Monday, July 20, 2026

Holy chrystal ball! This blog predicted 2021 Nobel Prize winner by name in 2017

I was rooting through what folks have looked at on this blog with three (3) followers, according to my dashboard. We're slowly and steadily on our way to 6 million views. I happened across a post from 2017 that predicted David Card would snag a Nobel in the fullness of time, and sure enough, he did! While I'm cetainly happy for Dave, I'm also a little miffed. Dave made his rep as a lefty economist with "Myth and Measurement," which he co-wrote with Al Krueger when they were both at Princeton. That initially got way more rasberries than accolades, but Dave's rep as a "lefty" persists to this day. That's why I encouraged him to use his high profile in the way certain other high profile academics, like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, have done. Dave's reply was that sort of thing is best left for retirement. Well, around the time he's getting his retirement paperwork in order, he suddenly becomes a Nobel Laureate! Berkley will for sure provide him an office, desk, and support staff for the rest of his life, even if he lives to 120. He is inundated with invitations to guest-lecture at the most prestgious universities in the world, invitations that inevitably include luxury accomodations and generous honorariums. I can't imagine the farm boy from Wellington County starting to rock the boat now. Here's the post from 2017. ******* neumann's blog Friday, June 30, 2017 Props to an old pal Me and Dave hooked up at Ponsonby PS in grade four. We were inseparable buddies till about grade seven or eight, after which our high school careers took us in different directions. I'm thinking about Dave because there's a story in today's Globe, penned by major league practitioners of the dismal science, that heavily references my old pal. Seems Dave was the first Dismal Scientist to stick his neck out for the proposition that increasing the minimum wage did not necessarily mean that jobs would be lost. He more or less got his head chopped off for that. Twenty years later everything old is new again. Raising the minimum wage is not a job-killer after all! Dave will no doubt have a Nobel with his name attached in a few years. Good on you, buddy!

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