were not a life-or-death matter for an enterprise.

Managers, based on their experience of repeated rescue operations, could more or less bank on their enterprise surviving. Despite all the stress on the profit motive, the incentive remained fairly weak in reality. Why bother too much about cost-cutting or innovating if there was no threat of insolvency? The financial situation of the enterprise did not place a real constraint on its spending, its borrowing or its expansion. This was the state of affairs that I called at that time a “soft budget constraint” (SBC).
...
Capitalism developed gradually out of the pre-capitalist social environment, by an organic process of growth. As capitalist forms came to dominate the economy, so the influence of business on politics increased. Socialism, on the other hand, did not seep gradually into the fabric of society in Tsarist Russia or post-World War Two China. The communist party became capable under specific historical conditions of seizing political power, taking control of the machinery of state, and then imposing the socialist economic system on society by state force. Every means was used, including merciless repression. The developmental process of the socialist system, unlike that of capitalism, began in the political quarter, not the economic.

However many bailouts there may be, however much the budget constraint may soften, there is no danger of socialism returning in that sense - which is the most important point. It is meaningless to raise that spectre in the United States, Western Europe or other developed countries, where democracy has sent down deep roots. There may be times when public discontent is stronger and more widespread than in other calmer and more prosperous periods. But only incorrigible revolutionists given to hoodwinking themselves believe such discontent can overthrow the foundations of the system. That prediction indicates a failure to understand the history of the communist system.

In other words, Hayek's mechanism in Road to Serfdom is wrong. Read the whole thing...

The importance of screening

Will Wilkinson points to a comment thread over on the Econ Job Rumours bulletin board where a bunch of folks finishing up their PhDs and looking at the job market complain about the Ostrom Nobel on grounds that she isn't an economist, that she didn't publish in the top economics journals, that her work wasn't mathy enough, that they never saw her stuff on any of their course reading lists, and that it was just a token throw to a woman. And, the occasional comment from someone claiming to be from the "demand side" warning these idiots that the market is weighing more heavily interdisciplinary work and that they might expect to be asked questions summarizing Ostrom's work when they get to the ASSA meetings.

The Ostrom Nobel of course now makes an Ostrom question a much coarser screen than it once would have been: they'll at least now have heard of her and the sensible ones will have a few canned answers prepped up.

I still like to ask candidates who their favorite economics bloggers are and what recent working paper from outside their dissertation area they've found most interesting. 'Cause why would I want a colleague who can't talk about anything beyond what he or she's currently working on? Boring....

More Ostrom

Marginal Revolution points me to Pete Boettke's excellent write-up on the Ostrom prize, who points to Steve Levitt's profoundly disappointing reaction to it. Writes Levitt:

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. She is a political scientist, both by training and her career — one of the most decorated political scientists around. So the fact I have never heard of her reflects badly on me, and it also highlights just how substantial the boundaries between social science disciplines remain.

So the short answer is that the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama. Economists want this to be an economists’ prize (after all, economists are self-interested). This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

Whose work is more consistent with good economics: somebody who takes methodological individualism seriously and studies spontaneous and emergent order, or somebody whose specialty is coming up with cute instrumental variables strategies for identifying relationships where endogeneity issues otherwise make inference difficult? One's economics, the other is applied statistics. If your view of economics is applied statistics, then maybe you won't have heard of Ostrom.

The part of the economics profession that would hate a prize going to Ostrom is the part I want nothing to do with. Writes Boettke:

But Lin Ostrom is firmly seated in the mainline tradition of economic scholarship from Adam Smith and David Hume to F. A. Hayek and James Buchanan --- As Lord Acton put it: “But it is not the popular movement, but the traveling of the minds of men [and women] who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy of all attention.” So in what sense is she not an "economist" in the proper sense of the word (remember her early work was on local public economics and her more recent work was on development economics)? It is because her methods were chosen to be appropriate to the task she was pursuing. Humanly rational choice, institutional analysis, field work, and experimental design were her tools for social understanding. She did not limit her work to that of Max U notions of "choice" nor instituitonally antiseptic models of 'markets' nor one size fits all models of economic development. Instead, she has been a major contributor to public choice economics, new institutional economics, and to our understanding of polycentricity and political economy.

