There’s a lot of speculation going on about who will get the Bank of Sweden’s upcoming Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. After Paul Krugman received it, the value of the award sullied somewhat (but mainly for his idiocy in writing columns, columns that contradict good points he’s made in the past, columns that shill shamelessly for Keynesianism and the Democrats, columns that prove a crucial autobiographical admission on his part: that he’s not an economist so much as an Asimovian “psychohistorian”). But perhaps the bankers and their hired hands at the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences can come up with some better candidates this next outing.

I admit that I am not very well read on contemporary Harvard/MIT Brand Econ. The furthest I lean in that direction is my extreme admiration for Sir John Hicks. The rest of that Nobel ilk, Samuelson, Kuznets, et al., strike me as off the beam. I have concentrated on the classics, and on more recent economists whose writings and work fit the picture of life I have developed from reading those classics as well as picking my way through sociology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, etc. And, from this perspective — perhaps quite heterodox — there exist a few economists who well deserve a Nobel, but have not received one yet, have been slighted for reasons unknown to me. Here’s my list of ideal candidates:

1. Armen Alchian, for work on property rights, evolution, information, and uncertainty.
   

2. Harold Demsetz, for property rights and the theory of the firm.
   

3. Sam Peltzman, for his paradigm-expanding work in the theory of risk and regulation.
   

4. Israel Kirzner, for rescuing the entrepreneur from the maw of formalistic mathematics.
   

5. Gordon Tullock, for pathbreaking work into “public choice” and “rent-seeking” behavior.
   

Some of the greatest economists of the recent past did not receive their much-deserved Nobels:

1. Ludwig von Mises, for his pioneering work on the ordinal theory of marginal utility, for applying marginal utility to money, for developing the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, for his devastating and pathbreaking examination of the calculation problem in common proposed socialistic economic policy, for . . . well, the list goes on.
   

2. G.L.S. Shackle, for extending subjectivism in choice theory by exploring the complicated ramifications of imagination and expectations.
   

3. Ludwig Lachmann, for limning the structure of production in terms of the heterogeneity of capital.
   

It’s a pity: The award only goes to living economists. So, with Alchian still alive, but ancient, and Kirzner no spring chicken, I think the Bank of Sweden should take notice.

It is true that some of my favorite economists did not receive enough praise in their lifetime, even if they did not quite deserve Nobel honors. I have learned much from W.H. Hutt, for instance, for his work on trade unions, depressions, money, Say’s law of markets, and the economics of racism. Similarly, at least one living economist is sort of in Hutt’s camp, a mainstream, classical-oriented economist who’s made important contributions to race and culture: Thomas Sowell. I’ve much profited from several of his books, starting with the magnificent Say’s Law, an incisive survey of the writing and theorizing about the thorny gambit against glut theory. Others like to mention his Knowledge and Decisions, which for some reason never impressed me that much. His glib editorials probably prevent him from getting the Bank of Sweden’s attention. After all, didn’t Krugman wait to go off the columnist beam until after he received the Nobel? (I guess not. It just seems that way, considering the Current Crisis and his response to it.) Sowell’s often controversial in his columns; I find him least convincing when he abandons his complex economic approach to shill for military action overseas.

But what the bank should really do is shake things up a bit. The bankers could withdraw an award previously given — to, say, Merton and Scholes, whose portfolio theories of hedging basically helped get us into the financial debacle we are struggling through right now.

Or the bank could simply give a Nobel to Nassim Nicholas Taleb!