Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Claudia Goldin

For the first time in recent years, the Nobel Prize in Economics will go to an economist specializing in interdisciplinary research. Claudia Goldin, laureate of the Swedish Riksbank Prize 2023, is an economic historian whose almost entire career has been devoted to research on women in the labor market and in the economy as a whole: the laureate was the first to show that the problem of gender inequality cannot be solved by “purely economic” methods and, in general, it is much more more complicated than it may seem in optimistic slogans.

Until this year, only two economic Nobels in economics had gone to non-economists: this became possible after 1995, when two representatives of the social sciences were included in the prize committee, and the statute of the Riksbank Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel allowed it to be awarded to sociologists and political scientists. However, this right has not yet been used, although until 1995 psychologist David Kahneman (in 2002) and political scientist Herbert Simon (in 1978) became Nobel economists. Nevertheless award 2023 – not purely economic: Claudia Goldin is known primarily as an economic historian, although in her field she is valued as an economist – it is not for nothing that she headed the American Economic Association in 1990-1991 and has worked for three decades at the leading American economic association NBER.

Goldin, who studied at Cornell and Chicago, has worked almost exclusively on the history of labor markets since the 1970s—her PhD was on slave labor in the American South, and her first widely published publication in economics journals was an article in 1973 in the Journal of Economic History (much years later, she became its regular editor) on various aspects of women’s emancipation in the United States in connection with the state of labor markets in the 20th century.

For the professional community, Claudia Goldin’s main work is the 1990 book “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women,” which for the first time shows that the statistically almost linear process of “equalization” of the incomes of women and men over decades completely unreliably shows the dynamics of gender economic inequality.

More or less everything needs to be taken into account – from hours of work in the workplace to education and its cost, from discrimination in hiring to the cost of flexible working hours for women, from child support to the state of basic infrastructure. The book is the first to show that the problem of gender inequality is not solved by simply equalizing wages – Goldin showed how factors seemingly unrelated to the labor market, such as the availability of oral contraceptives, reduce real gender inequality, while others are the same as technological development in certain areas – it can be easily increased.

The lay public is well aware of Goldin’s most cited work, written in 2000 in collaboration with Cecilia Rose, although until yesterday few people were interested in its authors. The story that when candidates are auditioned “blindly” (behind a screen), women have a much better chance of getting into the orchestra has become a meme – as has the idea that the patriarchal (usually male) audition committee even if used screens can distort the performer’s assessment just by hearing the click of heels on the podium.

However, apparently Goldin’s main contribution to economics is a practical indication that a “pure” economy cannot exist and that “non-economic” factors, considered effectively only in an interdisciplinary scientific paradigm, are sometimes even more important than econometric models (Goldin is a long-time member of the Econometric Society).

There is not and cannot be one final explanation for what happens in “economic” reality, since there is no economy outside of society – and here, and only economic historians know this, unpredictable things can become important, like the same click of heels on the catwalk , where the piano stands. In many ways, Goldin’s work changed the development of feminism at the end of the 20th century from bright but almost unworkable political declarations to a truly more just gender order.

Dmitry Butrin