Ostrom and Williamson! [updated]

What a great pick! Not what I was expecting, but Seamus and Paul were partially right. Paul was thinking it would be a pure "theory of the firm" prize, and that's not it. Instead, Ostrom and Williamson share it for governance: Ostrom for governance and the commons, Williamson for governance and the firm.

I'm especially pleased that Ostrom was picked. Williamson certainly also is deserving, but there was very high probability that he'd eventually get it for some variant of a theory of the firm prize. Ostrom's work is less well known and is underappreciated. From the prize site:

Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.

The operation of de facto systems for governing the commons, or informal transactions more generally, typically works out much better than we'd predict.

As expected, Marginal Revolution provides useful comment.

Tullock didn't get his due, but I like this prize.

Update: The National Business Review casts this as a rebuff to mainstream economics and a victory for the behaviorists. Humbug. Ostrom's work is Hayekian, not behaviorist. The behaviorists took some of her insights to test in the lab, especially concerning the nature of reciprocity. Ostrom's work isn't about how people screw things up because of poor decision making or irrationality; it's about how folks successfully can govern their own affairs even when the blackboard treatment says they can't.

It's telling that NBR also quotes Krugman, last year's winner, as saying he wasn't familiar with her work. A Prof walking down our hallway also confessed unfamiliarity. All the more reason why it's important that she won.

Nobels

Our Department holds an esteem-only Nobel sweeps each year. Last year, my three guesses were

• Dixit/Krugman trade
• Alchian/Demsetz micro
• Tullock/Krueger rent-seeking

I was half right. But, as nobody else had Krugman even joint, I won the sweeps. This year is tougher. Last year just felt like a trade year and I had an itch that they were going to give it to Krugman.

This year, I'd expect them to stay away from macro/finance unless there were an obvious big name from 20 years ago who laid out the mechanisms explaining what's currently going on. I don't know of any.

So my picks for this year

• Weitzman/Nordhaus/Grossman (Gene) for environmental
• Alchian/Demsetz micro
• Tullock/Krueger rent-seeking

Yeah, the first one is a bit of a cheat since they'll only award to two. But I'd reckon decent odds on an environmental pick in a year where economists are otherwise taking a beating. Last one is always my dark horse. Odds are slim to none, but Tullock very much deserves it. I haven't put any money on it over at InTrade -- no liquidity over there, and it isn't exactly the kind of market where we expect prediction markets to do well.

In other Nobel news, fun reactions to the Obama Peace Prize:
Pro:

• Gans

  Basically, the Nobel Prize Committee are awarding the US people for their choice and what it means. In terms of symbolic moves, that seems pretty appropriate even if it is not what we usually expect.



• Kevin Grier

  Here's Kevin Grier wondering whether an Obama prize will make it harder for Obama to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. Maybe we aren't giving the prize committee enough credit: maybe they aren't giving him a medal to wear, but an albatross. Are they hoping that this will render politically unsaleable a lot of possible foreign policy options that would be unbecoming of a Nobel Peace Prize winner?

Con:

• Mankiw (seriously hilarious)

  The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals.



• Fafblog

  n other news, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a man who set fire to a library and then promised to write a book about it.



• Cheryl Cline

  I, unlike many others, did not come to the mistaken conclusion that it was merely an Onion story.



• Art Carden

  ...is hoping that Kanye attends the Nobel awards ceremony.



• Patri Friedman

  It's so ridiculous and ludicrous that it seems like something that would be done as a parody by The Onion, or by the anti-Obama people who point out (with some truth, I think) that he is an empty vessel of empty words that people project their own hopes onto. His policies since entering office have been more of the same old same old - warmongering, anti-civil liberties, plus a dash of expanded federal spending and power.

...And the nays have it.

Update: I've seen a few folks calling a Fama/French/Thaler prize for behavioral finance. But Kahneman got it with Smith in '02, so it might be tough for Thaler to still be in the running. I'd still expect them to steer clear of finance this year, and especially efficient markets folks. Hey, I'd think it very cool if they decided to go with an EMH prize to Fama this year of all years, and Fama is odds-on in some markets. I'd still be surprised.