Economists mock Trump over Nobel Prize push

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his hope to win a Nobel Prize. “I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t,” he said in 2019. But beyond his desire to be awarded the organization’s famed peace prize, one of his allies is floating the idea that the pro-tariff businessman turned politician also deserves the Nobel in economics.

Trump trade advisor makes his case

“A lot of people talk about Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Peter Navarro, a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing in Trump’s White House, said during a recent appearance on the Fox Business network, “but I’m thinking that, since he’s basically taught the world trade economics, he might be up for the Nobel in economics.” Navarro, who served as a trade advisor during Trump’s first term, explained, “This is a fundamental restructuring of the international trade environment in a way where the biggest market in the world has said you’re not going to cheat us anymore. We’re going to have fair deals. And everything he’s doing has defied the critics. The tariffs have been tax cuts rather than inflation, and it’s working beautifully.”

Leading economists weigh in

The world’s most notable economists, however, have a very different take when it comes to the idea of Trump being nominated for or winning the prestigious prize. One expert — Jeffrey Frankel, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School — told Newsweek the notion that Trump could receive the economics Nobel “beyond absurd.” Newsweek also asked several former winners of the Nobel Prize in economics — which is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — for their thoughts on Trump joining their ranks.

Discoveries, not policies

Eric Maskin — who earned the prize in 2007 for his contributions to mechanism design theory alongside Roger Myerson and Leonid Hurwicz — told Newsweek “it is unlikely that Donald Trump will be awarded a Nobel for economics,” explaining, “The prize is given for discoveries in economics, not for economic policies. And even if it were awarded for a policy, it is far too early to know for sure what the impact of President Trump’s tariffs will be.” Maskin further said that if Trump’s high tariffs continue, it’s likely “the long-run effects on the U.S. and the world will be negative — but we will see.”

Publish some papers first

2007 co-winner Myerson also spoke to Newsweek, telling the outlet the president would need to “publish papers that engage with the economics literature and identify the different assumptions that have led him to choose his policies,” adding, that “if President Trump truly has important insights to offer about economic policy-making, his publishing a thoughtful rigorous development of his ideas could be an important contribution to economic sciences.”

Time will tell

James Heckman, who won a Nobel in 2000 for his work on econometrics, said he was “sure” Trump would never be given the same award “because of his abrasive commentary.” He further noted that the bias against Trump’s politics “is immense everywhere and he is not as polished as most laureates are.” As for the impacts of Trump’s attempts to restructure global trade, “the jury is out,” Heckman added, “but who knows. The times they are a-changing and [Bob] Dylan won [the Nobel] for literature.”

Alternative prize

William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel for economics in 2018 “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis,” Newsweek reported, said he believes Trump’s trade policies have undermined America’s global leverage and that the president is drawing upon “the vast amount of social capital” the U.S. has built up over the decades and “is using it like a spendthrift teenager to achieve virtually nothing of value and to destroy many critical parts of the global institutional infrastructure.” Rather than the Nobel for economics, Nordhaus said he thinks Trump is a “leading contender” for the Ig Nobel Prize — a satirical award whose past recipients include Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Trump himself: They were both among the “winners” of the 2020 award for medical education amid the pandemic.

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